The LookoutForbidden City art theft embarrasses Beijing officials
Beijing art officials are confessing their embarrassment after a thief knocked a hole in the wall of one of the city's most historic sites and made off with millions of dollars worth of valuables that were on loan to the Palace Museum.
The May 8 theft at the famed Forbidden City was caught on security cameras, according to China Daily. Palace Museum officials held a press conference Wednesday to release photos of the stolen valuables and to apologize to the Hong Kong museum which had lent the pieces to the Forbidden City museum.
Refreshingly, no one took a "mistakes were made" approach to the theft; Palace Museum officials practically rushed to take the blame.
Museum director Ma Jige stood up and bowed in apology to Wang Xiahong, curator of the Liang Yi Museum in Hong Kong, saying he felt "very guilty and sorry." Meanwhile, Wang said her museum would continue to donate pieces to the Beijing exhibition, despite the burglary.
"Certainly we can only blame the fact that our work was not thorough enough if something like this can happen," another Beijing museum spokesman Feng Nai'en said at the press conference.
Click image to see photos of art stolen from Beijing's Forbidden City
AP/Palace Museum
The BBC reports that this was the first theft in the city's former imperial palace in more than 20 years.
Wang said the seven stolen items were gold and silver pillboxes, some of which were encrusted with jewels. The Forbidden City contains items of much higher value--including rare scroll paintings--but they are most likely more tightly guarded, according to the AP.
Beijing curator Karen Smith told the AP that the theft was "a big loss of face" for the museum and its officials, and that security will undoubtedly be tightened around the landmark.
In the pantheon of art thiefs, the Museum Palace burglar looks like small potatoes. Just last year, a lone robber cut open a window at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, evaded at least three on-duty security guards, slipped five canvases out of their frames and made off with a $100 million roll of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger. The museum's alarm system had been malfunctioning for weeks--despite a pricey security remodeling--but it's unclear if the thief knew about the security lapse before he or she decided to steal the masterpieces.
In 2000, gunmen armed with submachine guns raided Stockholm's National Museum and stole Rembrandt and Renoir paintings worth about $30 million, before escaping in a small boat in a matter of minutes. Swedish police recovered the three paintings over the next five years, and sent eight people to prison for the robbery.
(Doorway to Palace Museum: Andy Wong/AP)
