Strange How It Keeps Happening, How The Greatest Works Of Chinese Art Keep Getting Brazenly Stolen From Museums Around The World. Is It A Conspiracy? Vengeance For Treasures Plundered Years Ago? We Sent Alex W Palmer To Investigate The Trail Of Theft And The Stunning Rumour: Is The Chinese Government Behind One Of The Boldest Art-crime Waves In History?
A month later, in Bergen, Norway, intruders descended from a glass ceiling and plucked 56 objects from the China Collection at the KODE Museum. Next, robbers in England hit the Oriental Museum at Durham University, followed by a museum at Cambridge University. Then, in 2013, the KODE was visited once more; crooks snatched 22 additional relics that had been missed during the first break-in.
Had they known exactly what was happening, perhaps the security officials at the Château de Fontainebleau, the sprawling former royal estate just outside Paris, could have predicted that they might be next.
With more than 1 500 rooms, the palace is a maze of opulence. But when bandits arrived before dawn on March 1, 2015, their target was unmistakable: the palace’s grand Chinese Museum. Created by the last empress of France, the wife of Napoleon III, the gallery was stocked with works so rare that their value was considered incalculable.
In recent years, however, the provenance of those treasures had become an increasingly sensitive subject: the bulk of the museum’s collection had been pilfered from China by French soldiers in 1860 during the sack of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace.
This story is from the November 2018 edition of GQ South Africa.
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This story is from the November 2018 edition of GQ South Africa.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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