China's 14-Year Quest to Catalog Overseas Bronzes

In the quiet of a Peking University research room, shelves groan under the weight of 60 thick volumes. Stacked, they stand taller than an average human.

Inside their pages lie the details of more than 23,000 ancient Chinese bronze vessels, weapons, chariot fittings and ritual objects that left China’s shores long ago and now sit in museums, private collections and auction houses across nearly 30 countries.

Published in April by Shanghai Classics Publishing House, the Collection of Chinese Bronzes in Overseas Collections is the product of a painstaking 14-year investigation. It is also something more: an assembled toolkit for China’s intensifying campaign to reclaim cultural heritage lost to war, looting and smuggling, as well as an assertion of Beijing’s ambition to shape the global rules of repatriation.

“To create archives for the cultural relics, to preserve evidence for history,” said lead editor and historian Zhu Fenghan, a Boya Chair Professor at Peking University, capturing the project’s dual purpose in an article in the People’s Daily last week.

“We need to get a clear picture of our family assets and gain a more complete and comprehensive understanding of Chinese bronzes held overseas,” Zhu was quoted as saying.

The effort began in 2012, when China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) asked Peking University to map the true scale of the country’s dispersed bronzes, prompting a scholarly odyssey.

Team members criss-crossed more than 10 countries to visit more than 260 institutions, scan rare catalogues, trawl auction records and photograph objects that had rarely, if ever, been systematically recorded by Chinese researchers.