Latest news with #MatthewBogdanos
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Yahoo
US hands over 41 cultural relics to China under deal to return artefacts
The US has returned 41 artefacts and antiques to China as part of a repatriation deal to help Beijing retrieve looted and smuggled relics. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office in New York handed over the items to China's National Cultural Heritage Administration on Tuesday, according to state-owned broadcaster CCTV. The oldest artefacts date from the Neolithic period (around 10,000BC - 1700BC) while the newest are from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). They include pottery, jade, bronzeware, and objects related to Tibetan Buddhism, according to CCTV. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. "It is the right thing to do to return these antiquities to their homeland," said Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney with the prosecutor's office, during the handover ceremony. CCTV said the 41 relics had been "illegally exported from China". The administration was informed through the Chinese consulate in New York that the Manhattan prosecutor's office had seized the 41 items while handling cases, according to the report. It added that the administration had worked closely with the consulate to return the items. According to the China Cultural Relics Academy, more than 10 million Chinese artefacts have been lost overseas since the mid-19th century, mostly due to wartime plunder and illegal smuggling. China and the US first signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to restrict illegal imports of Chinese cultural items in 2009. The MOU has been extended three times - in 2014, 2019, and 2024. Since the agreement was first signed, 594 artefacts have been returned to China, according to CCTV. In April, the US returned 38 cultural items to China under the deal, mostly dating from the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) to the Qing dynasty. They included rare ivory and wood carvings and mural fragments. The biggest batch of relics repatriated from the US to China was in 2019, when 361 cultural objects were retrieved. However, the illegal looting and smuggling of artefacts, antiques and artwork is still a major problem for China From 2011 to 2021, as many as 358 Chinese relics were stolen or lost, with most taken from Tibet autonomous region, Ningxia Hui autonomous region, and the provinces of Shaanxi and Henan, according to official data. Patriotic sentiment has grown in China in recent years as ties with the West have soured. This has brought new attention to relics lost during the colonial era. In 2023, a video series titled Escape from the British Museum became a viral hit among Chinese internet users. It tells the story of a Chinese teapot's quest to escape the London cultural institution and return to China. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
South China Morning Post
04-03-2025
- South China Morning Post
US hands over 41 cultural relics to China under deal to return artefacts
The US has returned 41 artefacts and antiques to China as part of a repatriation deal to help Beijing retrieve looted and smuggled relics. Advertisement The Manhattan District Attorney's Office in New York handed over the items to China's National Cultural Heritage Administration on Tuesday, according to state-owned broadcaster CCTV. The oldest artefacts date from the Neolithic period (around 10,000BC – 1700BC) while the newest are from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). They include pottery, jade, bronzeware, and objects related to Tibetan Buddhism , according to CCTV. 'It is the right thing to do to return these antiquities to their homeland,' said Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney with the prosecutor's office, during the handover ceremony. CCTV said the 41 relics had been 'illegally exported from China'. Advertisement The administration was informed through the Chinese consulate in New York that the Manhattan prosecutor's office had seized the 41 items while handling cases, according to the report. It added that the administration had worked closely with the consulate to return the items.
Boston Globe
15-02-2025
- Boston Globe
Cleveland museum to return prized bronze thought looted from Turkey
The Cleveland Museum of Art, which has featured the bronze in its collection since 1986, agreed Friday to surrender the statue in response to a seizure order from Manhattan investigators who have said the statue was clearly looted and sold through dealers in New York. Advertisement The museum's decision ended a court case it had initiated to block the seizure and came after months of what investigators from the Manhattan district attorney's office described as cooperative efforts to establish whether the bronze had indeed been stolen from an ancient archaeological site known as Bubon. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'This investigation included extensive witness interviews and forensic testing that proved conclusively this antiquity was looted from Bubon,' Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, said in a statement. The museum cited the extensive forensic testing as key to its decision. The testing included comparing soil samples using soil from within the statue, lead isotope analysis and 3D modeling that confirmed the statue was one that had stood in Bubon. Lead at the foot of the statute from a plug used to attach the bronze to its plinth was found to match lead residue that had leached into a stone base at the shrine site. 'Without this new research, the museum would not have been able to determine with confidence that the statue was once present at the site,' the Cleveland institution said in a statement. With the surrender, the district attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, led by Matthew Bogdanos, has seized 15 artifacts originally taken from Bubon, including artifacts returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art at Fordham University; and the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Advertisement Fourteen of the 15 have already been repatriated. The Cleveland bronze statue will be returned to Turkey after logistical arrangements are finalized with Turkish officials. The museum said it might be able to retain the statue, which is currently not on display, for a final, temporary period on exhibit. William M. Griswold, director of the museum, said in an interview that he hoped to arrange such a display so that 'our visitors who have grown accustomed to the presence of the sculpture at the museum may bid farewell to this cherished guest.' The Manhattan district attorney's office is still litigating an item held by a California collector that it also believes was taken from the site. Investigators have said their work also contributed to the return of two other Bubon objects: the head of emperor Septimius Severus from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark, and another, unnamed piece from London. Cleveland has long presented the bronze statue it is returning, with its flowing robes and stoic posture, as a premier artifact in its Greek and Roman galleries. It was cast to be larger-than-life and stands 6 feet, 4 inches without its head. Investigators have valued it at $20 million. Efforts to return the statue date to 2023, when investigators persuaded a New York judge to authorize its seizure. But the museum filed a court challenge in U.S. District Court in Ohio, arguing that evidence presented by the Manhattan district attorney's office had not been compelling. The museum said it had bought the statue in 1986 from the Edward H. Merrin Gallery in New York for $1.85 million. The museum provided a bill of sale from the date of its purchase that said it was buying a 'Figure of a Draped Emperor (Probably Marcus Aurelius), Roman, late 2nd Century A.D., bronze.' Advertisement But in fighting the seizure, museum officials had disputed that the statue was from Turkey and suggested it was more likely the torso of a philosopher, not an emperor. Aurelius had something of a reputation as both. His 'Meditations' is viewed as a classic work of stoic philosophy. Turkey's claim had at one point hinged in part on convincing investigators that the statue in fact depicts Marcus Aurelius because a stone plinth at the site is inscribed with that emperor's name. But in its statement Friday, museum officials said the recent research had only deepened their sense that the statue they hold is not that of Aurelius because the plinth that bears that name is not the one where analysis indicated the Cleveland bronze had once stood. The district attorney's office said it continued to believe that the statue represents Aurelius and noted that the museum had indicated as much on its website until two years ago. Turkish officials said they disagreed with the museum's conclusion as to the statue's identity, saying that in ancient times statues were moved around and that they believe the bronze had occupied the plinth with lead tracings as well as the plinth that bears the inscription of the name. Investigators visited Bubon three times, including once with museum officials, and did interviews with villagers near Bubon who recalled the looting, the investigators said. Some villagers, investigators said, had plundered the shrine (called a sebasteion) and sold the artifacts to smugglers based in the coastal Turkish city of Izmir. Advertisement Investigators said the smugglers worked with a Switzerland-based dealer and a prominent antiquities dealer, Robert Hecht, who supplied artifacts to many museums and collectors but who was known by the villagers as 'American Bob.' Though authorities several times accused Hecht, who died in 2012, of antiquities trafficking, he was never convicted. The Bubon artifacts, investigators said, were transported to Switzerland and Britain for restoration before being shipped to the United States and elsewhere in Europe. As part of their evidence of the smuggling network, investigators said they knew the identity of the studio where some artifacts were restored in London. From the time of Augustus, Roman emperors were venerated as gods, sometimes alongside the deities themselves. To honor the emperors with a shrine, to become part of the 'imperial cult,' was to establish that a local, conquered region had embraced the benefits and prestige of what it meant to be part of the empire. Few of the shrines are known to survive in any form, and Turkish archaeologists have been excavating the one in Bubon to help reconstruct how it fit into the society of what was then part of Asia Minor. Experts say that while seismic events most likely led to the demise of the shrine, the calamity that buried them probably protected the bronze from being recycled into armaments. Zeynep Boz, a Turkish official responsible for the return of her country's antiquities, said in a statement that she wanted to thank the investigators who had in partnership with her country 'corrected an injustice and restored justice in the end.' This article originally appeared in Advertisement
