Tens of thousands of Chinese social media users have backed calls from the country’s state media to have its artefacts kept in the British Museum returned.
The hashtag “The British Museum please return Chinese antiquities” topped the search chart of Weibo, the nation’s censored social media, on Monday (August 28), with more than half a billion of views.
The hashtag was in response to a piece published by Chinese state media outlet Global Times that called for all cultural relics in the British Museum to be returned “free of charge”.
The British Museum has been under pressure after around 2,000 items were reported “missing, stolen or damaged” two weeks ago, leading to accusations that it was failing to fulfil its duty of care.
A member of staff was sacked when the news first came out and last week, its director Hartwig Fischer also announced he would step down.
One comment stemming from the hashtag read: “Return the objects to their original owner.” It has more than 32,000 reads at the time of writing.
“Now that the country is rich and the people are strong, it’s time to have our treasures back home,” another top comment read.
The calls follow a piece published by the Global Times that argued that the world-renowned British museum has failed to take good care of “cultural property belonging to other countries”.
“The huge loopholes in the management and security of cultural objects in the British Museum exposed by this scandal have led to the collapse of a long-standing and widely circulated claim that ‘foreign cultural objects are better protected in the British Museum,” the editorial reads.
The British Museum looks after 23,000 Chinese objects, from the Neolithic age (10,000 BC) to the present day.
It is one of the largest collections of Chinese antiquities in the West.
The collection includes a large range of precious items such as paintings, prints, jade, bronzes and ceramics.
One of the most famous is the reproduction of a scroll called “Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies”, a masterpiece considered a milestone in Chinese art history.
