A relic looted from China is in the hands of a Taiwanese collector who dropped plans to auction it after Beijing’s wrath over sales of other stolen antiques from the same set, an expert said yesterday.
Wellington Wang (王度), a well-known local art collector, told TVBS cable news he was contacted by a businessman who claimed to have a bronze dragon’s head and was initially looking to auction it.
The relic, along with the rabbit and rat bronze heads auctioned by Christie’s last month, were stolen by British and French forces from China’s imperial Summer Palace toward the end of the Second Opium War in 1860.
“He said he was willing to sell it if the [Christie’s] auction went well. He didn’t expect such fallout and now everybody is afraid,” Wang said, indicating that the dealer had changed his mind.
The owner reportedly bought the dragon’s head for US$200,000 from a European antique dealer around 1988 and has since stored it in central Taiwan, Wang told the Chinese-language Apple Daily.
Wang declined to name the collector and said he had not seen the artifact.
The dragon’s head could be more valuable than the rabbit and rat if sold because of its highly symbolic status in Chinese culture, the newspaper said, quoting another local antique collector.
The two bronzes, part of the art collection of late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge, sold for 15.7 million euros (US$20.3 million) each at the Christie’s auction in Paris last month.
Authorities in Beijing had repeatedly called for the sale not to go ahead and called for the relics to be returned to China.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
RSS