Museums under attack - the recent spate of thefts from British museums

As the media report the news of Britain sliding back into recession, heritage crime has also received some attention.  Metal thefts in particular, often directly damaging historic buildings, monuments and memorials, have hit the headlines and rightly caused outrage.  However, another crimewave seems to be affecting the nation's heritage, but with less media coverage overall - thefts and attempted thefts from museums and galleries.


Now, the metal theft issue is doubtless on a much larger scale, but despite national media coverage of a few high profile individual thefts, the quantity of recent incidents doesn't seem to have attracted much attention as a whole.


For those readers who haven't been following the issue, recent incidents have included:

• The theft (and thankfully subsequent recovery) of two Chinese artefacts - a jade bowl and a porcelain sculpture valued at almost £2 million, from the Durham Oriental Museum (see their news page here).  This theft occurred when thieves smashed through an outside wall and then into a display case after the museum had closed.  The objects taken suggest that the theft may have been 'to order'.

• In February, two 19th Century Buddhas were stolen from the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in broad daylight by three men armed with baseball bats.  They smashed the glass of the display case and made off with the two objects.  As far as I am aware, they have not been recovered.

• In the largest single theft of recent times, 18 Chinese objects worth around £18 million were taken from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge after a gang broke in once the museum had closed.  They escaped in a white van that had been stolen in London, again suggesting that this was an organised, well-planned and focused robbery.  The fact that they were inside for mere minutes also says that they knew exactly what they were after.

• Other incidents haven't involved Asian art.  The Norwich Castle Museum has seen two separate theft attempts in recent months.  First there was the attempted daylight theft of a rhino horn (objects themselves subject to a spate of thefts recently) - only thwarted after the display case had been broken, but the thieves were stopped by brave and vigilant staff.  Sadly the second theft, occurring mere days later, saw decorative arts items relating to Lord Nelson and worth around £36,000 taken from a display case.

• In January, a group of 30 Anglo Saxon silver pennies and a silver pin, worth around £12,000, were taken from a locked display case at St Albans Museum.

• Finally, I heard this morning that there had been an attempted break-in at the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath.  Three men knocked on the door of the museum, then pushed past the staff and rushed into the museum.  Thankfully, they fled empty-handed once the alarm had been triggered.

There may be even more that I'm unaware of, but this list is shocking enough, I feel.  The fact that a number of the raids were in daylight is also rather startling.  Of course, these raids inevitably raise the issue of security.  The Ulster Museum theft caused the DUP MLA to openly question the security at the museum, but in all seriousness, what are museum and gallery staff expected to do when faced with potentially armed gangs?  No object is worth as much as a staff member.


Having said that, staff in museums and galleries of all sizes should exercise particular vigilance at the present time, but of course visitors can play a crucial role as well, by being aware of any potentially suspicious activity and alerting staff.  I'm not suggesting that visitors become suspicious snoops, but if we care about protecting the treasures that exist in our museums and galleries, then everyone has a role to play.


The fact that the highest profile thefts and attempted thefts have involved Chinese and Asian artefacts can be far from a coincidence.  Although no link between the crimes has been suggested by police, the enormous prices being paid by Asian collectors for artefacts now housed in the west has certainly created a situation where risks may be seen as worth taking by criminals - not to mention the very likely reality that a number of these items have been stolen specifically to fill a space in someone's personal display cabinet.

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Travels with Li Dongni - Zhazidong prison and the 3 Gorges museum, Chongqing, China (October 2011)

While visiting some of my wife's extended family in Chongqing we naturally took the opportunity to do some sightseeing, so this travel post will look at two of the more cultural places we visited. First though, have to come some photographs of Chongqing's famous skyline.

Zhazidong prison

The name makes this sound like a rather odd place to visit but don't worry - this wasn't the result of a late night drunken run in with the law! Zhazidong prison is a patriotic Communist heritage site, and the setting of a famous (in China at least) and tragic 20th Century story.

Chongqing is famous for its connection with the Guomindang (國民黨) - or Kuomintang (KMT) as they are still more commonly known in English.  For those not familiar with 20^th Century Chinese history, the KMT were the Chinese Nationalist party – the ones who ran the country before the Communists and with whom a vicious civil war was fought in the 1930s and 40s, and who are still in control in Taiwan.  In 1939 their leader Chiang Kai Shek made Chongqing the nation’s capital after the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese (see my earlier post for the atrocities related to that episode).

Zhazidong prison is located on Chongqing’s Gele mountain, a beautiful place which was home to Chiang Kai Shek’s headquarters (which we also visited) and a large training base for his soldiers.

The prison, located in an old mine, is one of two on the mountain, and was used to house Communist prisoners during the civil war.  More controversially, these prisoners were not soldiers but civilians, both men and women, who expressed sympathy or outright support for the communist cause, and had often been involved in spreading pro-communist propaganda.

One of the most dramatic rooms is one where the prisoners were, for want of a less controversial word, tortured, and the tools that were used form a rather formidable display.

The most infamous event at the prison occurred on November 27^th 1949, when the KMT secret police set fire to the buildings with the prisoners still inside, but not before systematically executing many of them.  180 prisoners are believed to have been murdered, but 15 managed to escape the bullets and the fire by breaking through the prison’s outer wall.  Images of those that perished can be seen throughout the site, elevated by the current regime to the status of martyrs.  Many of their individual stories are told in the cells, though the English translations are limited.

Some individual prisoners have become well known, such as the youngest victim Song Zhengzong, who was only a year old when he was sent to the prison with his mother, and became so malnourished he was known as ‘little radish’ because his head appeared so big against his body.  Another famous martyr is ‘Sister Jiang’, a communist operative who was captured after being betrayed.  She was sent to Zhazidong, tortured, and eventually killed in the prison.  Her story has even been turned into an opera in recent years.

In 2007, Chongqing suffered its worst floods in a century, but the damage caused by the waters revealed new information about the prison, uncovering the original 19^th Century mine shaft entrance, but also revealing tools that had been hidden beneath the floors by prisoners – evidence, so the site interpretation tells us, that they ‘continued their class struggle’ while in prison.

One bizarre element of the site is the array of souvenir stalls at the exit.  While these in themselves are to be expected, and the amount of communist branded merchandise isn't a surprise, given what happened at the site the quantity of replica period guns seemed to me to be in rather bad taste!  The photo below is rather blurry as it was taken in haste for fear of being shouted at by a stallholder! The fact that the guns sit next to statuettes of Sister Jiang and Song Zhengzong only enhances the tackiness.

Ultimately, all politics aside, the site serves as a stark reminder as to just how far some elements of humanity are prepared to go to stifle those with opposing views, and deserves to be better known outside of China.

Three Gorges Museum

I've been to quite a few Chinese museums during my trips, and this was one I had been very keen to visit.  It falls into the category of those brand new architecturally interesting museums that promises to show off the best of modern Chinese museum thinking.

The Three Gorges dam was a rather controversial project, which is now becoming officially accepted as a costly and damaging mistake – though many knew this from the outset. The idea was to control the flow of the Yangtze river and create one of the world’s largest power stations.  Sadly, in doing this, huge swathes of land, including historic settlements and areas of immense archaeological and natural importance were submerged or destroyed.

Before delving into the museum, I have to mention something that was happening outside the museum as we were entering.  As part of a scheme to 'demonstrate' the professionalism of the police in light of recent corruption scandals, a series of female traffic police were lining up on parade before going out on patrol - no doubt inspired by some official's trip to see the changing of the guard.  The horse riding outfits were a particularly odd touch.  I’ll let you decide for yourself from the pictures below whether you think this is anything more than a publicity stunt!

The museum itself is attractive enough architecturally, and follows a common style for modern Chinese museums in the use of a central ‘well’ with an architectural feature at the top.  The exterior of the museum can be seen to echo that form of a dam.

The content of the museum is arranged around four key subjects, the 3 Gorges, the ancient Ba culture, the development of Chongqing and the fight against Japan in the Second World War.  There are then galleries examining the creative arts – painting, calligraphy, coinage and folk customs.

We started our visit in the galleries looking at the development of Chongqing, and with hindsight we should have moved past these much more quickly than we did, as they contain vast quantities of replicas and reconstructions of fairly mundane 19^th and 20^th Century things, and this meant that we didn’t get to finish all of the museum’s galleries.

The more artistic and creative displays can be found in the Ba culture galleries and in those looking at the heritage of the Three Gorges and these contrast well against the slightly more restrained social history elements.

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Lincoln City – an absolute shower at Bath…

Let’s face facts – if Lincoln City were a racehorse, they would have been taken round the back of the shed and had their brains blown out by now.  And I can’t shake the feeling that perhaps that would be a kindness…

After being beaten by bottom of the league Bath (giving them only their 5^th win of the season), City now sit level on points with the top relegation place, only staying out of the red zone by goal difference.  Surely by this time next week we won’t even have that luxury as the teams below us continue to do something that seems beyond City’s feckless squad – actually fighting to avoid the drop.

And therein lies the worst thing for me at the moment.  Just like last season, it feels like we’re going down without a fight from the players or the board.  I’m never one to call for a manager’s head, and I have respect for David Holdsworth, but its clear that he doesn’t know how to turn it around and that the players are just not fired up or driven enough under his leadership.  A manager can be unlucky in a single game, but over 30 or more games the lack of improvement is impossible to ignore.  Although having three managers in a season is ridiculous, it’s surely the only way to have any chance of shaking the apple cart and picking up some precious points by fair means or foul.

That's not to say that I hold Holdsworth or even the board as primarily responsible for this mess.  It's the players who draw their wages and are expected to be professionals doing their job who I would feel the most resentment towards should the worst happen.  It's a sad truth of football though that players will always shirk responsibility when the excrement hits the air circulation device, but a new voice controlling the dressing room is one way to try to instil some collective responsibility.

I could rant on for hours trying to find a way to articulate my feelings at the moment, but I’ll end by simply asking ‘does anybody actually take any enjoyment out of following Lincoln any more?’  Can any Lincoln fan say they go because they actually enjoy the experience, or are we all still there out of a misplaced loyalty to a bunch of useless journeymen who couldn’t care less what league we are playing in? Sadly, I find myself more and more questioning whether the money and emotional strain that go into following the Imps are actually worth it any more.

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The Roman amphitheatres of London and Lincoln

On a recent trip to London I was able to go and do something that I’d been promising myself I’d do for some time – see the site of the Roman amphitheatre.

Amphitheatres are of course one of the great emotive monuments of the classical world, and people never tire of hearing about the grisly acts that were carried out inside their walls, to the sounds of the Roman mob baying for blood.  Of course, not everything the person in the street believes happened is close to being true, but still…

Compared to the continent and north Africa where many amphitheatres survive to an impressive degree, in Britain they are rather more elusive finds. Only a handful have been conclusively identified, despite our belief that most major settlements would have had one.

Londinium’s amphitheatre was discovered as recently as 1988, and is now incorporated into the basement of the Guildhall Art Gallery.  Although I’m not focussing on the Gallery here, I will say that it is home to a small but very high quality art collection, beautifully displayed and well worth a visit.

The London amphitheatre was originally constructed in AD70 (coincidentally the same year that work began on the Colosseum in Rome), but the stone walls that survive are from the replacement built in the early 2^nd Century.  It is located very close to London’s Legionary fortress, suggesting that it played a role in both training and entertaining the soldiers as well as the public.  The excavations uncovered brightly coloured wall plaster, marble inlays and finely carved stonework, indicating that the amphitheatre was a prestige building, designed to be a source of pride for the local population, of whom it could seat over 5,000.

One thing I particularly liked about the exhibition was the way that the low light levels and ‘wireframe’ style graphics provide a sense of the layout of the complete structure without compromising the atmosphere.

This leads me on to an issue closer to home (well, closer for me anyway) which is the question of Lincoln’s Roman amphitheatre.  Despite the wealth of knowledge we have about Roman Lincoln, no evidence of an amphitheatre has yet been found.  The presence of the Legionary fortress and the subsequent founding of the Colonia place Lincoln among the most important of Romano-British settlements, and it is surely impossible that an amphitheatre didn’t exist - as settlements such as Chester, Caerleon, Silchester, Cirencester and others had.

The problem is that if the amphitheatre was only ever built in earth and timber, then archaeological traces of it will be ephemeral if they survive at all in the face of later disturbance.  The other examples mentioned above were almost all rebuilt in stone as the civilian settlements grew, as London’s was. If Lincoln's amphitheatre was never given such investment, there has never been a plausible theory as to why that should be the case.

As to where the amphitheatre might have been located, Roman military and urban planning was largely consistent so a position outside of the porta decumana (the western gateway into the upper city – located close to Lincoln Castle’s west gate) might be expected, perhaps where the Lawn complex now stands.

It remains one of the great mysteries of Roman Lincoln, but if London’s amphitheatre is anything to go by, there is still hope that it can be found, and it could become a fantastic addition to the city’s tangible heritage if we do.

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Lincoln City – is the unthinkable becoming reality?

After another dismal and aimless performance which saw the mighty Alfreton Town become the latest club to leave Sincil Bank with a swag bag filled with three points, City have to start facing up to a horrific possibility that is looming ever larger - consecutive relegations.

Even the most pessimistic of fans at the start of the season saw a double relegation as beyond contemplation, but that awful reality seems to be edging closer. It feels as if the only talent the Imps have is to plumb ever deeper depths of atrociousness year on year.

The parallels with last season are terrifying:

• A group of players who think they are better than they are but who have a shocking tendency to lose evenly-balanced matches

• A manager who is convinced that he doesn't need to change anything he is doing

• A set of restless fans starting to get angry, which will affect the players performances even more

• Teams below us with better organisation and a greater desire to win

The silence about our predicament from the manager and board is deafening. Words are cheap, but we're not even getting any fighting talk. Has the entire club gone into atrophy or is there simply such shock about just how fatal the fall through another trapdoor would be that it cannot even be voiced?

The sad truth is that doing nothing will get us nowhere. On paper the players should be good enough. The problem is that they are not playing as a team, they are not organised, and they simply don't ever look fired up enough to chase and harry the opposition into making mistakes.  We stroll around casually, waiting for something to happen rather than fighting for every lost cause and loose ball.  When was the last time the City players left the field looking like they were about to drop from fatigue after running themselves into the ground?

City fans have long viewed the Conference as the ultimate abyss, but now have to face the thought of instantly dropping even lower - to a level so cataclysmically embarrassing it has never really been contemplated.

Even when Boston United dropped down through the leagues, at least they had the excuse that they had been punished for off the field irregularities with points deductions. The Imps would have to live with the fact that they had been relegated through sheer lack of ability.

The time for the ship to be turned around is now, but are the players and manager up to the task?  I begin to fear not…

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