BERLIN -- A consortium of seven German museums has begun working with Beijing's Palace Museum to determine which of the thousands of Chinese artifacts in their collections were looted and smuggled out in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion.
The researchers estimate that hundreds of porcelains, bronzes and picture scrolls could be implicated.
In 1900, American, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian troops moved into north China to crush an uprising that targeted Christians and foreign and colonial influences.
Their intervention was followed by an orgy of looting by soldiers, civilians and missionaries that did not spare Chinese imperial palaces, including Beijing's Forbidden City. The British Legation, for instance, held daily loot auctions for crowds of foreign bidders.
By some accounts, 10 million artifacts were stolen from China during its "Century of Humiliation" between 1842 and 1945.
Beijing's Forbidden City was one of the Chinese imperial palaces looted by soldiers, civilians and missionaries. © Getty ImagesGermany has in recent years begun repatriating looted items from its colonial era. In 2018, Berlin returned skulls taken during the early 20th-century genocide committed by Germans in what is now the African nation of Namibia.
German researchers' attentions subsequently turned to the legacy of the Boxer Rebellion, with Shanghai University joining their efforts in 2019. The Palace Museum last year also linked up with the project and has taken part in virtual meetings that started in December.
The intention is to produce guidelines to serve as a robust basis for comprehensive investigations by other German and international museums into Boxer Rebellion art looting.
The German investigators describe their provenance research as an internationally pioneering move that will ultimately make the other members of the Eight-Nation Alliance face questions about repatriation.
"Our project paves the way for the repatriation of looted objects," said Christine Howald, Asia collections provenance researcher for the Berlin State Museums. She does not expect, however, that China will insist on getting all of the pieces back.
"Art looting in the context of the Boxer Rebellion is a global issue, and our project has so far generated great interest as far as Australia, which has many Chinese pieces from that period in its museums despite not having been part of the Eight-Nation Alliance itself," she said.
Mio Wakita, curator of the Asian art collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, told workshop participants in Berlin in March about studies of her museum's "Jesuit globe" that may have come from an imperial collection in Beijing. (Photo by Jens Kastner)On the German side, the current project, with total funding of 220,000 euros ($238,665), is due to end in November with completion of the guidelines. It is expected they will then be utilized for follow-up projects.
The seven involved German museums initially each chose up to 20 Chinese pieces for deep research.
The researchers are investigating materials, imagery and inscriptions as well as documents from German military archives and China's imperial workshops that could offer clues about the origins of the items. Chemical tests, X-rays and interviews with descendants of protagonists could be involved in follow-up investigations, Howald said.
A workshop held by the seven involved German museums in Berlin on March 2 illustrated how exact attribution is a difficult task, not least because some art traders a century ago may have falsely claimed their artifacts belonged to imperial collections to command higher prices.
Other difficulties derive from inconsistent romanization of Chinese words, geographic confusion in the diaries of German soldiers and the fact that looting of Chinese imperial palaces and mausoleums was also conducted by Chinese warlords in the 1920s.
Among the pieces that have so far been linked to the Boxer Rebellion is a portrait of a Chinese military officer that was looted from the Winter Palace in Beijing, which served as the German forces' headquarters.
Visitors take photos next to the ruins of Beijing's Winter Palace, another site that was looted. © Getty ImagesIn 1902, the painting was sold by a Berlin art shop to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, which is home to a further 16 such portraits that might also be linked to the Boxer Rebellion.
"Initial findings show that there is surprisingly strong linkage between German looting in African colonies and German looting in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion," Howald said. "Some key protagonists, such as military members, diplomats and art dealers, were highly active in both settings."
East Germany and the Soviet Union both returned pieces looted during the Boxer Rebellion to China in the 1950s.
In 2013, a visit to China by then-British Prime Minister David Cameron was overshadowed by criticism from the China Center for International Economic Exchanges that plundered artifacts kept in the British Museum were not being returned.
On China's part, the protection of traditional artifacts and cultural relics has become a state strategy under President Xi Jinping amid an emphasis on the "great revival of the Chinese race."
A portrait of a Chinese officer that has been linked to the looting of the Winter Palace in Beijing. (Courtesy of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin)Xi referred to "cultural relics and cultural heritage" in his first keynote address as secretary-general to the 2017 Communist Party Congress, stressing the need for strengthened protection. On a visit two years later to the ancient Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang in western China, he praised the role of a research center there in protecting and recovering artifacts from a "series of destruction and stealing."
In March, the National Cultural Heritage Administration reiterated that it would "comprehensively implement and make into use" the spirit of Xi's directives on cultural relics. In his final presentation as premier to the annual National People's Congress in March, Li Keqiang also emphasized the importance of protecting cultural relics to "propagate outstanding traditional culture of the Chinese race."
None of the scholars working with the Germans at Shanghai University nor the Palace Museum agreed to comment on the joint project. Chinese diplomats who joined the March 2 workshop in Berlin and other Chinese scholars did not reply to requests for comment.
While Beijing looks set to welcome the repatriation of any looted artifacts from Germany, it can also be expected to gloss over the fact that their presence overseas may have kept them intact amid the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, said Steve Tsang, director of the University of London's SOAS China Institute.
"Historical artifacts had been taken out of China at one time or another, and those that ended up in museums in various countries are well preserved, looked after and made available to the general public," he said.
"It is entirely possible that if they had not been taken out and preserved in museums, many of them would have been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution," he said. "This is not a simple black-and-white matter, as advocates of the repatriation of historical artifacts' like to claim."
Additional reporting by Nikkei staff writer Kenji Kawase in Hong Kong.
