TheHill.com - Coin collectors, art dealers fear restrictions on Chinese imports
An interesting article came out today. What I find particularly unsettling is that ancient coins are being described "cultural heritage" and that description is left unchallenged.
Also, the fact that China of all countries is "pleading" the case that "Every day that goes by without an [agreement] is another day we are not doing everything we can to stop the plunder of China’s cultural heritage, everyone’s cultural heritage" when the government of China sells ancient coins. Not to mention a little thing like the hundreds of REAL significant cultural heritage sites flooded by the Chinese government and the hundreds more that are scheduled to be flooded by 2010.
According to the REUTERS news report: "Chinese heritage officials are scrambling to save thousands of cultural relics dating back 3,000 years and threatenedby a $25 billion project to pump water from the country's southern rivers to its arid north. The 1,300-km (800-mile) central route of the south-to-north water transfer project, scheduled to pump water from a major tributary of the Yangtze river to Beijing by 2010, cuts across the Yellow river plain -- the so-called "cradle of Chinese civilisation" dotted with ancient sites. With only three years left to complete the project, heritage workers had finished less than a third of their task, the Beijing News said. "Looking at it from our current excavations, whether in terms of quantity or quality, the relics along the (route) are far, far more valuable than those along the Three Gorges dam," Monday's Beijing News quoted Li Taoyuan, a senior archaeologist from central Hebei province, as saying. The 185-metre Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river, China's longest, has inundated hundreds of cultural sites, along with some 116 towns in Hubei province and neighbouring Chongqing municipality. Junxian, a village in Danjiangkou city, at the southern extreme of the project, had "tens of thousands" of ancient tombs dating back to the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC), Li said, indicating the scale of the task."
Money by it's very nature can not be considered a specific countries cultural heritage. It was designed to be portable. At best, an argument can be made that specific find sites should be protected, but the vast majority of ancient coins on the market today come from chance finds and finds which are not tied to a archaeological site of any significance. Going after ancient coin collectors and dealers will have virtually no effect on the underlying problems.
TheHill.com - Coin collectors, art dealers fear restrictions on Chinese imports
Also, the fact that China of all countries is "pleading" the case that "Every day that goes by without an [agreement] is another day we are not doing everything we can to stop the plunder of China’s cultural heritage, everyone’s cultural heritage" when the government of China sells ancient coins. Not to mention a little thing like the hundreds of REAL significant cultural heritage sites flooded by the Chinese government and the hundreds more that are scheduled to be flooded by 2010.
According to the REUTERS news report: "Chinese heritage officials are scrambling to save thousands of cultural relics dating back 3,000 years and threatenedby a $25 billion project to pump water from the country's southern rivers to its arid north. The 1,300-km (800-mile) central route of the south-to-north water transfer project, scheduled to pump water from a major tributary of the Yangtze river to Beijing by 2010, cuts across the Yellow river plain -- the so-called "cradle of Chinese civilisation" dotted with ancient sites. With only three years left to complete the project, heritage workers had finished less than a third of their task, the Beijing News said. "Looking at it from our current excavations, whether in terms of quantity or quality, the relics along the (route) are far, far more valuable than those along the Three Gorges dam," Monday's Beijing News quoted Li Taoyuan, a senior archaeologist from central Hebei province, as saying. The 185-metre Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river, China's longest, has inundated hundreds of cultural sites, along with some 116 towns in Hubei province and neighbouring Chongqing municipality. Junxian, a village in Danjiangkou city, at the southern extreme of the project, had "tens of thousands" of ancient tombs dating back to the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC), Li said, indicating the scale of the task."
Money by it's very nature can not be considered a specific countries cultural heritage. It was designed to be portable. At best, an argument can be made that specific find sites should be protected, but the vast majority of ancient coins on the market today come from chance finds and finds which are not tied to a archaeological site of any significance. Going after ancient coin collectors and dealers will have virtually no effect on the underlying problems.
TheHill.com - Coin collectors, art dealers fear restrictions on Chinese imports
posted by Alfredo De La Fe at 8:05 AM
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