March 6, 2025 • 41 mins
The market for Chinese art used to be very small and is now a billion dollar annual industry. What changed? And how is this all tied to a string of heists? Listen in to find out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
Should Know, and we're going to talk a little bit
about Chinese art heists. So let's get started.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Go that's right, big thanks to Olivia, she did a
banger of an article.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
For us, But also thanks to you. Where'd you come
up with this idea?
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Oh? Was this a recommendation? God, I'm so bad about that.
I don't know. But we also have to thank reporter
for GQ magazine named Alex W. Palmer, who in twenty
eighteen wrote a pretty a banger of an article as
(00:55):
well about these art heists of cultural, very specific cultural
and art artifacts from China that have been stolen from
museums in the twenty tens and basically pose the question
is the Chinese government behind this? Right?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Are they commissioning people to rob art museums? And I
mean not just like you know, some Tinkertown museum on
the corner of a neighborhood that like, I don't know,
you know, not a good museum. So talking like world
class museums like the Fountain Blue and outside Paris, Paris,
France said it's not Texas. Yeah, so yeah, there's like
(01:35):
a still to this day, people don't know exactly what
the deal was, and it seems like despite what Palmer
Alex Palmer was saying, Palmer basically was like, you know,
didn't point the finger directly, but that was kind of
the premise of the article that who knows who's behind this,
and it's possible that the government of China has some
(01:57):
hand in it, but also the Chinese art market, as
we'll see, has blown up so much that it's also
entirely possible that it's just like that makes a lot
of sense for thieves to steal Chinese art. The thing
is is these the string of particular heists that Alex
Palmer talks about that really kind of form this galaxy
(02:20):
of particular heights. The thieves would go in and steal
really specific stuff that were Chinese antiquities. A lot of
times they've been looted, and they would walk right past
other things that were really really valuable, and it almost
seemed like they had a shopping list of items that
were particularly Chinese that they wanted to steal.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Yeah, I don't think almost seem like it. That seems
like a certainty to me.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It's true, it is. You could see that like you know,
Imperial Seal, China dog or that the waving cat. That's fortunate,
and then you know eggs, butter and apples.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, the Picasso.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Nah, they just walk right past really expensive stuff. But yeah,
it wasn't because they didn't know what they were doing.
It seems like some of the people who were caught
with this were clearly professional thieves.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, and some not so great. But we'll get to that.
We should do a little backstory here to kind of
set this all up, and we are going to go
back to about one hundred and close to one hundred
and ten year period known as the Century of Humiliation,
and this is when China was kind of getting just
beat up on all fronts. Back then, a lot of
global powers at the time were kind of coming in
(03:39):
and saying, you know, in China, you should just sort
of listen to us and do what we say. Particularly
during the Opium Wars from eighteen forty one to eighteen sixty,
a lot of European countries in the UK forced China to,
you know, to accept treaties they didn't want to accept,
force them to accept opium import Yeah. I think it
(04:01):
was nineteen different countries, you know, opening these treaty ports
for imports from those nineteen countries and accept them and
basically said you have no choice in the matter. Add
to this, later that century, in the eighteen nineties to
nineteen hundreds, when China battled with Japan, which ended up
losing parts of Manchuria, losing Taiwan had a lot of
(04:25):
control over Korea at the time. That was, you know,
they no longer had control over And this all sort
of leads up to the Chinese Communist Party taking power
and chairman Mao Zeidong saying in nineteen forty nine, We're
not going to be subject to insult in humiliation any longer.
That century of humiliation was a dark part of our
(04:46):
past and we need to forget about it.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah. So this idea, this concept of the century of
humiliation was coined by Mao, and then the twenty first century,
the Chinese Communist Party that Mao founded have kind of
really kind of used that as a point of pride
and as a point of unity among the country, which
(05:11):
is really interesting because it's it. They view it as
a really shameful period of their history, and yet they
it does generate pride in them and brings them together,
and I think a sense of like we're going to
overcome that, We're never going to go back to that.
But that's a change from how Chairman Mao approached it.
He was like, we're never turning backwards, and in fact,
(05:32):
everything that reminds us of the past, we're just going
to destroy. So go into museums, go into libraries, go
into you know, anywhere that like landmarks, things that remind
us of the past. They call them the four Olds
that were just meant to be destroyed. And it was
the cultural revolution, is what they called it. And that's
(05:54):
how it was approached for the for about fifty years,
and then finally it kind of turned and then that
pride kind of extended to Chinese antiquities, and in particular
today in China, there's a tremendous amount of there's a
tremendous sense of loss over some particular items that came
(06:14):
from a particular place called the yuan ming Yu. The
Garden of perfect Brightness, I think is what it's called,
but less formally it's called the Old Summer Palace. It's
in Beijing, I believe, and it was magnificent from what
I can tell.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, it was. And these aren't the only things. I mean,
all Chinese artifacts and cultural relics were looked at this way.
But this was just a pretty notable space at the
time it was built in seventeen oh nine, and then
for the next century and a half basically just got
bigger and bigger, and it had temples, it had gardens
(06:52):
and pools, and it had a lot of art, all
kinds of art like you name it. They had it
some of the most important art of you know, that
period of China and preceding it. And during the Second
Opium War in eighteen sixty, the Europeans you know, were
again coming in and kind of doing their thing against China,
(07:13):
and the government of China said, you know what, you
have some people here on a negotiating mission. We're going
to capture them, We're going to torture them. And so
British I think about five thousand British and French forces
took part in what has been kind of looked back
on now as one of the greatest acts of cultural
(07:33):
vandalism in modern history when they looted and either stole
or just could just outright destroyed or vandalize everything at
the Old Summer Palace essentially.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, they were apparently already in the process of looting
the palace when they heard about the torture deaths of
that delegation that was trying to broker peace for the
Second Opium War, and they're like, oh, okay, well, I
guess we'll burn the place down too, And they did
so over I think two days and nights, but the
fire kept going for like three days, and rather than rebuild,
(08:09):
China decided to preserve the place in ruins. It's kind
of like Hiroshima, like they decided to preserve some of
the bombed out areas. It's just a reminder, but rather
than a reminder to never use nukes ever again, this
was a reminder to China of like what outside powers
did to China, Like this is what happened to China
(08:32):
in the past, and it's something to use to kind
of motivate you to become the best kind of China
there is that could never let something like that happen again.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, a lot of this stuff, as you would imagine,
like a lot of you know, looted things during wartime
ended up in control of royalty in other countries, private
collection sometimes, but a lot of royal palaces in Europe
ended up with this stuff. Queen Victoria even and this
is a great little fine from Libya. Besides art, Queen
(09:04):
Victoria apparently also got a Pekinese dog that she named
Lootie as in loot.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, as in the dog itself was looted, yeah, exactly.
And I think it was the first Pekinese in all
of England, I would believe it. I also read that
at the time the press reported that the dog had
to be taken to a different palace because it was
being ostracized by the other dogs for its Eastern ways,
whatever that means.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Well. One of the most prized sort of things at
this palace was this water clock, and it was you know,
don't think of it as a normal clock, because it
was what it really was was a big fountain and
the twelve spouts were carved in the shape of the
heads of the animals of the Chinese zodiac, and whenever
one of the fountains squirted, that was what time it was.
(09:54):
So that was it became a really big symbol of
this whole looting. Basically it was in the European wing
of the palace, but it went away and part of
and again they were, you know, some of these some
of the repatriation and these tests. As we'll see, it
(10:14):
was all kinds of stuff, but it seems like that
these fountain heads hold particular significance.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
They're the most symbolic. So again, this Summer Palace stuff,
it was just such a big deal, like you said,
one of the biggest acts of cultural vandalism ever. It's
such a symbol in this country of China's shame, and
these things are like the greatest symbol of that larger symbol,
Like these zodiac heads mean everything to China, and to
(10:42):
get them back is enormous. The Commist Party kind of
took a shift, especially as China became more and more
economically powerful, and it started to kind of look at
getting some of these antiquities back rather than looking at
them as reminders of some terrible backwards passed. They became
part of China's heritage, and the Chinese government in particular
(11:06):
started to want to get these back, and they started
a kind of a trend I think culturally that was like, Hey,
start having pride in these heritage antiques, and let's see
if we can get them back into China. How who cares?
Just go get them?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, And one good way to do that is I
have a ton of money. So a lot of billionaires
from China obviously stepped forward and showed a lot of
interest in growing their collections or probably even starting and
then growing in their collections of Chinese art from history,
and some of them even open private museums to showcase
this stuff. They were working with the auction houses very closely,
(11:44):
and like you mentioned earlier, the Chinese art market, it
went from really not much of anything in the year
two thousand to about a billion dollars a year in
value by twenty eighteen, especially this stuff that was looted
by the UK and by Europe and the United States.
And like I said, it's everything you can think of.
(12:06):
It's you know, statues, paintings, carvings, in any kind of
art you can imagine. According to UNESCO, close to one
point seven million Chinese objects are currently held in forty
seven countries other than China in two hundred different museums.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
And those are just museums in just forty seven countries.
I saw that the Chinese government itself estimates as there's
about ten million antiquities spread throughout the world outside of China,
and China considers basically all of these stolen. Even if
a Westerner came in and paid for them back in
nineteen hundred, the Chinese government basically considers whoever sold it
(12:46):
to have been taken advantage of by that westerner. So
if you have a piece of Chinese art and antique
that's Chinese.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Hang on to it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
You may want to hide it actually, because there's a
good chance that China considers that stolen and that that's
not rightfully yours. Maybe there's some law in your country
that says it's yours. China doesn't really recognize that because
in a lot of cases they weren't They weren't sold legitimately,
(13:17):
they were stolen. They were part of war loot, like
with the Old Summer Palace. And they have a great point.
There's a lot of stuff out there, not just from China,
but from other countries that colonial powers went to and
said we really like this, We're going to literally steal it,
and we're going to display in our museums in one
hundred and fifty years from now, you're going to ask
for it back and we're going to say no.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, but we're going to ask for our stuff back
and get.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Most of it right after World War two, right.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah, which we'll you know, we'll talk more about that,
I guess in a little bit. But as far as
the government's involvement officially, there was one group called the
China poly Group. It's a state owned industrial company and
it was original part of the Chinese military and they
traded arms. But in two thousand they said, you know what,
let's diversify and let's start a wing of this company
(14:09):
called poly Culture, and let's make it one of our
missions to go and get some of these artifacts. They
had their own museum to put some of these in
in Beijing. So that was one of the big sort
of groups trying to head up this effort along with
the Chinese billionaires. And then in two thousand, Sotheby's and
Christie's auction houses in Hong Kong auctioned off three of
(14:32):
those heads, three of those zodiac fountain heads, and this
was a big deal. The Chinese Bureau of Cultural Relics
was like, you can't sell this stuff like this stuff's
really important to us. It was stolen, it was looted.
They had no luck. I think they were trying to
get it back for free, and they eventually said all right,
well we'll just bid on it and get it the
old fashioned way, which they.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Did, right. Okay, So in two thousand China, China, as
far as like it's searched for repatriating its art and antiquities,
was so powerless that Christie's and Sotheby's felt comfortable telling
the government of China, sorry, now, we're not going to
give these back to you. Less than ten years later,
in two thousand and nine, when the estate of East
(15:15):
Aves Saint Laurent went up for auction, China contacted Christie's
and said, hey, you're about to auction off two more
of those zodiac heads. If you do it, it's going
to be really bad for you. And China had become
such a player in the global art market that Christie's
would they handed them over. They gave them to them,
(15:37):
and in exchange, I think Christie's was the first auction
house to have an independent or license to independently operate
in China. Within the next year or something like that,
so that's how powerful they became. And then also as
kind of a nod to how valuable Chinese antiquities became
when China started to become interested in them, there was
an auction in twenty fifteen, less than two decades after
(16:00):
China became interested in its own heritage. The presale of
this the sixteen inch vase, sorry, this is twenty ten,
a sixteen inch vase. Presale value was eight hundred thousand dollars.
A half hour after it went under the gavel, it
sold for almost seventy million dollars to a Chinese billionaire.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
It's a lot of dough, it is.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
It also just shows how bad they want this stuff back,
because there's one other thing, Chuck, you mentioned the billionaire's
gating involved. It's not just one way to show off
how much money they have. It's also to show everybody
how patriotic they are, because they're buying these things at
astronomical prices to bring back to China for China.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For sure. So let's take a break and we'll come
back and talk about what China was going to do
about this officially right after this, all right, so we're
(17:20):
back and wondering what China was going to officially do
about this. In two thousand and nine, the government said,
you know what, We're all bets are off. Now, We're
officially gonna get a treasure hunting team together, and we're
going to go send them around the world and investigate
all this art that's in the United States, that's in Europe,
that's in the UK. One of these guys, one of
(17:41):
the chief detectives, whose name was Lou Yang, and he
went all over the place and he was like, Hey,
this was in the Summer Palace. This was in the
Summer Palace. You guys have our stuff, And they noticed
kind of not too long after that, a lot of
these museums on their website started sort of quietly moving
mentions and web pages about these Chinese artifacts on their websites.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, Lou Yang had quite a reputation. I read in
that Alex Palmer GQ article that he wrote a comprehensive
book on all the looted antiquities, at least from the
old Summer Palace, and could show you printouts of websites
from museums around the world where that thing was being held.
So I guess there was also a really tense meeting
(18:26):
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when
he showed up too, because he would just walk around
and be like, that's China's, that's China's that was stolen,
that was looted, and very strangely, that was what'd you
say two thousand and nine. Yeah, the very next year
the string of museum heists of Chinese antiquities began.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, for sure. I did want to point out though,
when I was making the previous point that they took
down these websites, but not everybody, because the fontaine Bleue
and Ants was one of those that were like, no,
you can see right here on our website and we'll
tell you like what this is and when and where
it was looted, like what palace was sacked at the time,
(19:10):
So they kind of, you know, held firm in their
belief that it was theirs. I guess. But yeah, these
robberies started in twenty ten, and we don't know exactly
how many of these have happened. We're going to talk
about quite a few of these, but they were detailed
in the GQ article, and then since twenty eighteen, there's
also been more and it seems like it there may
(19:33):
have been a concerted effort and then other people just started,
you know, because they became really valuable and there was
a market for it, people kind of piggybacked on stealing
this Chinese art and that the entire thing may not
be some you know, complete masterminded by one group or
government kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, that was my interpretation too.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
So apparently the whole thing started in Stockholm, Sweden, at
the Drottningholm Palace, which is well a Swedish royal palace,
and they have a Chinese pavilion there and there's a
state owned collection of Chinese antiquities. And on August six,
twenty ten, they it was quite a surprise because there
(20:17):
was a group of cars that were set fire to
elsewhere in Stockholm, and as the police ran over there,
and we're very much distracted by these sudden car fires
because usually that means riot, so I can imagine that
put the police on edge. The thieves ran over to
the palace in their China pavilion, Chinese pavilion, and started
(20:40):
ransacking some specific items. I think they smashed three display
cases and I'm not sure how many items they stole,
but I believe it seemed pretty specific and they were
out of there in six minutes, so they were clearly pros.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Do you think the Swedish police were like, guys, we
might have our first riot in the country's history.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I've been waiting for this since I was a boy.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I've been told a car fire means a riot. They
were like, what is a riot? And it's well, Spin,
we'll explain it to you.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Spin's been out of the country before.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
So yeah, smash and grab, six minutes in and out.
They hopped on some mopeds, they drove those over to
a lake and they got on a boat and they
got out of there. And this was a very sort
of you know, clearly professional job. Knew exactly what they
were going for, and you'll see, you know, in a
lot of these cases it's pretty similar, like they knew
(21:32):
where this stuff was, they knew exactly what they wanted
on their little grocery list, like you mentioned. The next
one was a few months after that at the Code
Museum in Norway. They busted a glass ceiling and not
in a good way and repelled down just like a movie.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, just like Charles Groden and Miss Picky, that's right.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
And took fifty six things from the China collection. There.
A lot of this stuff was from a Norwegian army
officer named Johannville Norman Munt, who was a big art guy.
Eventually fought on China's side in the Sino Japanese Wars
in eighteen ninety four and eighteen ninety five, but he
(22:12):
was big into art, had a lot of this stuff,
including stuff from the Summer Palace, and that stuff was
taken in the first of the Code Museum's burglaries.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Right, yeah, there was another one, what three years later,
And this is a big deal, and a museum gets
struck like it's not good, especially if word gets out, because,
as Livia was pointing out, museums a lot of times
don't announce the fact that they've been robbed. Number One,
it's very humiliating because they're entrusted with protecting these things
(22:46):
that are part of humanity's cultural heritage. And then secondly,
it also practically means that they need to beef up
security because now thieves are on alert, like, oh, the
Code Museum is really easy to break into, and they'll
become a much bigger target. So for two different break
ins to become public knowledge, it's just not really a
(23:06):
good thing, but it was also very curious that they
were both they both seemed to be Chinese art heists.
Right after that, they suddenly became very interested in negotiating
with China to give back some of the antiquities that
they held, and in particular Chinese billionaire named Huang Nubo.
I'm quite sure that's not exactly how you say his
(23:27):
last name, because I said it like I'm from Mississippi
or something. He came to Stockholm or no Bergen and said,
what do you got. I can give you a donation
if you want, and they showed him some columns from
the old Summer Pals and I read that he wept
when he saw them.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah, and this was a case where they used the
car fire thing again, which is really surprising to use
sort of the same method.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Hey, it works, it works in Scandinavia, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
But it just seems like that would be a tip
off maybe, like watch the museum, because you know, Sweden
and Norway aren't big Riot countries as far as I.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Know, I would hope it would be now, you know, after.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Two yeah, yeah, I would think after one. But anyway,
they use the same method they ended up the Museum
at Code closed the China Collection for renovation when that
was in twenty thirteen, and it's still closed for renovation.
So if that tells you anything, I don't. I'm not
sure if that thing's opening again anytime soon. No.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
I think by renovation they mean the head curators in
the basement clutching the remaining objects to their chest exactly,
get back, get away. So the Swedish burglars and both
Code burglars were not caught, but kind of an indicator
that really does point a bit of a finger at China.
(24:47):
Someone in China. They got a tip, the Code museum
did from the publicity the second robbery brought. They got
a tip about one of the objects that was stolen
in the first robbery that it was in a Shanghai
airport on display. So that does kind of show you
that China is very much like where'd you get this?
(25:09):
Who cares? They probably didn't even ask that unless they
were congratulating. And so when Norway found this out, they
decided not to do anything about it because they had
just recently ticked China off by giving the twenty ten
Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident lou Jabo Chobo, who
was imprisoned at the time in China. So China wasn't
(25:31):
happy with Norway. Sonari I was like, you just keep
your airport antiquity. We're gonna just not say anything about
it exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
So that was Scandinavia. In England around the same time,
this is April of twenty twelve. Meanwhile, in England, the
Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge was robbed. There were eighteen items
taken from here, again very specific Chinese artifacts. These were
valued between eight and twenty three million bucks. The same
(26:00):
month in England, the Malcolm McDonald gallery at Durham University's
Oriental Museum was hit and they took two items this time,
but they were super valuable. They were three million dollars
between the two of them. But these guys were caught.
They finally nabbed somebody. The judge said and sentencing that
they displayed crass ineptitude because they stashed the stuff in
(26:23):
a sort of a swamp, a parcel of land that
was super swampy. Went back to get it, couldn't find
where they put it, and a witness saw somebody like
searching the area and was really agitated on their cell phone,
seemed suspicious, phoned it in and authorities searched the area
and not only found the objects, but eventually arrested dudes.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
They did. They got some people. From what I was
reading up about it, they were like in their early twenties,
not very pro I think they were up and coming criminals,
is the impresson.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
That I have, But I think crass ineptitudes it really does.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
They Also, this is another giveaway, the police found a
cell phone in one of their underpants while they were
being arrested, and they used that cell phone to kind
of build a case that connected that heist to I
think the Cambridge heist and a bunch of other ones actually,
and they ended up tracing it back to a group
(27:24):
of travelers like Brad Pitt and Snatched. Snatch. Now snatched,
is that the Amy what's her name?
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, Amy Schumer?
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Schumer, Yes, thank you. That was a stupid sidetrack. But
so these were real life travelers and they had a
gang called the Rathkeel Rovers and they were responsible for
a bunch of different burglaries and robberies and things like that.
But they seem to be behind all of the Chinese
art heists in the country. What's significant about it is
(27:57):
that there was a member of this gang named he
Chong Donald Wong. He was from South London and he
seems to be their Chinese connection because he kept traveling
in and out of the country, going to China and
smuggling their loot over there. And I don't think they
recovered a single thing from those heists, did they.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
I don't think so. Yeah. I mean they'd figured this
stuff was just successfully smuggled and eventually sold in private
collectors have them. But this was I I was sort
of just surprised for some reason that these were, you know,
Irish travelers, and I just figured they would all be
Chinese people. But yeah, they were just hired robbers basically.
(28:40):
So yes, oh okay, once I wrapped my head around
that they were just doing a job for money exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
So the question remains though, because the police are like,
we never caught the highest person at the top of this,
the head cheese, the ultima ombre, that kind of person,
and they think that even if they had found that person,
that person was probably commissioned by Chinese mafia, Chinese billionaires,
maybe the Poly group who knows, but that seems to
(29:08):
be the case for all of the robberies where they
found the people who carried out the robbery, they were
just hired criminals. They were not doing this because, you know,
they loved China or something like that. They were either
commissioned to or they knew that the Chinese art market
was so hot that it would just make sense to
steal Chinese objects because they were going to fetch a
(29:30):
pretty high price.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah. Should we take another break? Yeah, all right, we'll
take a break and we'll talk about more heist right
after this.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Okay, Chuck, So we're back, and you promised talk of
more heists. And I'm going to take this to France,
won't you come with me?
Speaker 1 (30:15):
I love France.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
How about France in twenty fifteen. Wasn't that a particularly
pretty summer? I think? Or spring?
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Well, let's go find out. Because March first, twenty fifteen,
at the Chateau de Fantbleau outside Paris, which is a
I think, beginning back in medieval times, one of the
homes of the French monarchs, there was a collection assembled
by Empress Eugenie, who was the wife of Napoleon the
third She was the last Empress of France, and she
(30:45):
put together a collection of at least eight hundred objects
that those were just the ones on display. Three hundred
of them these were Chinese objects antiquities. Three hundred of
them were from the Old Summer Palace alone, mostly taken
by French soldiers who were there to sack the Old
Summer Palace in eighteen sixty. Right, yeah, yeah, so I
(31:08):
think thieves when they broke into the Fountain Blue in
twenty fifteen, they made off with like fifteen different things,
one of which sticks out to me. It was a
replica of the King of Siam's crown. Siam is now Thailand,
and that really has very little to do with China.
It was certainly not a Chinese heritage object. From what
I can tell. That one seems a little hinky to me.
(31:31):
I'm not sure if that was a commissioned robbery or not,
but regardless, I don't Oh, they did find at least
some of the people who were behind it, and again
these were just hired guns basically.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah, And it was, you know, sort of the same
pattern as before as far as getting in and out
of the air. In this time it was you know,
they were pretty good at what they were doing. Even though,
like you said, they got six of them. They questioned them,
didn't they They still couldn't get the big fish, you know.
I guess they're maybe not good at questioning, but they couldn't.
(32:04):
They couldn't land the whale. Unfortunately, Paul Harris is an
art dealer from Britain who he thought it was French
professional criminals who did this. Again, I just hired people,
in one case Irish travelers, in this case French you
know art art deeds. I guess, yeah, pretty good specialty.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
This apparently was the origin of the phrase no Sherlock.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
So if you look at you know, research on this,
a lot of the research will say like, hey, all
of these events are sort of part of this larger
operation like we've been talking about since that article. Though
I mentioned there have been other other you know, art heist,
other crimes. There was one in June of twenty nineteen
(32:57):
at the Museum of Our Eastern Art in Switzerland. The
time in Geneva took some couple of things from the
Ming dynasty in less than a minute. This time they
had DNA evidence in this case and they did catch
the people. These were British dudes. They said they were
just trying to make money to pay off a debt.
So again it looks like another either hired people to
(33:20):
return these or just people being hired out because this
stuff's valuable, or just guys doing it because they know
it's valuable.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Yeah, it's just too It's just.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
You can't you don't know for sure, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
No, Again, that hot Chinese art market kind of dilutes
the possibility that yet Chinese government there was one. There
was a second robbery on the Fountain Blue or in
an attempt, the police broke it up before it could happen,
in Operation Bamboo. The I guess Spanish and French police
got together and they said, let's get these guys, and
(33:53):
they did before they could rob the place. And those
guys said that they were hired by the Chinese mafia
and that they had been going after three specific pieces
of art, Chinese art. And I don't think that that
led anywhere either. I think also though, even if you
could trace it back to say the Poly group or
(34:15):
the Prime Minister, it wouldn't matter. China would basically just
say so, or they would deny it or whatever, and
everybody needs to be essentially an at least good economic
terms with China right now that it's just the issue
is not going to get pressed, so it doesn't really matter.
It's more just an academic kind of interesting thing to
(34:38):
try to track it back to who's behind it. It's
not actually going to result in any kind of geopolitical differences.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
No, of course, not as far as the Chinese government.
You know, this whole time, they've maintained like, hey, this
isn't us that's doing this. The Polyculture group, I believe
the general manager even talk to the Global Times about
it instead of was a nonsense story, the GQ story.
We may sue. I don't think anything ever became of that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
My dad's gonna see you.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, do with that, which you will. But you know,
their official position as a government is like all of
that stuff is illegitimate, Like everything you own, you own illegally.
There's nothing like if you have one like they had
one in the airport, like you mentioned, if you have
something like this in your private collection. The Chinese government
(35:31):
doesn't dissuade any of that. I don't know that they
officially encourage it, but they they definitely don't say like, hey,
you have the stolen thing in your private collection.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
No, and there's no apparently there's no legal repercussions for
it either. Even if somebody from Norway or Sweden came
over and said this is ours, like this was stolen
from our museum, China would just be like, well, there's
no laws here that could punish whoever did this, so
go home and you. They officially apparently do discourage theft.
(36:04):
But because the item could become damaged in the robbery, right,
that's why, Not because it violates any laws or treaties
or anything like that. Because again, there's a lot of
soreness from the idea that these things were stolen and
there's I mean, it's not even like they make a
good case that's exactly what happened historically. And so I
(36:27):
was trying to figure out, like, okay, if there's museums
around the country that you know, there's this growing movement
for repatriation here in America. We have like the Indigenous
Graves Act, which is like, if you have Native American
remains in your museum collection, you should give them back
to the to the group who from which they came,
(36:48):
so that they can you know, bury the remains or
do whatever custom they do rather than keeping them in
a museum collection. That's a good example of this, this
kind of growing awareness of responsibility museums have for giving
stuff back that was stolen from a country. But museums
just aren't really going with it. And I was looking
(37:11):
at it and I sent you I think some parts
of a I think an artsy article that talks about this,
like China, Greece, Nigeria, They're all like, you, guys have
some really important cultural treasures of ours, so give them back,
and museums are basically saying like, no, you won't be
able to take good care of them. We can take
(37:32):
better care of them. And then I think the British
Museum was just discovered to have suffered an extensive robbery
from inside that really kind of undermines that argument that
you know, they can protect these things better than the
countries can, because this curator at the British Museum stole
something like two thousand pieces from the museum's collection was
selling them on eBay. So it's not like China and
(37:55):
other countries don't have a legitimate claim to this. It's
just more like Western museums are just basically they're just
digging in and saying like, no, we're not going to
give these back.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah. I think if every piece of ill gotten art,
whether it was through looting or stealing or even you know,
started out that way and then we're purchased and repurchased
like that, there'd be a lot of half empty museums
if only like super legitimate, legitimately acquired art was on display.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah, maybe even more than half. And that's got to
be ultimately the reason why they don't want.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
To do it. Yeah, they're like, what are we going
to put in the Chinese art wing right of the.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Mets, Yeah, exactly. I think also in the UK in particular,
they have a law that says museums aren't allowed to
repatriate cultural artifacts to other countries, and they're like, yep,
that's the law, and I think the Chinese government is like,
that's your law. You can change that law. Stop hiding
behind that.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
So yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah. I mean there were a couple of instances where
I'm like, Okay, this makes sense to not give it back,
like if there's a lot of instability and turmoil in
that country. Another one that really kind of stuck out
to me is if the cultural heritage is now divided
among multiple countries. So let's say it was a Yugo
slobban item and now, yeah, Czechoslovakia and Slovenia, they're both
(39:21):
saying like, that's ours, that's a tickler spot. But for
the most part, if it's you know, a stable country,
is like, that's ours. Give it back, especially if it
was looted, there really shouldn't be any discussion about that.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh well, you can look out for a movie by
Crazy Rich Asians director John M. Chew coming out sometime soon.
Netflix is gonna have something based on Grace D. Lee's
novel Portrait of a Thief. And there's a twenty twelve
Jackie Chan movie called CZ twelve about this very kind
of stuff.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Jackie Chan.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Well, since you said Jackie Champ, he unlocked with Sermail.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
All right. This is on swamp coolers. Hey, guys, you
talked about swamp coolers in the History of Refrigeration episode.
We live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at seven thousand
feet elevation, where it's historically hasn't gotten hot enough to
need air conditioning. Although summers are getting hotter here, with
a couple of weeks in the high to mid nineties
every year. Now it's pretty hot. Our house was a
(40:27):
custom built house in two thousand and five and it
does not have AC. So we bought a portable swamp
cooler last summer to help just on those handfuls of
really hot days when it's too hot to sleep, and
it's really effective, I have to say. In the dry
desert air, some people have whole house swamp coolers on
the roof with thermostats inside. They use a lot less
energy than AC, so there are good option in places
(40:50):
where it's dry and not too hot. They only lower
the temperature ten to fifteen degrees. That's not bad at all,
So anything ninety five we get for a short time
wouldn't really work. I disagree. Eighty to ninety five is
pretty substantial, Yeah for sure, But that is from Chandra.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Thanks a lot, Chandra, whole house swamp cooler. Can you
just see like the tops like open and it says
igloo and giant letters on the side.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Yeah, it sounds like a record name too, like an
album title.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Whole house swamp cooler.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Yeah. Yeah, the chick us all mudpuppies or.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Something very nice, Chuck, very nice. Well, if you want
to be like Chandra and write in and tell us
about something that we talked about, that's whole house size.
We love hearing that kind of stuff. You can shoot
us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
Should Know, and we're going to talk a little bit
about Chinese art heists. So let's get started.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Go that's right, big thanks to Olivia, she did a
banger of an article.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
For us, But also thanks to you. Where'd you come
up with this idea?
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Oh? Was this a recommendation? God, I'm so bad about that.
I don't know. But we also have to thank reporter
for GQ magazine named Alex W. Palmer, who in twenty
eighteen wrote a pretty a banger of an article as
(00:55):
well about these art heists of cultural, very specific cultural
and art artifacts from China that have been stolen from
museums in the twenty tens and basically pose the question
is the Chinese government behind this? Right?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Are they commissioning people to rob art museums? And I
mean not just like you know, some Tinkertown museum on
the corner of a neighborhood that like, I don't know,
you know, not a good museum. So talking like world
class museums like the Fountain Blue and outside Paris, Paris,
France said it's not Texas. Yeah, so yeah, there's like
(01:35):
a still to this day, people don't know exactly what
the deal was, and it seems like despite what Palmer
Alex Palmer was saying, Palmer basically was like, you know,
didn't point the finger directly, but that was kind of
the premise of the article that who knows who's behind this,
and it's possible that the government of China has some
(01:57):
hand in it, but also the Chinese art market, as
we'll see, has blown up so much that it's also
entirely possible that it's just like that makes a lot
of sense for thieves to steal Chinese art. The thing
is is these the string of particular heists that Alex
Palmer talks about that really kind of form this galaxy
(02:20):
of particular heights. The thieves would go in and steal
really specific stuff that were Chinese antiquities. A lot of
times they've been looted, and they would walk right past
other things that were really really valuable, and it almost
seemed like they had a shopping list of items that
were particularly Chinese that they wanted to steal.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Yeah, I don't think almost seem like it. That seems
like a certainty to me.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It's true, it is. You could see that like you know,
Imperial Seal, China dog or that the waving cat. That's fortunate,
and then you know eggs, butter and apples.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, the Picasso.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Nah, they just walk right past really expensive stuff. But yeah,
it wasn't because they didn't know what they were doing.
It seems like some of the people who were caught
with this were clearly professional thieves.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, and some not so great. But we'll get to that.
We should do a little backstory here to kind of
set this all up, and we are going to go
back to about one hundred and close to one hundred
and ten year period known as the Century of Humiliation,
and this is when China was kind of getting just
beat up on all fronts. Back then, a lot of
global powers at the time were kind of coming in
(03:39):
and saying, you know, in China, you should just sort
of listen to us and do what we say. Particularly
during the Opium Wars from eighteen forty one to eighteen sixty,
a lot of European countries in the UK forced China to,
you know, to accept treaties they didn't want to accept,
force them to accept opium import Yeah. I think it
(04:01):
was nineteen different countries, you know, opening these treaty ports
for imports from those nineteen countries and accept them and
basically said you have no choice in the matter. Add
to this, later that century, in the eighteen nineties to
nineteen hundreds, when China battled with Japan, which ended up
losing parts of Manchuria, losing Taiwan had a lot of
(04:25):
control over Korea at the time. That was, you know,
they no longer had control over And this all sort
of leads up to the Chinese Communist Party taking power
and chairman Mao Zeidong saying in nineteen forty nine, We're
not going to be subject to insult in humiliation any longer.
That century of humiliation was a dark part of our
(04:46):
past and we need to forget about it.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah. So this idea, this concept of the century of
humiliation was coined by Mao, and then the twenty first century,
the Chinese Communist Party that Mao founded have kind of
really kind of used that as a point of pride
and as a point of unity among the country, which
(05:11):
is really interesting because it's it. They view it as
a really shameful period of their history, and yet they
it does generate pride in them and brings them together,
and I think a sense of like we're going to
overcome that, We're never going to go back to that.
But that's a change from how Chairman Mao approached it.
He was like, we're never turning backwards, and in fact,
(05:32):
everything that reminds us of the past, we're just going
to destroy. So go into museums, go into libraries, go
into you know, anywhere that like landmarks, things that remind
us of the past. They call them the four Olds
that were just meant to be destroyed. And it was
the cultural revolution, is what they called it. And that's
(05:54):
how it was approached for the for about fifty years,
and then finally it kind of turned and then that
pride kind of extended to Chinese antiquities, and in particular
today in China, there's a tremendous amount of there's a
tremendous sense of loss over some particular items that came
(06:14):
from a particular place called the yuan ming Yu. The
Garden of perfect Brightness, I think is what it's called,
but less formally it's called the Old Summer Palace. It's
in Beijing, I believe, and it was magnificent from what
I can tell.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, it was. And these aren't the only things. I mean,
all Chinese artifacts and cultural relics were looked at this way.
But this was just a pretty notable space at the
time it was built in seventeen oh nine, and then
for the next century and a half basically just got
bigger and bigger, and it had temples, it had gardens
(06:52):
and pools, and it had a lot of art, all
kinds of art like you name it. They had it
some of the most important art of you know, that
period of China and preceding it. And during the Second
Opium War in eighteen sixty, the Europeans you know, were
again coming in and kind of doing their thing against China,
(07:13):
and the government of China said, you know what, you
have some people here on a negotiating mission. We're going
to capture them, We're going to torture them. And so
British I think about five thousand British and French forces
took part in what has been kind of looked back
on now as one of the greatest acts of cultural
(07:33):
vandalism in modern history when they looted and either stole
or just could just outright destroyed or vandalize everything at
the Old Summer Palace essentially.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, they were apparently already in the process of looting
the palace when they heard about the torture deaths of
that delegation that was trying to broker peace for the
Second Opium War, and they're like, oh, okay, well, I
guess we'll burn the place down too, And they did
so over I think two days and nights, but the
fire kept going for like three days, and rather than rebuild,
(08:09):
China decided to preserve the place in ruins. It's kind
of like Hiroshima, like they decided to preserve some of
the bombed out areas. It's just a reminder, but rather
than a reminder to never use nukes ever again, this
was a reminder to China of like what outside powers
did to China, Like this is what happened to China
(08:32):
in the past, and it's something to use to kind
of motivate you to become the best kind of China
there is that could never let something like that happen again.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, a lot of this stuff, as you would imagine,
like a lot of you know, looted things during wartime
ended up in control of royalty in other countries, private
collection sometimes, but a lot of royal palaces in Europe
ended up with this stuff. Queen Victoria even and this
is a great little fine from Libya. Besides art, Queen
(09:04):
Victoria apparently also got a Pekinese dog that she named
Lootie as in loot.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, as in the dog itself was looted, yeah, exactly.
And I think it was the first Pekinese in all
of England, I would believe it. I also read that
at the time the press reported that the dog had
to be taken to a different palace because it was
being ostracized by the other dogs for its Eastern ways,
whatever that means.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Well. One of the most prized sort of things at
this palace was this water clock, and it was you know,
don't think of it as a normal clock, because it
was what it really was was a big fountain and
the twelve spouts were carved in the shape of the
heads of the animals of the Chinese zodiac, and whenever
one of the fountains squirted, that was what time it was.
(09:54):
So that was it became a really big symbol of
this whole looting. Basically it was in the European wing
of the palace, but it went away and part of
and again they were, you know, some of these some
of the repatriation and these tests. As we'll see, it
(10:14):
was all kinds of stuff, but it seems like that
these fountain heads hold particular significance.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
They're the most symbolic. So again, this Summer Palace stuff,
it was just such a big deal, like you said,
one of the biggest acts of cultural vandalism ever. It's
such a symbol in this country of China's shame, and
these things are like the greatest symbol of that larger symbol,
Like these zodiac heads mean everything to China, and to
(10:42):
get them back is enormous. The Commist Party kind of
took a shift, especially as China became more and more
economically powerful, and it started to kind of look at
getting some of these antiquities back rather than looking at
them as reminders of some terrible backwards passed. They became
part of China's heritage, and the Chinese government in particular
(11:06):
started to want to get these back, and they started
a kind of a trend I think culturally that was like, Hey,
start having pride in these heritage antiques, and let's see
if we can get them back into China. How who cares?
Just go get them?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, And one good way to do that is I
have a ton of money. So a lot of billionaires
from China obviously stepped forward and showed a lot of
interest in growing their collections or probably even starting and
then growing in their collections of Chinese art from history,
and some of them even open private museums to showcase
this stuff. They were working with the auction houses very closely,
(11:44):
and like you mentioned earlier, the Chinese art market, it
went from really not much of anything in the year
two thousand to about a billion dollars a year in
value by twenty eighteen, especially this stuff that was looted
by the UK and by Europe and the United States.
And like I said, it's everything you can think of.
(12:06):
It's you know, statues, paintings, carvings, in any kind of
art you can imagine. According to UNESCO, close to one
point seven million Chinese objects are currently held in forty
seven countries other than China in two hundred different museums.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
And those are just museums in just forty seven countries.
I saw that the Chinese government itself estimates as there's
about ten million antiquities spread throughout the world outside of China,
and China considers basically all of these stolen. Even if
a Westerner came in and paid for them back in
nineteen hundred, the Chinese government basically considers whoever sold it
(12:46):
to have been taken advantage of by that westerner. So
if you have a piece of Chinese art and antique
that's Chinese.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Hang on to it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
You may want to hide it actually, because there's a
good chance that China considers that stolen and that that's
not rightfully yours. Maybe there's some law in your country
that says it's yours. China doesn't really recognize that because
in a lot of cases they weren't They weren't sold legitimately,
(13:17):
they were stolen. They were part of war loot, like
with the Old Summer Palace. And they have a great point.
There's a lot of stuff out there, not just from China,
but from other countries that colonial powers went to and
said we really like this, We're going to literally steal it,
and we're going to display in our museums in one
hundred and fifty years from now, you're going to ask
for it back and we're going to say no.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, but we're going to ask for our stuff back
and get.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Most of it right after World War two, right.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah, which we'll you know, we'll talk more about that,
I guess in a little bit. But as far as
the government's involvement officially, there was one group called the
China poly Group. It's a state owned industrial company and
it was original part of the Chinese military and they
traded arms. But in two thousand they said, you know what,
let's diversify and let's start a wing of this company
(14:09):
called poly Culture, and let's make it one of our
missions to go and get some of these artifacts. They
had their own museum to put some of these in
in Beijing. So that was one of the big sort
of groups trying to head up this effort along with
the Chinese billionaires. And then in two thousand, Sotheby's and
Christie's auction houses in Hong Kong auctioned off three of
(14:32):
those heads, three of those zodiac fountain heads, and this
was a big deal. The Chinese Bureau of Cultural Relics
was like, you can't sell this stuff like this stuff's
really important to us. It was stolen, it was looted.
They had no luck. I think they were trying to
get it back for free, and they eventually said all right,
well we'll just bid on it and get it the
old fashioned way, which they.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Did, right. Okay, So in two thousand China, China, as
far as like it's searched for repatriating its art and antiquities,
was so powerless that Christie's and Sotheby's felt comfortable telling
the government of China, sorry, now, we're not going to
give these back to you. Less than ten years later,
in two thousand and nine, when the estate of East
(15:15):
Aves Saint Laurent went up for auction, China contacted Christie's
and said, hey, you're about to auction off two more
of those zodiac heads. If you do it, it's going
to be really bad for you. And China had become
such a player in the global art market that Christie's
would they handed them over. They gave them to them,
(15:37):
and in exchange, I think Christie's was the first auction
house to have an independent or license to independently operate
in China. Within the next year or something like that,
so that's how powerful they became. And then also as
kind of a nod to how valuable Chinese antiquities became
when China started to become interested in them, there was
an auction in twenty fifteen, less than two decades after
(16:00):
China became interested in its own heritage. The presale of
this the sixteen inch vase, sorry, this is twenty ten,
a sixteen inch vase. Presale value was eight hundred thousand dollars.
A half hour after it went under the gavel, it
sold for almost seventy million dollars to a Chinese billionaire.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
It's a lot of dough, it is.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
It also just shows how bad they want this stuff back,
because there's one other thing, Chuck, you mentioned the billionaire's
gating involved. It's not just one way to show off
how much money they have. It's also to show everybody
how patriotic they are, because they're buying these things at
astronomical prices to bring back to China for China.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For sure. So let's take a break and we'll come
back and talk about what China was going to do
about this officially right after this, all right, so we're
(17:20):
back and wondering what China was going to officially do
about this. In two thousand and nine, the government said,
you know what, We're all bets are off. Now, We're
officially gonna get a treasure hunting team together, and we're
going to go send them around the world and investigate
all this art that's in the United States, that's in Europe,
that's in the UK. One of these guys, one of
(17:41):
the chief detectives, whose name was Lou Yang, and he
went all over the place and he was like, Hey,
this was in the Summer Palace. This was in the
Summer Palace. You guys have our stuff, And they noticed
kind of not too long after that, a lot of
these museums on their website started sort of quietly moving
mentions and web pages about these Chinese artifacts on their websites.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, Lou Yang had quite a reputation. I read in
that Alex Palmer GQ article that he wrote a comprehensive
book on all the looted antiquities, at least from the
old Summer Palace, and could show you printouts of websites
from museums around the world where that thing was being held.
So I guess there was also a really tense meeting
(18:26):
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when
he showed up too, because he would just walk around
and be like, that's China's, that's China's that was stolen,
that was looted, and very strangely, that was what'd you
say two thousand and nine. Yeah, the very next year
the string of museum heists of Chinese antiquities began.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, for sure. I did want to point out though,
when I was making the previous point that they took
down these websites, but not everybody, because the fontaine Bleue
and Ants was one of those that were like, no,
you can see right here on our website and we'll
tell you like what this is and when and where
it was looted, like what palace was sacked at the time,
(19:10):
So they kind of, you know, held firm in their
belief that it was theirs. I guess. But yeah, these
robberies started in twenty ten, and we don't know exactly
how many of these have happened. We're going to talk
about quite a few of these, but they were detailed
in the GQ article, and then since twenty eighteen, there's
also been more and it seems like it there may
(19:33):
have been a concerted effort and then other people just started,
you know, because they became really valuable and there was
a market for it, people kind of piggybacked on stealing
this Chinese art and that the entire thing may not
be some you know, complete masterminded by one group or
government kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, that was my interpretation too.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
So apparently the whole thing started in Stockholm, Sweden, at
the Drottningholm Palace, which is well a Swedish royal palace,
and they have a Chinese pavilion there and there's a
state owned collection of Chinese antiquities. And on August six,
twenty ten, they it was quite a surprise because there
(20:17):
was a group of cars that were set fire to
elsewhere in Stockholm, and as the police ran over there,
and we're very much distracted by these sudden car fires
because usually that means riot, so I can imagine that
put the police on edge. The thieves ran over to
the palace in their China pavilion, Chinese pavilion, and started
(20:40):
ransacking some specific items. I think they smashed three display
cases and I'm not sure how many items they stole,
but I believe it seemed pretty specific and they were
out of there in six minutes, so they were clearly pros.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Do you think the Swedish police were like, guys, we
might have our first riot in the country's history.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I've been waiting for this since I was a boy.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I've been told a car fire means a riot. They
were like, what is a riot? And it's well, Spin,
we'll explain it to you.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Spin's been out of the country before.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
So yeah, smash and grab, six minutes in and out.
They hopped on some mopeds, they drove those over to
a lake and they got on a boat and they
got out of there. And this was a very sort
of you know, clearly professional job. Knew exactly what they
were going for, and you'll see, you know, in a
lot of these cases it's pretty similar, like they knew
(21:32):
where this stuff was, they knew exactly what they wanted
on their little grocery list, like you mentioned. The next
one was a few months after that at the Code
Museum in Norway. They busted a glass ceiling and not
in a good way and repelled down just like a movie.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, just like Charles Groden and Miss Picky, that's right.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
And took fifty six things from the China collection. There.
A lot of this stuff was from a Norwegian army
officer named Johannville Norman Munt, who was a big art guy.
Eventually fought on China's side in the Sino Japanese Wars
in eighteen ninety four and eighteen ninety five, but he
(22:12):
was big into art, had a lot of this stuff,
including stuff from the Summer Palace, and that stuff was
taken in the first of the Code Museum's burglaries.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Right, yeah, there was another one, what three years later,
And this is a big deal, and a museum gets
struck like it's not good, especially if word gets out, because,
as Livia was pointing out, museums a lot of times
don't announce the fact that they've been robbed. Number One,
it's very humiliating because they're entrusted with protecting these things
(22:46):
that are part of humanity's cultural heritage. And then secondly,
it also practically means that they need to beef up
security because now thieves are on alert, like, oh, the
Code Museum is really easy to break into, and they'll
become a much bigger target. So for two different break
ins to become public knowledge, it's just not really a
(23:06):
good thing, but it was also very curious that they
were both they both seemed to be Chinese art heists.
Right after that, they suddenly became very interested in negotiating
with China to give back some of the antiquities that
they held, and in particular Chinese billionaire named Huang Nubo.
I'm quite sure that's not exactly how you say his
(23:27):
last name, because I said it like I'm from Mississippi
or something. He came to Stockholm or no Bergen and said,
what do you got. I can give you a donation
if you want, and they showed him some columns from
the old Summer Pals and I read that he wept
when he saw them.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah, and this was a case where they used the
car fire thing again, which is really surprising to use
sort of the same method.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Hey, it works, it works in Scandinavia, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
But it just seems like that would be a tip
off maybe, like watch the museum, because you know, Sweden
and Norway aren't big Riot countries as far as I.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Know, I would hope it would be now, you know, after.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Two yeah, yeah, I would think after one. But anyway,
they use the same method they ended up the Museum
at Code closed the China Collection for renovation when that
was in twenty thirteen, and it's still closed for renovation.
So if that tells you anything, I don't. I'm not
sure if that thing's opening again anytime soon. No.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
I think by renovation they mean the head curators in
the basement clutching the remaining objects to their chest exactly,
get back, get away. So the Swedish burglars and both
Code burglars were not caught, but kind of an indicator
that really does point a bit of a finger at China.
(24:47):
Someone in China. They got a tip, the Code museum
did from the publicity the second robbery brought. They got
a tip about one of the objects that was stolen
in the first robbery that it was in a Shanghai
airport on display. So that does kind of show you
that China is very much like where'd you get this?
(25:09):
Who cares? They probably didn't even ask that unless they
were congratulating. And so when Norway found this out, they
decided not to do anything about it because they had
just recently ticked China off by giving the twenty ten
Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident lou Jabo Chobo, who
was imprisoned at the time in China. So China wasn't
(25:31):
happy with Norway. Sonari I was like, you just keep
your airport antiquity. We're gonna just not say anything about
it exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
So that was Scandinavia. In England around the same time,
this is April of twenty twelve. Meanwhile, in England, the
Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge was robbed. There were eighteen items
taken from here, again very specific Chinese artifacts. These were
valued between eight and twenty three million bucks. The same
(26:00):
month in England, the Malcolm McDonald gallery at Durham University's
Oriental Museum was hit and they took two items this time,
but they were super valuable. They were three million dollars
between the two of them. But these guys were caught.
They finally nabbed somebody. The judge said and sentencing that
they displayed crass ineptitude because they stashed the stuff in
(26:23):
a sort of a swamp, a parcel of land that
was super swampy. Went back to get it, couldn't find
where they put it, and a witness saw somebody like
searching the area and was really agitated on their cell phone,
seemed suspicious, phoned it in and authorities searched the area
and not only found the objects, but eventually arrested dudes.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
They did. They got some people. From what I was
reading up about it, they were like in their early twenties,
not very pro I think they were up and coming criminals,
is the impresson.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
That I have, But I think crass ineptitudes it really does.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
They Also, this is another giveaway, the police found a
cell phone in one of their underpants while they were
being arrested, and they used that cell phone to kind
of build a case that connected that heist to I
think the Cambridge heist and a bunch of other ones actually,
and they ended up tracing it back to a group
(27:24):
of travelers like Brad Pitt and Snatched. Snatch. Now snatched,
is that the Amy what's her name?
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, Amy Schumer?
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Schumer, Yes, thank you. That was a stupid sidetrack. But
so these were real life travelers and they had a
gang called the Rathkeel Rovers and they were responsible for
a bunch of different burglaries and robberies and things like that.
But they seem to be behind all of the Chinese
art heists in the country. What's significant about it is
(27:57):
that there was a member of this gang named he
Chong Donald Wong. He was from South London and he
seems to be their Chinese connection because he kept traveling
in and out of the country, going to China and
smuggling their loot over there. And I don't think they
recovered a single thing from those heists, did they.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
I don't think so. Yeah. I mean they'd figured this
stuff was just successfully smuggled and eventually sold in private
collectors have them. But this was I I was sort
of just surprised for some reason that these were, you know,
Irish travelers, and I just figured they would all be
Chinese people. But yeah, they were just hired robbers basically.
(28:40):
So yes, oh okay, once I wrapped my head around
that they were just doing a job for money exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
So the question remains though, because the police are like,
we never caught the highest person at the top of this,
the head cheese, the ultima ombre, that kind of person,
and they think that even if they had found that person,
that person was probably commissioned by Chinese mafia, Chinese billionaires,
maybe the Poly group who knows, but that seems to
(29:08):
be the case for all of the robberies where they
found the people who carried out the robbery, they were
just hired criminals. They were not doing this because, you know,
they loved China or something like that. They were either
commissioned to or they knew that the Chinese art market
was so hot that it would just make sense to
steal Chinese objects because they were going to fetch a
(29:30):
pretty high price.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah. Should we take another break? Yeah, all right, we'll
take a break and we'll talk about more heist right
after this.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Okay, Chuck, So we're back, and you promised talk of
more heists. And I'm going to take this to France,
won't you come with me?
Speaker 1 (30:15):
I love France.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
How about France in twenty fifteen. Wasn't that a particularly
pretty summer? I think? Or spring?
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Well, let's go find out. Because March first, twenty fifteen,
at the Chateau de Fantbleau outside Paris, which is a
I think, beginning back in medieval times, one of the
homes of the French monarchs, there was a collection assembled
by Empress Eugenie, who was the wife of Napoleon the
third She was the last Empress of France, and she
(30:45):
put together a collection of at least eight hundred objects
that those were just the ones on display. Three hundred
of them these were Chinese objects antiquities. Three hundred of
them were from the Old Summer Palace alone, mostly taken
by French soldiers who were there to sack the Old
Summer Palace in eighteen sixty. Right, yeah, yeah, so I
(31:08):
think thieves when they broke into the Fountain Blue in
twenty fifteen, they made off with like fifteen different things,
one of which sticks out to me. It was a
replica of the King of Siam's crown. Siam is now Thailand,
and that really has very little to do with China.
It was certainly not a Chinese heritage object. From what
I can tell. That one seems a little hinky to me.
(31:31):
I'm not sure if that was a commissioned robbery or not,
but regardless, I don't Oh, they did find at least
some of the people who were behind it, and again
these were just hired guns basically.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah, And it was, you know, sort of the same
pattern as before as far as getting in and out
of the air. In this time it was you know,
they were pretty good at what they were doing. Even though,
like you said, they got six of them. They questioned them,
didn't they They still couldn't get the big fish, you know.
I guess they're maybe not good at questioning, but they couldn't.
(32:04):
They couldn't land the whale. Unfortunately, Paul Harris is an
art dealer from Britain who he thought it was French
professional criminals who did this. Again, I just hired people,
in one case Irish travelers, in this case French you
know art art deeds. I guess, yeah, pretty good specialty.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
This apparently was the origin of the phrase no Sherlock.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
So if you look at you know, research on this,
a lot of the research will say like, hey, all
of these events are sort of part of this larger
operation like we've been talking about since that article. Though
I mentioned there have been other other you know, art heist,
other crimes. There was one in June of twenty nineteen
(32:57):
at the Museum of Our Eastern Art in Switzerland. The
time in Geneva took some couple of things from the
Ming dynasty in less than a minute. This time they
had DNA evidence in this case and they did catch
the people. These were British dudes. They said they were
just trying to make money to pay off a debt.
So again it looks like another either hired people to
(33:20):
return these or just people being hired out because this
stuff's valuable, or just guys doing it because they know
it's valuable.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Yeah, it's just too It's just.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
You can't you don't know for sure, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
No, Again, that hot Chinese art market kind of dilutes
the possibility that yet Chinese government there was one. There
was a second robbery on the Fountain Blue or in
an attempt, the police broke it up before it could happen,
in Operation Bamboo. The I guess Spanish and French police
got together and they said, let's get these guys, and
(33:53):
they did before they could rob the place. And those
guys said that they were hired by the Chinese mafia
and that they had been going after three specific pieces
of art, Chinese art. And I don't think that that
led anywhere either. I think also though, even if you
could trace it back to say the Poly group or
(34:15):
the Prime Minister, it wouldn't matter. China would basically just
say so, or they would deny it or whatever, and
everybody needs to be essentially an at least good economic
terms with China right now that it's just the issue
is not going to get pressed, so it doesn't really matter.
It's more just an academic kind of interesting thing to
(34:38):
try to track it back to who's behind it. It's
not actually going to result in any kind of geopolitical differences.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
No, of course, not as far as the Chinese government.
You know, this whole time, they've maintained like, hey, this
isn't us that's doing this. The Polyculture group, I believe
the general manager even talk to the Global Times about
it instead of was a nonsense story, the GQ story.
We may sue. I don't think anything ever became of that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
My dad's gonna see you.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, do with that, which you will. But you know,
their official position as a government is like all of
that stuff is illegitimate, Like everything you own, you own illegally.
There's nothing like if you have one like they had
one in the airport, like you mentioned, if you have
something like this in your private collection. The Chinese government
(35:31):
doesn't dissuade any of that. I don't know that they
officially encourage it, but they they definitely don't say like, hey,
you have the stolen thing in your private collection.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
No, and there's no apparently there's no legal repercussions for
it either. Even if somebody from Norway or Sweden came
over and said this is ours, like this was stolen
from our museum, China would just be like, well, there's
no laws here that could punish whoever did this, so
go home and you. They officially apparently do discourage theft.
(36:04):
But because the item could become damaged in the robbery, right,
that's why, Not because it violates any laws or treaties
or anything like that. Because again, there's a lot of
soreness from the idea that these things were stolen and
there's I mean, it's not even like they make a
good case that's exactly what happened historically. And so I
(36:27):
was trying to figure out, like, okay, if there's museums
around the country that you know, there's this growing movement
for repatriation here in America. We have like the Indigenous
Graves Act, which is like, if you have Native American
remains in your museum collection, you should give them back
to the to the group who from which they came,
(36:48):
so that they can you know, bury the remains or
do whatever custom they do rather than keeping them in
a museum collection. That's a good example of this, this
kind of growing awareness of responsibility museums have for giving
stuff back that was stolen from a country. But museums
just aren't really going with it. And I was looking
(37:11):
at it and I sent you I think some parts
of a I think an artsy article that talks about this,
like China, Greece, Nigeria, They're all like, you, guys have
some really important cultural treasures of ours, so give them back,
and museums are basically saying like, no, you won't be
able to take good care of them. We can take
(37:32):
better care of them. And then I think the British
Museum was just discovered to have suffered an extensive robbery
from inside that really kind of undermines that argument that
you know, they can protect these things better than the
countries can, because this curator at the British Museum stole
something like two thousand pieces from the museum's collection was
selling them on eBay. So it's not like China and
(37:55):
other countries don't have a legitimate claim to this. It's
just more like Western museums are just basically they're just
digging in and saying like, no, we're not going to
give these back.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Yeah. I think if every piece of ill gotten art,
whether it was through looting or stealing or even you know,
started out that way and then we're purchased and repurchased
like that, there'd be a lot of half empty museums
if only like super legitimate, legitimately acquired art was on display.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah, maybe even more than half. And that's got to
be ultimately the reason why they don't want.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
To do it. Yeah, they're like, what are we going
to put in the Chinese art wing right of the.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Mets, Yeah, exactly. I think also in the UK in particular,
they have a law that says museums aren't allowed to
repatriate cultural artifacts to other countries, and they're like, yep,
that's the law, and I think the Chinese government is like,
that's your law. You can change that law. Stop hiding
behind that.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
So yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah. I mean there were a couple of instances where
I'm like, Okay, this makes sense to not give it back,
like if there's a lot of instability and turmoil in
that country. Another one that really kind of stuck out
to me is if the cultural heritage is now divided
among multiple countries. So let's say it was a Yugo
slobban item and now, yeah, Czechoslovakia and Slovenia, they're both
(39:21):
saying like, that's ours, that's a tickler spot. But for
the most part, if it's you know, a stable country,
is like, that's ours. Give it back, especially if it
was looted, there really shouldn't be any discussion about that.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh well, you can look out for a movie by
Crazy Rich Asians director John M. Chew coming out sometime soon.
Netflix is gonna have something based on Grace D. Lee's
novel Portrait of a Thief. And there's a twenty twelve
Jackie Chan movie called CZ twelve about this very kind
of stuff.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Jackie Chan.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Well, since you said Jackie Champ, he unlocked with Sermail.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
All right. This is on swamp coolers. Hey, guys, you
talked about swamp coolers in the History of Refrigeration episode.
We live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at seven thousand
feet elevation, where it's historically hasn't gotten hot enough to
need air conditioning. Although summers are getting hotter here, with
a couple of weeks in the high to mid nineties
every year. Now it's pretty hot. Our house was a
(40:27):
custom built house in two thousand and five and it
does not have AC. So we bought a portable swamp
cooler last summer to help just on those handfuls of
really hot days when it's too hot to sleep, and
it's really effective, I have to say. In the dry
desert air, some people have whole house swamp coolers on
the roof with thermostats inside. They use a lot less
energy than AC, so there are good option in places
(40:50):
where it's dry and not too hot. They only lower
the temperature ten to fifteen degrees. That's not bad at all,
So anything ninety five we get for a short time
wouldn't really work. I disagree. Eighty to ninety five is
pretty substantial, Yeah for sure, But that is from Chandra.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Thanks a lot, Chandra, whole house swamp cooler. Can you
just see like the tops like open and it says
igloo and giant letters on the side.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Yeah, it sounds like a record name too, like an
album title.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Whole house swamp cooler.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Yeah. Yeah, the chick us all mudpuppies or.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Something very nice, Chuck, very nice. Well, if you want
to be like Chandra and write in and tell us
about something that we talked about, that's whole house size.
We love hearing that kind of stuff. You can shoot
us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
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