Chinese museum forced to closeafter discovery its 40,000 piece collection of ‘ancient relics’ are fake,OOOPS
HandoutAn "artefact" on display at the Jibaozhai Museum in Jizhou, China. The 60 million yuan museum was opened in 2010 with its 12 exhibition halls packed with apparently unique cultural gems. But the museum's collection, while extensive, appears ultimately to have been made up of knock-offs.
A Chinese museum has been forced to close after claims that its 40,000-strong collection of supposedly ancient relics was almost entirely composed of fakes.
The Jibaozhai Museum, located in Jizhou, a city in the northern province of Hebei, opened in 2010 with its 12 exhibition halls packed with apparently unique cultural gems.
But the museum’s collection, while extensive, appears ultimately to have been flawed. On Monday, the museum’s ticket offices were shut amid claims that many of the exhibits were knock-offs that had been bought for between 100 yuan and 2,000 yuan.
WeiboAn artefact on display at the Jibaozhai Museum in Jizhou, China.
The museum’s public humiliation began earlier this month when Ma Boyong, a Chinese writer, noticed a series of inexplicable discrepancies during a visit and posted his findings online.
Among the most striking errors were artefacts engraved with writing purportedly showing that they dated back more than 4,000 years to the times of China’s Yellow Emperor. However, according to a report in the Shanghai Daily, the writing appeared in simplified Chinese characters that only came into widespread use in the 20th century.
The collection also contained a “Tang Dynasty” five-colour porcelain vase despite the fact that this technique was invented hundreds of years later, during the Ming Dynasty.
HandoutrThe Jibaozhai Museum, located in Jizhou, a city in the northern province of Hebei, opened in 2010 with its 12 exhibition halls packed with apparently unique cultural gems.
Museum staff tried to play down the scandal. Wei Yingjun, the museum’s chief consultant, conceded that it did not have the proper provincial authorizations to operate but said he was “quite positive” that at least 80 of its 40,000 objects had been confirmed as authentic.
HandoutThe collection also contained a "Tang Dynasty" five-colour porcelain vase despite the fact that this technique was invented hundreds of years later, during the Ming Dynasty.
“I’m positive that we do have authentic items in the museum. There might be fake items too but we would need [to carry out] identification and verification [to confirm that],” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Mr. Wei said that objects of “dubious” origin had been “marked very clearly” so as not to mislead visitors and promised to sue Mr. Ma, the whistleblowing writer, for blackening the museum’s name.
“He [acted] like the head of a rebel group during the Cultural Revolution — leading a bunch of Red Guards and making chaos,” Mr. Wei said.
Shao Baoming, the deputy curator, said “at least half of the exhibits” were authentic while the owner, Wang Zonquan, claimed that “even the gods cannot tell whether the exhibits are fake or not.”
China’s vibrant online community begged to differ, reacting with its customary barrage of disgust and ridicule.
One micro-blogger urged local authorities to reopen and rebrand the museum as “China’s biggest fake item museum.”
The Daily Telegraph
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments always welcome!