Advertisement
Britain
OpinionComment
Wei Wei
Wei Wei

Opinion | If the British Museum isn’t taking good care of relics, Chinese want theirs back

  • A theft scandal at the British Museum has raised questions about whether it should return objects to the countries they came from
  • Among Chinese people, the museum’s Chinese collection remains a symbol of past suffering

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
21
People visit the British Museum in London on January 25. Amid a theft scandal, there have been calls for the museum to return Chinese artefacts. Photo: Reuters
Wei Wei

Recently, a short video series titled Escape from the British Museum went viral on the Chinese internet. The three-part series tells the story of how a Chinese artefact – a jade teapot played by a vlogger as a damsel in distress – escapes from the British Museum and finds its way back home to China.

Advertisement
The first episode was released on August 30 but, even before that, the trailer attracted much online attention against the backdrop of a theft scandal at the British Museum. In mid-August, the museum announced that it had dismissed an employee after items from its collection were found to be “missing, stolen or damaged”. As it emerged that around 2,000 items had been taken, the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, resigned.
The British Museum is one of the world’s largest and best-known museums, housing 8 million artefacts from all over the world that represent a wide swathe of human civilisation. Many of these treasures came from countries beyond Britain.

There have been other thefts at the British Museum over the decades, and the latest scandal has revealed the extent of the museum’s obliviousness and raised questions about its management. Many of the missing items may be untraceable due to the fact that they were not properly catalogued; their disappearance might just be the tip of the iceberg.

Thus, the theft scandal has triggered a broader debate about how the British Museum amassed its huge collection in the first place, and whether it should return objects to the countries they came from.

Advertisement

As a Chinese, I have always had complicated feelings when it comes to the British Museum, which currently has about 23,000 Chinese objects that span the Neolithic age to the present day. Ranging widely from paintings and prints to jade, bronzes, lacquer and ceramics, the objects reflect the cultural richness and diversity of China.

Advertisement