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

‘China isn’t organised enough to prevent its art disappearing overseas; besides, Chinese officials are too corrupt to want to prevent it happening. So they have to wait for it all to be lost before they can buy it back at much higher prices,’ says one Hong Kong-based art collector. ‘It’s a weird system.’

And China cannot admit that it has largely got itself into this mess. ‘China lumps the loss of its heritage into a broad ambiguous statement about foreigners looting the country,’ notes Colin Sheaf of Bonhams, ‘rather than admitting Mao’s terrible mistakes, and his desire to loot his own country.’

It’s tempting to wonder what would have happened if European collectors and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists had not made off with the country’s antiquities. Would they instead have been shattered under Red Guard rifle butts in 1966?

And there is a final twist here with Poly: more than a dozen new museums go up somewhere in China every month. Someone has to stock the halls with things worth looking at, and that role is usually handed to Poly. Sellers know they have a wealthy customer that has to spend — leading, in recent months, to record auction prices for Chinese antiquities.

Poly Group has a lot to buy, and a short amount of time to buy it. Sometimes there is little they can do to buy back their country’s lost heritage: the Stoclet family, for instance, says it will never sell its cherished $20 million dragon. And accidents do occur.

Closing out his story that night in 2003, the American admitted that ten years previously, while moving house from Boston to New York, the U-Haul trailer carrying his precious stash of Chinese antiques caught fire on the freeway. ‘It was insured,’ he said sadly, ‘but that doesn’t bring any of it back. It’s lost for ever.’