How German museums are reassessing their imperial Chinese treasures, worried about looted Boxer war artefacts
- German museums are scouring their imperial Chinese art collections, looking for artefacts looted during the Boxer war in the early 1900s
In the storeroom of Hamburg’s Markk Museum am Rothenbaum, one of the world’s largest ethnographic museums, is a guqin, a seven-stringed Chinese zither – one of the oldest instruments made in China, historically played only by nobles and scholars.
This particular black piece, expertly crafted and finished with a high-gloss lacquer, has inscriptions at its base dating it to 1789, during the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty. What’s puzzling is that the instrument rests in a case considerably larger and made 50 years earlier. Inscriptions on the case refer to instruments known from the Tang dynasty, more than 1,200 years ago.
This discrepancy raised suspicions with Susanne Knödel, who, now in her 60s, has studied Mandarin in Taiwan and worked as a translator before joining the Hamburg museum in 1994. Since then, she’s been caring for the museum’s East and South Asia collection, which contains 40,000 objects including clothing, porcelains and statuary.
Along the way, Knödel noticed that the museum’s Chinese collection had expanded sharply around 1900, when “suddenly”, she says, “the museum got lots and lots of really important art”.
The date is no coincidence. Between 1900 and 1901, Germany joined seven other countries – Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, the United States and Japan – in quashing the Boxer rebellion in China.
The Boxers, also known as Yihetuan, or “Righteous and Harmonious Militia” in Chinese, were an anti-foreign, anti-Christian group that emerged in response to escalating colonial aggression and missionary expansion in northern China. In the West, they gained the moniker of “boxers” for practising martial arts.
The uprising quickly escalated into an all-out war, with the Qing government in Beijing supporting the Boxers. After foreign troops arrived in Beijing, they ransacked the city, and subsequent plundering transformed the capital into an open-air art market, with priceless imperial treasures selling on seemingly every corner.