For decades, the Royal Ontario Museum has boasted one of the world's greatest collections of Chinese antiquities. From jade to pottery, from temple paintings to bronzes, the ROM's collection has been spectacular.
But a new book suggests that many of the Toronto museum's most precious treasures were smuggled illegally out of China in the 1930s in violation of a national ban on cultural exports.
The antiquities were secretly spirited out of China by a Canadian missionary, an Anglican bishop named William Charles White, who sometimes packed them in the luggage of other missionaries to avoid detection, or shipped the antiquities through obscure railway stations where inspection was unlikely, according to the book published by the University of Toronto Press.
The activities of Bishop White and other foreign collectors have provoked mounting resentment in China, where many people are angry that foreign museums amassed fabulous collections by scooping up vast amounts of ancient Chinese treasure when the country was weakened by civil wars in the 1920s and 1930s.
Fresh controversy erupted this month when Chinese media attacked another Canadian museum for displaying almost 500 antiquities that had been stolen from Chinese tombs. Chinese newspapers and websites said the exhibit at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria was “immoral” and “an incitement to illegal smuggling.”
Although the Chinese Communist government has never formally demanded the return of the ROM's artifacts, Bishop White has often been attacked by Chinese commentators who say his collection should be returned to its homeland. Some newspapers have accused him of plundering and pillaging China's treasures.
The ROM, however, regards Bishop White as one of its greatest heroes. He is prominently credited in the museum's Asian art galleries, and an annual lecture is named after him. The Bishop White Gallery is one of the museum's four main galleries of Chinese art and archeology, according to the ROM's website.
A senior ROM official acknowledged that Bishop White had known about the 1930 law banning the export of historical artifacts from China.
“Bishop White was aware that legislation regarding exports was passed in 1930 but was unsure of if or when it was to come in to force, or how that would affect exportation of cultural objects,” said Mark Engstrom, deputy director of collections and research at the ROM, in an e-mailed response to questions from The Globe and Mail.
Many of the artifacts exported by Bishop White after 1930 were “declared, examined and cleared” by Chinese customs agents in Shanghai and were also cleared by Canadian customs agents at the Canadian border, he said.
Chinese scholar Linfu Dong, who investigated Bishop White's activities as part of his research for a biography on fellow missionary James Menzies, said the Chinese law was clear enough. The national law on antiquities, approved by the Chinese government in 1930, explicitly stated that “exportation to foreign countries is strictly prohibited.”
Bishop White, the ROM's main collector in China, was indignant about the new law, calling it “selfish” and “anti-foreign,” the book says. “He actively sought to evade its restrictions and continued to procure objects that he knew had been obtained illegally and to ship them to Toronto. Indeed, some of his most spectacular objects were sent between 1930 and 1934.
Bishop White was a 51-year-old Canadian missionary in Henan province in 1924 when the ROM agreed to let him become the museum's purchasing agent in China. For the next 10 years, he was a highly energetic collector who sought to create the world's greatest collection of Chinese art and archeology. He returned to Canada in 1934, became the first curator of the ROM's Far Eastern collection, headed the first Chinese studies department at the University of Toronto, and died in 1960.
