China probes if ancient bronze vessel to be auctioned in UK was looted
Documents found by auction house suggest Royal Marines captain may have taken it from Old Summer Palace in Beijing
China’s government is investigating whether a 3,000-year-old bronze vessel to be auctioned in Britain next month was looted from an imperial palace in Beijing.
The rare water vessel dates back to the Western Zhou dynasty (1047BC-772BC) and is one of only seven similar vessels known to exist, auction house Canterbury Auction Galleries told the Antiques Trade Gazette in the UK earlier this month.
The auction house will sell it on April 11 in Kent, southern England at an estimated price of £120,000 (US$170,000) to £200,000.
Documents found by the auction house suggest Harry Lewis Evans, a Royal Marines captain who fought in the second opium war (1856-60), could have looted it from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was sacked by British and French forces in 1860.
Evans detailed the infamous looting of the palace in a letter to his mother dated October 17, 1860, which was found along with the vessel by the auction house.
“The war is now virtually at an end … Peking is now virtually ours … I went out on Thursday with a party to burn down the Summer Palace. It is about four miles from here, and a portion of it is beautifully situated on a spur of the hills which form a magnificent background; it is very different from all European notions of a palace, and consists of a range of buildings scattered over an immense extent of ground on the plain at the foot of the hills,” he wrote.