Reflections | Statues of hated Chinese historical figures that are replaced when destroyed could help other countries address their controversial pasts
- Statues of a treacherous Song dynasty politician and his wife in Hangzhou that were built for public vilification have been replaced 11 times since 1475
- For Belgium, which is considering what to do with a statue of the brutal King Leopold II, simply melting it down might be letting him off too easily
In February, a group of historians, architects and other specialists, commissioned by the Brussels regional government, proposed two options on what to do with the bronze statue of Belgian king Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909.
The first proposed option is that the statue, located in the centre of Belgium’s capital, could be melted down and recast as a monument to the millions who died during the king’s brutal rule of the Belgian Congo and other victims of colonialism. The second option is to create an open-air statue park to house the statue, along with other monuments to controversial figures of the colonial past.
Under Leopold’s rule of the Congo Free State (1885-1908), which was privately owned by him, untold millions of Africans lost their lives or had their hands cut off for not meeting rubber production quotas set by the king and his minions.
This and other shameful legacies of Belgium’s colonial past were rarely talked about by Belgians and the rest of the Western world until the late 1990s, with the publication of King Leopold’s Ghost by American historian Adam Hochschild, and more recently, the global Black Lives Matter movement.
Although the instinctive response is to banish the image of the mass murderer from public view, I prefer the second option suggested by the experts, which is to congregate the statues of the king and the likes of him in a single location.
Statues are often associated with public adulation, but they can also be monuments to infamy and shame. A statue park could be a place for education: who these images represent, why they were put up in the first place, who had put them up, and why they have ended up where they are.