China Asks Penn to Remove All Artifacts From ‘Silk Road’ Exhibition
Originally published by The New York Times,02 February 2011
By RANDY KENNEDY5:40 p.m. | Updated It’s not an easy thing to mount a big exhibition of artifacts from China without any artifacts from China.
That’s the position the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology now finds itself in, as it prepares to open a major show on Saturday, “Secrets of the Silk Road,” which was organized by the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., last year and traveled from there to the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
The Penn Museum, as it is known, had advertised its version of the show as “an extraordinary collection of materials, including spectacularly preserved clothing and textiles, personal items and golden treasures, all recently excavated at desert burial sites in the far western reaches of modern China.” But on Wednesday the museum announced that China had requested that none of the artifacts be shown. In a statement the museum said the exhibition “has been modified,” and will now consist only of photographs, multimedia presentations and a recreation of an excavation site. It added that it would refund money to everyone who had bought tickets for the show ahead of time and that the exhibition would now be free.
The star attractions of the traveling show have been two mummies, more than 3,500 years old, that were unearthed in the Tarim Basin of western China, the first time any Chinese mummies had been shown in the United States.
Pam Kosty, a spokeswoman for the museum, declined to explain why China had made the request or whether the artifacts were already installed at the museum when the request was made. The museum has had long associations with Chinese archaeologists and scholars. It has also long been regarded as a leader in advocating for stronger protections surrounding the export and acquisition of antiquities from around the world to discourage the illicit trade in artifacts.
The original negotiations between China and the United States and within China itself that brought the artifacts to the United States last year were long and complicated. Mummies and other artifacts that have been found in the region in recent years there have been identified as Caucasoid, with long noses and light hair, discoveries that have caused controversy there. The discoveries have raised questions about who first settled that part of western China and for how long. Chinese authorities have faced an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in the region, and Uighur nationalists have used evidence from the mummies–whose corpses span thousands of years–to support historical claims to the region.
The Los Angeles Times reported last March that the Uighur population was not happy with the idea of sending the artifacts and mummies abroad. Officials from the Bowers traveled to the region and drafted an agreement, sent to Beijing, for loans of such items from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Museum and the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology in Western China, and the requests were granted in June 2010.