Why is Chinese art being stolen?

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And we're going to talk a little bit about Chinese art heists. So let's get started.
Go.

Speaker 3 That's right. Big thanks to Livia.
She did a banger of an article for us.

Speaker 2 But also thanks to you. Where'd you come up with this idea?

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 3 was this a recommendation?

Speaker 2 God, I'm so bad about that.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 3 But we also have to thank a reporter for GQ magazine named Alex W. Palmer, who in 2018 wrote a pretty

Speaker 3 banger of an article as well

Speaker 3 about these art heists of cultural, very specific cultural and art artifacts from China that have been stolen from museums in the 2010s and basically posed the question, is the Chinese government behind this?

Speaker 2 Right. Are they commissioning people to rob art museums? And I mean, not just like, you know,

Speaker 2 some tinkertown museum on the corner of a neighborhood that like

Speaker 2 I don't know, you know not a good museum museum talking like world-class museums like the fountain blue and outside paris paris france that is not texas yeah

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 so yeah it was there's like um

Speaker 2 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 hand in it.

Speaker 2 But also,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The thing is, is these string of particular heists that Alex Palmer talks about that really kind of form this

Speaker 2 galaxy of particular heists, the thieves would go in and steal really specific stuff that were Chinese antiquities.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 of items that were particularly Chinese that they wanted to steal.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't think almost seemed like it. That seems like a certainty to me.

Speaker 2 It's true. It is.
You could see that

Speaker 2 it would be like, you know, Imperial Seal,

Speaker 2 China Dog,

Speaker 2 or

Speaker 2 the waving cat that's fortunate.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, eggs, butter, and apples. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The Picasso, nah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Some of the people who were caught with this were clearly professional thieves.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And we are going to go back to about a hundred and close to 110-year period known as the Century of Humiliation.

Speaker 3 And this is when China was kind of getting just beat up on all fronts back then.

Speaker 3 A lot of global powers at the time were kind of coming in and saying, you know what, China, you should just sort of listen to us and do what we say.

Speaker 3 Particularly during the opium wars from 1841 to 1860, a lot of European countries in the UK forced China to, you know, to accept treaties they didn't want to accept, forced them to accept opium imports.

Speaker 3 I think it was

Speaker 3 19 different countries

Speaker 3 opening these treaty ports for imports from those 19 countries and accept them and basically said, you have no choice in the matter.

Speaker 3 Add to this later that century in the 1890s to 1900s, when China battled with Japan, which ended up losing parts of Manchuria, losing Taiwan,

Speaker 3 had a lot of control over Korea at the time that was, you know, they no longer had control over.

Speaker 3 And this all sort of leads up to the Chinese Communist Party taking power and Chairman Mao Zedong saying in 1949, we're not going to be subject to insult and humiliation any longer.

Speaker 3 That century of humiliation was a dark part of our past, and we need to forget about it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so this idea, this concept of the century of humiliation was coined by Mao.

Speaker 2 And in the 21st century, the Chinese Communist Party that Mao founded have kind of

Speaker 2 really kind of used that as a point of pride and as a point of unity among the country, which is really interesting because

Speaker 2 they view it as a really shameful period of their history, and yet it does generate pride in them and brings them together. And I think a sense of like, we're going to overcome that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And in fact, everything that reminds us of the past, we're just going to destroy. So go into museums, go into libraries, go into,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 anywhere that like landmarks, things that remind us of the past. They call them the four olds

Speaker 2 that were just meant to be destroyed. And it was the cultural revolution is what they called it.

Speaker 2 And that's how it was approached for about 50 years. And then finally, it kind of turned and then

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 some particular items that came from a particular place called the Yuan Ming Yu,

Speaker 2 the Garden of Perfect Brightness, I think is what it's called, but less formally, it's called the Old Summer Palace.

Speaker 2 It's in Beijing, I believe, and it was magnificent from what I can tell.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It was built in 1709, and then for the next century and a half, basically just got bigger and bigger. And it had temples, it had gardens and pools, and it had a lot of art,

Speaker 3 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 1860,

Speaker 3 the Europeans, you know, were, again, coming in and kind of doing their thing against China. And the government of China said, you know what? You have some people here on a negotiating mission.

Speaker 3 We're going to capture them. We're going to torture them.
And so British, I think about 5,000 British and French forces took part in what has been

Speaker 3 kind of looked back on now as one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in modern history

Speaker 3 when they

Speaker 3 looted and either stole or just could just outright destroy or vandalize

Speaker 3 everything at the old summer palace, essentially.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they were apparently already in the process of looting the palace when they heard about the torture deaths of that

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they did so over, I think, two days and nights, but the fire kept going for like three days. And rather than rebuild,

Speaker 2 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 as just a reminder.

Speaker 2 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 in the past and it's something to

Speaker 2 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 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 private collections sometimes, but a lot of royal palaces in Europe ended up with this stuff.

Speaker 3 Queen Victoria, even, and this is a great little find from Livia,

Speaker 3 besides art, Queen Victoria apparently also got a Pekinese dog that she named Lootie, as in loot.

Speaker 2 Yeah, as in the dog itself was looted.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 And I think it was the first Pekinese in all of England.

Speaker 3 I would believe it.

Speaker 2 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 3 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.

Speaker 3 And the 12 spouts were carved in the shape of the heads. of the animals of the Chinese zodiac.
And whenever one of the

Speaker 3 fountains squirted, that was what time it was.

Speaker 3 So that

Speaker 3 became a really big symbol of this whole looting, basically.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Some of the repatriation and these thefts, as we'll see, was all kinds of stuff, but it seems like that these fountain heads hold particular significance.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 to China. And to get them back is enormous.
The Communist Party kind of took a shift, especially as China became more and more economically powerful. And it started to kind of look at

Speaker 2 getting some of these antiquities back rather than looking at them as reminders of some terrible backwards past.

Speaker 2 They became part of China's heritage and the Chinese government in particular 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

Speaker 2 Let's see if we can get them back into China. How? Who cares? Just go get them.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And one good way to do that is to have a ton of money.

Speaker 3 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 their collections of Chinese art from history.

Speaker 3 And some of them even opened private museums to showcase this stuff. They were working with the auction houses very closely.

Speaker 3 And like you mentioned earlier, the Chinese art market, it went from really not much of anything in the year 2000 to to about a billion dollars a year in value by 2018,

Speaker 3 especially the stuff that was looted by the UK and by Europe and the United States.

Speaker 3 And like I said, it's everything you can think of. It's statues, paintings, carvings, any kind of art you can imagine.

Speaker 3 According to UNESCO,

Speaker 3 Close to 1.7 million Chinese objects are currently held in 47 countries other than China in 200 different museums.

Speaker 2 And those are just museums in just 47 countries. I saw that the Chinese government itself estimates that there's about 10 million antiquities spread throughout the world outside of China.

Speaker 2 And China considers basically all of these stolen.

Speaker 2 Even if a Westerner came in and paid for them back in 1900,

Speaker 2 the Chinese government basically considers

Speaker 2 whoever sold it to have been taken advantage of by that Westerner. So if you have a piece of Chinese art, an antique that's Chinese,

Speaker 2 hang on to it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 China doesn't really recognize that because

Speaker 2 in a lot of cases, they weren't.

Speaker 2 They weren't sold legitimately. They were stolen.
They were part of war loot,

Speaker 2 like with the old Summer Palace. 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.

Speaker 2 We're going to literally steal it and we're going to display it in our museums. And 150 years from now, you're going to ask for it back and we're going to say, no.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but we're going to ask for our stuff back and get most of it. Right.

Speaker 2 After World War II, right?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's a state-owned industrial company, and it was originally part of the Chinese military, and they traded arms.

Speaker 3 But in 2000, they said, you know what, let's diversify and let's start a wing of this company called Poly Culture and let's make it one of our missions to go and get some of these artifacts.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 along with the Chinese billionaires. And then in 2000,

Speaker 3 Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses in Hong Kong auctioned off three of those heads, three of those Zodiac fountain heads.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They

Speaker 3 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 did.

Speaker 2 Right. Okay.

Speaker 2 So in 2000, China, China, as far as like its search for repatriating its art and antiquities, was so powerless that Christie and Sotheby's felt comfortable telling the government of China, sorry, no, we're not going to give these back to you.

Speaker 2 Less than 10 years later, in 2009, when the estate of Yves Saint-Laurent

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And China had become such a player in the global art market that Christie's, they handed them over, they gave them to them.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So that's how powerful they became. And then also, it's kind of a nod to how valuable Chinese antiquities became when China started to become interested in them.

Speaker 2 There was an auction in 2015, less than two decades after China became interested in its own heritage.

Speaker 2 The pre-sale of this

Speaker 2 16-inch vase, sorry, this is 2010. A 16-inch vase pre-sale value was $800,000.
A half hour after it went under the gavel,

Speaker 2 it sold for almost $70 million to a Chinese billionaire.

Speaker 3 It's a lot of dough.

Speaker 2 It is. It also just shows how bad they want this stuff back.

Speaker 2 Because there's one other thing, Chuck, you mentioned the billionaires getting involved.

Speaker 2 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 3 For sure.

Speaker 3 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.

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Speaker 3 All right, so we're back and wondering what China was going to officially do about this. In 2009,

Speaker 3 the government said, you know what?

Speaker 3 All bets are off now.

Speaker 3 We're officially going to 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.

Speaker 3 One of these guys, one of the chief detectives, his name was Liu Yang, and he went all over the place and he was like, hey,

Speaker 3 this was in the Summer Palace. This was in the Summer Palace.
You guys have our stuff.

Speaker 3 And they noticed kind of not too long after that, a lot of these museums on their website started sort of quietly removing mentions and web pages about these Chinese artifacts on their websites.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Liu Yang had quite a reputation.

Speaker 2 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 from museums around the world where that thing was being held so i guess there was also a really tense meeting at um 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 um and very strangely that was what'd you say 2009?

Speaker 2 yeah the very next year

Speaker 2 the string of museum heists of chinese antiquities began

Speaker 3 yeah for for sure.

Speaker 3 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 Fontainebleau in France 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.

Speaker 3 So they kind of, you know, held, held firm in their belief that it was theirs, I guess.

Speaker 3 But yeah, these robberies started in 2010.

Speaker 3 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 2018, there's also been more.

Speaker 3 And it seems like there may 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.

Speaker 3 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 Yeah, that was my interpretation, too. Yeah.
So apparently the whole thing started in

Speaker 2 Stockholm, Sweden, at the Drottningom 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.

Speaker 2 And on August 6th, 2010,

Speaker 2 it was quite a surprise because there was a group of cars that were set fire to elsewhere in Stockholm.

Speaker 2 And as the police ran over there and were very much distracted by these sudden car fires, because usually that means riot. So I can imagine that put the police on edge.

Speaker 2 The thieves ran over to the palace in their China pavilion, Chinese pavilion, and started ransacking some specific items.

Speaker 2 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 3 Do you think the Swedish police were like, guys, we might have our first riot in the country's history?

Speaker 2 Like, I've been waiting for this since I was a boy.

Speaker 3 I've been told a car fire means a riot. And they were like, what is a riot? And I was like, well, Sven will explain it to you.

Speaker 2 Right. Sven's been out of the country before.

Speaker 3 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 a boat and they got out of there.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Like they knew where the stuff was. They knew exactly what they wanted on their little grocery list, like you mentioned.
Right.

Speaker 3 The next one was a few months after that at the Code Museum in Norway.

Speaker 3 They busted a glass ceiling and not in a good way and rappelled down just like a movie.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just like Charles Groden and Miss Piggy. That's right.

Speaker 3 And took 56 things from the China collection there.

Speaker 3 A lot of this stuff was from a Norwegian army officer named Johann Wilhelm Norman Mundt,

Speaker 3 who was a big art guy,

Speaker 3 eventually fought on China's side in the Sino-Japanese wars in 1894 and 1895. But he was big into art, had a lot of this stuff,

Speaker 3 including stuff from the Summer Palace. And that stuff was taken in the first of the Code Museum's burglaries.

Speaker 2 Right. Yeah.
There was another one, what, three years later. And this is a big deal.
When a museum gets struck, like,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Number one, it's very humiliating because they're entrusted with protecting these things that are part of humanity's cultural heritage.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, for two different break-ins to become public knowledge,

Speaker 2 it's just not really a good thing. But it was also very curious that

Speaker 2 they both seemed to be Chinese art heists.

Speaker 2 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, a Chinese billionaire named Huang Nubo.

Speaker 2 I'm quite sure that's not exactly how you say his last name, because I said it like I'm from Mississippi or something.

Speaker 2 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 palace.

Speaker 2 And I read that he wept when he saw them.

Speaker 3 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 hey it works it works in scandinavia i guess so 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 know i would hope it would be now you know after two yeah yeah i would think after one but anyway they use the same method uh they ended up the museum uh code closed the china collection for renovation uh when

Speaker 3 That was in 2013, and it's still closed for renovation. So if that tells you anything, I'm not sure if that thing's opening again anytime soon.

Speaker 2 No, I think by renovation, they mean the head curators in the basement clutching the remaining objects to their chest.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Get back. Get away.

Speaker 2 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.
Someone in China,

Speaker 2 they got a tip, the Code Museum did, from the publicity the second robbery brought.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So that does kind of show you that China is very much like, where'd you get this? Who cares? They probably didn't even ask that unless they were congratulating. And so when Norway found this out,

Speaker 2 they decided not to do anything about it because they had just recently ticked China off by giving the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu

Speaker 2 Xiaobo, who was imprisoned at the time in China. So China wasn't happy with Norway.
So Norway was like, you just keep your airport antiquity. We're going to just not say anything about it.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 3 So that was Scandinavia. In England, around the same time, this was April of 2012, meanwhile, in England,

Speaker 3 the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge was robbed. There were 18 items taken from here.
Again, very specific Chinese artifacts. These were valued between $8 and $23 million.

Speaker 3 The same 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.

Speaker 3 They were $3 million between the two of them.

Speaker 3 But these guys were caught. They finally nabbed somebody.

Speaker 3 The judge said in sentencing that they displayed displayed crass ineptitude because

Speaker 3 they stashed the stuff in 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 arrested dudes.

Speaker 2 They did. They got some people.
From what I was reading up up about it. They were like in their early 20s,

Speaker 2 not very pro. I think they were up-and-coming criminals, is the impression that I have.

Speaker 3 But I think crass ineptitude says it all.

Speaker 2 It really does. They also, this is another giveaway.

Speaker 2 The police found a cell phone in one of their underpants while they were being arrested.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they ended up

Speaker 2 tracing it back to a group of travelers like Brad Pitt and Snatched.

Speaker 2 Snatched. Now Snatched is that

Speaker 2 Amy,

Speaker 2 what's her name?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, yeah, Amy Schumer.

Speaker 2 Schumer, yes, thank you. But that was a stupid sidetrack.

Speaker 2 But so these were real-life travelers, and they had a gang called the Wrathkeel Rovers, and they were responsible for a bunch of different burglaries and robberies and things like that.

Speaker 2 But they seem to be behind all of the Chinese art heists in the country. What's significant about it is that there was a member of this gang named Chichong Donald Wong.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I don't think they recovered a single thing from those heists, did they?

Speaker 3 I don't think so.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, they'd figured the stuff was just successfully smuggled and eventually sold and private collectors have them. But this was,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But yeah, they were just hired robbers, basically. So I was like, oh, okay.
Once I wrap my head around that, they were just doing a job for money.

Speaker 2 Exactly. 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 ultimate ombre, that kind of person.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Who knows?

Speaker 2 But that seems to be the case for all of the robberies where they found the people who carried out the robbery. They were just hired criminals.

Speaker 2 They were not doing this because they love China or something like that.

Speaker 2 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 pretty high price.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Should we take another break? Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk about more heists right after this.

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Speaker 2 Okay, Chuck, so we're back and you promised talk of more heists and I'm going to take us to France. Won't you come with me?

Speaker 2 I love france how about france in 2015 wasn't that a particularly pretty summer i think or spring i think it was well let's go find out because on march 1st 2015 at the château de fontenebleu outside paris uh which is a i think beginning back in medieval times one of the homes of the french monarchs um there was a collection assembled by empress eugenie who was the wife of napoleon iii she was the last empress of france and she put together um a collection of at least 800 objects.

Speaker 2 Those were just the ones on display. 300 of them.
These were Chinese objects, antiquities.

Speaker 2 300 of them were from the old summer palace alone, mostly taken by French soldiers who were there to sack the old summer palace in 1860, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I think thieves, when they broke into the Fountain Blue in 2015, they made off with like 15 different things, one of which sticks out to me. It was a replica of the king of Siam's crown.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That one seems a little hinky to me. 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.

Speaker 2 And again, these were just hired guns, basically.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it was, you know, sort of the same pattern as before as far as getting in and out of there. And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They questioned them.

Speaker 3 They still couldn't get the big fish. You know, I guess they're maybe not good at questioning,

Speaker 3 but they couldn't land the whale,

Speaker 3 unfortunately.

Speaker 3 Paul Harris is an art dealer from Britain who he thought it was French professional criminals who did this. Again,

Speaker 3 just hired people, in one case, Irish travelers, in this case, French, you know, art,

Speaker 3 art thieves, I guess. Yeah.
Pretty good specialty.

Speaker 2 This apparently was the origin of the phrase, no shit, Sherlock.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 3 if you look at, you know, research on this, a lot of the

Speaker 3 research will say, like, hey,

Speaker 3 all of these events are sort of part of this larger operation, like we've been talking about.

Speaker 3 Since that article, though, I mentioned there have been other,

Speaker 3 you know, art heists, other crimes. There was one in June of 2019 at the Museum of Far Eastern Art in Switzerland this time, in Geneva.

Speaker 3 Took some couple of things from the Ming dynasty in less than a minute this time.

Speaker 3 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, again, it looks like another

Speaker 3 either hired people to 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 Yeah, it's just too.

Speaker 3 It's just you just can't, you don't know for sure, you know.

Speaker 2 No, again, that hot Chinese art market kind of dilutes the possibility that it's just the Chinese government.

Speaker 2 There was one, there was a second robbery on the Fountain Bluer and attempt. The police broke it up before it could happen in Operation Bamboo.

Speaker 2 The, I guess, Spanish and French police got together and they said, let's get these guys. And they did before they could rob the place.

Speaker 2 And those guys said that they were hired by the Chinese mafia and that they had been going after three specific pieces of art,

Speaker 2 Chinese art. And

Speaker 2 I don't think that that led anywhere either. I think also, though, even if you could trace it back to, say, the Pali group or

Speaker 2 the prime minister,

Speaker 2 it wouldn't matter. China would basically just say so, or they would deny it or whatever.
And everybody needs to be essentially in at least good economic terms with China right now.

Speaker 2 That's just the issue's not going to get pressed. So it doesn't really matter.
It's more just an academic kind of interesting thing to try to track it back to who's behind it.

Speaker 2 It's not actually going to result in any kind of geopolitical differences.

Speaker 3 No, of course not.

Speaker 3 As far as the Chinese government, you know, this whole time they've maintained, like, hey, this isn't us that's doing this.

Speaker 3 The Polyculture Group, I believe the general manager even talked to the Global Times about it and said it was a nonsense story, the GQ story.

Speaker 3 We may sue. I don't think anything ever became of that.

Speaker 2 My dad's going to sue you.

Speaker 3 Yeah, do with that what you will.

Speaker 3 But, you know, their official position as a government is like, all of that stuff is illegitimate. Like everything you own, you own illegally.

Speaker 3 There's nothing like

Speaker 3 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 doesn't dissuade any of that.

Speaker 3 I don't know that they officially encourage it, but they

Speaker 3 definitely don't say like, hey, you have this stolen thing in your private collection.

Speaker 2 No, and there's no, apparently there's no legal repercussions for it either.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So go home.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they officially, apparently, do discourage theft, but because the item could become damaged in the robbery. Right.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's why, not because it violates any laws or treaties or anything like that. Because again, there's a lot of soreness from

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so I was trying to figure out: okay, if there's museums around the country that, you know, there's this growing movement for repatriation.

Speaker 2 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 group who

Speaker 2 from from which they came so that they can

Speaker 2 bury the remains or do whatever custom they do rather than keeping them in a museum collection. That's a good example of this kind of

Speaker 2 growing awareness of a responsibility museums have for giving stuff back that was stolen from a country, but museums just aren't really going with it.

Speaker 2 And I was looking at it, and I sent you, I think, some parts of an Artsy article um that talks about this like china greece um

Speaker 2 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 you won't be able to take good care of them we can take 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 the this curator at the British Museum stole something like 2,000 pieces from the museum's collection was selling them on eBay.

Speaker 2 So it's not like China and other countries don't have a legitimate claim to this.

Speaker 2 It's just more like Western museums are just basically just digging in and saying like, no, we're not going to give these back.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think if every piece of ill-gotten art, whether it was through looting or stealing or even,

Speaker 3 you know, started out that way and then then were purchased and repurchased. Like there'd be a lot of half-empty museums if only like super legitimate, legitimately acquired art was on display.

Speaker 2 Yeah, maybe even more than half. And that's got to be ultimately the reason why they don't want to do it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they're like, what are we going to put in the Chinese art wing

Speaker 2 of the Mets? Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I think the Chinese government was like, That's your law. You can change that law.
Stop hiding behind that. So, yeah, I agree.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, there were a couple of instances where I'm like, okay, this makes sense to not give it back.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, let's say it was a Yugoslavian item and now, yeah, Czechoslovakia and Slovenia, they're both saying, like, that's ours. That's a that's a ticklish spot.

Speaker 2 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 3 I'm with you.

Speaker 2 You got anything else?

Speaker 3 I got nothing else.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, you can look out for a movie by crazy rich Asians director John M. Chu coming out sometime soon.
Netflix is going to have something based on Grace D. Lee's novel Portrait of a Thief.

Speaker 2 And there's a 2012 Jackie Chan movie called CZ12

Speaker 2 about this very kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 Jackie Chan. Well, since Chuck said Jackie Cham, he unlocked listener mail.

Speaker 3 Alright, this is on swamp coolers. Hey guys, you talked about swamp coolers in the History of Refrigeration episode.

Speaker 3 We live in Santa Fe, New Mexico at 7,000 feet elevation, where it historically hasn't gotten hot enough to need air conditioning.

Speaker 3 Although summers are getting hotter here with a couple of weeks in the high to mid 90s every year now.

Speaker 3 It's pretty hot. Our house was a custom-built house in 2005 and it does not have AC.

Speaker 3 So we bought a portable swamp cooler last summer to help just on those handful 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.

Speaker 3 Some people have whole house swamp coolers on the roof with thermostats inside. They use a lot less energy than AC.
So they're a good option in places where it's dry and not too hot.

Speaker 3 They only lower the temperature 10 to 15 degrees. That's not bad at all.

Speaker 3 So anything 95 we get for a short time wouldn't really work. I disagree.
80 to 95 is pretty substantial.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 But that is from Chandra.

Speaker 2 Thanks a lot, Chandra. Whole House Swamp Cooler.
Can't you just see like the tops like open and it says igloo in giant letters on the side?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it sounds like a record name too, like an album title.

Speaker 2 Whole house swamp cooler.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 The Chickasaw Mud Puppies or something.

Speaker 2 Very nice, Chuck. Very nice.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You can shoot us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 3 Support for the show today comes from Public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 3 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 2 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 3 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 4 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 5 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC.

Speaker 5 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

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