Chasing dragons: the Chinese army takes up art collecting

Elliot Wilson

1 November 2008

Elliot Wilson profiles Poly Group, a company controlled by the Chinese military which uses arms-sales profits to buy back artworks that have been illicitly flogged off abroad

Much of what remains is held in Taiwan’s National Museum. In 1949, with the communists closing in fast on Shanghai, Mao’s nationalist rival Chiang Kai-shek — ‘Cash-my-check’ to his weary American financial backers — loaded 48 boats with a vast collection of artworks (plus China’s entire gold reserve) and fled to Taiwan, where it all remains. The Great Helmsman Mao’s plan had been to sell it all off to the highest foreign bidder, in order to earn enough foreign currency to finance his mad plans for a Chinese socialist paradise.

Remarkably, China’s Great Culture Sale continues to this day. When the Beijing government flooded the Three Gorges section of the Yangtze River in order to build a vast hydroelectric dam, officials and villagers scrambled to rescue priceless artworks, including ancient tableaux carved into the rocky hillsides. When China’s cultural and archaeological preservation groups failed to stump up the billions of pounds needed to buy it all back, locals did business with shadowy Taiwanese antique smugglers instead.

As in 1949, the tableaux were packed into sacks and crates and shipped across the Taiwan Straits, where they now gather dust behind shutters on the streets of north-western Taipei. ‘I have seen unmarked warehouses in Taipei where the metal doors would roll back, and there would be all of this priceless stuff — temples and stones and all kinds of crazy shit,’ says James Mulvenon.

Taiwanese dealers continue to extract antiquities from right underneath Beijing’s nose. Every time a chunk of the country is earmarked for industrial expansion, the brokers move in and quietly buy everything up. A few months later, officials from Poly Group show their faces, quietly trying to buy it all back.