Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums, and Why They Should Stay There by Tiffany Jenkins
Museums shouldn't be sending any treasures back, insists this forthright study
Sunday February 14 2016, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Stone wonder: raising a lion at the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (in modern Turkey) by Charles Thomas Newton, 1862
Read the first chapter here
In October 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French forces attacked the Summer Palace near what was then Peking. Built of jade and marble and filled with treasures crafted exclusively for the imperial family, it had been described as a "dazzling cavern of human fantasy". Three days of looting left it a smoking ruin. Eyewitnesses told of soldiers carrying off strings of pearls and pencil cases set with diamonds. The empress's pekinese was also taken and, tactlessly renamed "Looty", presented to Queen Victoria. Much of the plunder, which the present Chinese government reckons to have totalled 1.5m artefacts, found its way, via salesrooms, into European and American museums, including the V&A, which has one of the richest Chinese