Why is Chinese art being stolen?
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What is the main topic of this episode?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And we're going to talk a little bit about Chinese art heists. So let's get started. Go.
That's right. Big thanks to Livia. She did a banger of an article for us.
But also thanks to you. Where'd you come up with this idea?
Oh, was this a recommendation? I'm so bad about that. I don't know. But we also have to thank a reporter for GQ magazine named Alex W. Palmer, who in 2018 wrote a pretty a banger of an article as well about these art heists of cultural, very specific cultural and art artifacts from China that have been stolen from museums in the 2010s and basically pose the question, is the Chinese government behind this?
Right. Are they commissioning people to rob art museums? And I mean, not just like, you know, some Tinkertown museum on the corner of a neighborhood that like, I don't know. You know, not a good museum. You know those museums? I'm talking like world-class museums like the Fountain Blue outside Paris. Paris, France, that is, not Texas.
Yeah.
So, yeah, there's like a – still to this day, people don't know exactly what the deal was. And it seems like despite what Palmer, Alex Palmer was saying, Palmer basically was like, you know, didn't point the finger directly. But that was kind of the premise of the article that who knows who's behind this and it's possible that the government of China has some hand in it. But also the Chinese art market, as we'll see, has blown up so much that it's also entirely possible that it's just like that makes a lot of sense for thieves to steal Chinese art. The thing is, is the string of particular heists that Alex Palmer talks about that really kind of form this galaxy of particular heists. The thieves would go in and steal really specific stuff that were Chinese antiquities. A lot of times they've been looted and they would walk right past other things that were really, really valuable. And it almost seemed like they had a shopping list of items that that were particularly Chinese that they wanted to steal.
Yeah, I don't think almost seem like it. That seems like a certainty to me.
It's true. It is. You could see that list be like, you know, Imperial Seal, China Dog, or the waving cat that's fortunate. And then, you know, eggs, butter, and apples.
Yeah. The Picasso? Nah.
Yeah, they just walk right past really expensive stuff. But, yeah, it wasn't because they didn't know what they were doing, it seems like. Some of the people who were caught with this were clearly professional thieves.
Yeah, and some not so great. But we'll get to that. We should do a little back story here to kind of set this all up. And we are going to go back to about close to 110-year period known as the century of humiliation. And this is when China was kind of getting – just beat up on all fronts back then.
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