CHINA
STOLEN HERITAGE
Sept 2000 – 14’ 05’’
| Suggested link | Around the world there's an increasing clamour over lost cultural heritage, artworks and relics that were once the heart and soul of nation lost, stolen or traded for a song in the age of exploration and colonisation. |
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| It's perhaps at its loudest in Greece where they've been screaming for the return of the so-called Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon sculptures lifted by a British lord from Ottoman Greece in the early 1800s. |
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| The Greeks want them back in time for the 2004 Olympics but with six million visitors dawn to the British Museum's display every year they're not going back without a fight. |
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| In India they've begun a campaign for the return of a monstrous diamond called the Mountain of Light which is part of the crown jewels. |
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| Ethiopia's even chimed in with demands for the return of treasures looted by the British in the 19th century. Now China's joined the chorus and once again the Brits are the villains. Jane Hutcheon on the fight to reclaim the past and one aging woman's dedicated effort to recreated an elaborate subterranean shrine to lost history. |
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| Gobi desert | Music | 00:00 |
| Chengxian and son in desert | Hutcheon: Li Chengxian is a headstrong 77 year old with an ambitious mission. | 00:09 |
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| In the hollow of a remote gully in the Gobi Desert, Madam Li and her son Jiahuang are creating a shrine to China's lost heritage. |
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| Jiahuang carries box | Chengxian: We see ourselves like a match – we can start a small fire, and by starting something small it can draw attention and eventually concern. | 00:30 |
| Chengxian and Jiahuang create shrine | Hutcheon: In an underground gallery they set to work, slowly, deftly, painstakingly recreating the masterpieces of Dunhuang that were taken from China by stealth. | 00:43 |
| Jiahuang | Jiahuang: I think the most important thing for China to do now is to educate people about the importance of cultural relics and their value to society. | 00:58 |
| Chengxian | Chengxian: Our main purpose is to show the crème de la crème of our ancient art but at the moment there's no chance to see them. So my thinking is that if I paint them everyone will be able to appreciate them. That's our main goal. | 01:07 |
| Chengxian and Jiahuang set up shrine | Hutcheon: Mother and son know only too well the stories of foreign explorers who last century shamelessly pilfered China's most prized relics. This is their way of righting an historical wrong. | 01:23 |
| Map | Music | 01:40 |
| Hutcheon on bus travelling to Gobi desert | Hutcheon: The journey to the oasis town of Dunhuang in the Gobi Desert takes 22 hours through an ocean of sand, flecked by towns and villages on what was once the fabled Silk Road. More than a thousand years ago it was a complex highway bringing commodities, ideas and religions into China. | 01:50 |
| Hutcheon on camel |
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| Shadow of camel on sand | Hutcheon: In the old days explorers travelled this region by camel. These days it's more for the experience, no vehicle can quite match it. | 02:19 |
| Desert scenery | Music | 02:34 |
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| Hutcheon: China's western desert was known to hold the remains of bygone civilisations and none more enticing than the treasures of Dunhuang. | 02:44 |
| Rock temples | Music | 02:55 |
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| Hutcheon: Carved in rows into the cliff-face dating from 366 AD more than four hundred rock temples filled with wall paintings and sculptures. It was the last caravan stop on the ancient Silk Road and China's gateway to the west. | 03:09 |
| Photos of exploration teams | It was also a magnet to treasure hunters like the British-Hungarian explorer, Sir Aurel Stein. He came in search of scrolls discovered in 1900 in a secret cave. | 03:32 |
| Hutcheon to camera | Hutcheon: Stein had earlier learnt that a Daoist priest by the name of the Huang [sp?] in 1900 had discovered a secret library cave just here. The cave had been sealed and then covered by the desert sands where it remained undiscovered for 900 years. Inside the library cave, 50,000 items, manuscripts, paintings and Buddhist artefacts. | 03:45 |
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| Eventually Stein persuaded the priest to part with a portion of the cave's contents, and it wasn't long before other foreigners followed suit. Today the pride of Dunhuang is scattered in museum's across the world. | 04:09 |
| Artefacts | Though the Chinese eventually put a stop to the outflow of relics 30 institutions world-wide now possess pieces of Dunhuang, including the earliest known book, the Diamond Sutra, printed in the year 868 and removed by Stein. | 04:24 |
| Professor Fan | Prof. Fan: Stein from Britain destroyed the internal structure of the cave so many questions will never be answered. We have no idea how much we had, everyone estimate forty thousand pieces, fifty thousand pieces. | 04:43 |
| Madam Li | Madam Li: Well, there were so many amazing things in the secret cave – not only Buddhist scripts, but also historical documents – and I felt sad that we didn't have access to the works at all. I only dared dream about them. | 05:08 |
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| This is the Huang Qing temple where we used to live. It was built during the Qing Dynasty. Hutcheon: Really? Madam Li: Oh, we can see the caves from here. | 05:28 |
| Hutcheon and Madam Li at home | Hutcheon: This is the mud-brick home Madam Li lived in when she first came to Dunhuang from China's interior in 1947. | 05:40 |
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| It was the house where her son Jiahuang was born and where she and her late husband, the famous Dunhuang artist, Chang Shuhong, ran the Institute of Dunhuang Arts for close to thirty years. |
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| Portrait of Chang Shuhong | In the late '70s when China took the path of economic reform, the family's official role as Protectors of Dunhuang came to an end, but the dream of recreating the caves and their art lived on. | 06:03 |
| Madam Li | Li Chengxian: We're not only going to reproduce a cave called 'Relics Lost Overseas', but also duplicate other caves – like the Dunhuang Caves, which are over 1,000 years old. | 06:18 |
| Madam Li in underground cave | Hutcheon: Thirty metres underground, workers have dug a series of caves, replicating what the real Dunhuang caves might have looked like more than a thousand years ago. | 06:37 |
| Madam Li | Madam Li: When we look inside, these two sides of the wall are over there, this is Wei Wu Jie Buddha, Wenshu Buddha is over there. Ah Mi Buddha is on this side of the wall. This wall, see. Hutcheon: Right. Madam Li: It's this wall. That's the wall over there and we're going to paint Qi Shi Buddha, that on this side. | 06:48 |
| Building of gallery | Hutcheon: With passion and hard work and no official assistance, the gallery slowly takes shape. They have a new cave dug only when enough money has been saved or donated. | 07:25 |
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| Eventually they hope to open the caves to other artists and eventually tourists. |
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| Manuscripts | Far from the Gobi Desert, British Library's Sinologist Susan Whitfield unrolls the precious manuscripts brought back by Sir Aurel Stein. The British with their sizeable collection of Stein's discoveries, defend his actions. | 07:49 |
| Whitfield Super: Dr. Susan Whitfield British Library | Dr Susan Whitfield: He did have a Chinese passport, he did have travelling documents and he did have permission to take his finds out of the country, and he did negotiate a price for them. | 08:06 |
| Wood Super: Frances Wood British Library | Dr Frances Wood: If we've got to defend anything, that we should defend the fact that Stein really believed that he was serving international scholarship in his collection of materials. He wasn't just serving English or Hungarian or whatever, he wanted everybody to be able to see these things. | 08:16 |
| Art exhibition opening | Hutcheon: Today, Aurel Stein's greatest triumph is viewed by China as an act of shameless deceit. | 08:38 |
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| Applause |
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| Hutcheon: This exhibition of Dunhuang art displays not the original works but copies of the caves' once magnificent treasures. It also serves to arouse popular anger at the marauding activities of the foreign explorers. |
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| Men at opening | Man 1: He cheated. He bought things – but also cheated, stole and bought. | 09:05 |
| Prof. Fan | Prof. Fan Jinshi: I think he's a big thief. He bestowed upon himself the title of Education Minister of Britain but he was not at all. He prepared for his trip by asking the British Foreign Ministry to give him a title high enough to cheat the Chinese people. | 09:09 |
| Photos of expedition | We should recognise that he used a lot of ways to cheat the Priest. We should recognise that he didn't use ethical means to buy his goods. | 09:41 |
| Visitors to exhibition | Hutcheon: Today, thousands of visitors to Dunhuang hear of the foreign incursions into China's artistic heritage. For many it remains an open wound. | 09:53 |
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| Prof Fan: It's the biggest misfortune of the Chinese people! Despite the significance and preciousness of these things Chinese relics were removed. We anxiously want them to be returned. |
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| Prof Fan | Whenever Chinese people think of this they feel sad. Why were our cultural relics taken away? | 10:17 |
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| Chang Jiahuang at shrine | Hutcheon: As they toil on the shrine to Dunhuang's lost treasures, Madam Li and Jiahuang are driven by their passion for the art. But surprisingly there's no support for the growing calls to return the relics. | 10:37 |
| Chang Jiahuang | Chang Jiahuang: If we see it just from the narrow perspective of nationalism – they are robbers and thieves – but if we see it from the perspective of mankind overall they did the right thing, I think. I think that for the sake of greater society the relics should remain where they will be most useful. On display in foreign museums as they are now is more practical. | 10:53 |
| Antiques market | Hutcheon: At a weekly antiques market in Beijing, relics illicitly plucked from tombs, temples and warehouses. These are everyday artefacts, the gems of current archaeological finds are for sale in less public spaces. | 11:26 |
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| Despite the patriotic efforts of institutions like the Poly Group and an increasingly tough stand by the government, thousands of relics slip out of the country every week. | 11:46 |
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| Chang Jiahuang: What China should do now is to protect the relics which are in China and organise them well. But is China capable? I don't think they've done enough work yet. Whether they are relics still buried, or already unearthed, they're not protected well enough. The word here is "rescue", not return. We can talk about returning relics in the future. | 11:59 |
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| Hutcheon: The controversy over where the relics belong may rage on for years. But in Madam Li's temple, the lost masterpieces are always close at hand. As for the original treasures of Dunhuang, for better or worse, they belong to the world. | 12:19 |
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| Credits: | Reporter: Jane Hutcheon Camera : Sebastian Phua Sound: Cleo Leung Research: Charles Li Editor: Ivan Dodin | 12:47 |