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The robbers worked in 10 separate groups and four suspects are archaeologists, the ministry said. Each group had a clear division of labor covering everything from excavation to sales, the ministry said.

They were found to have robbed ancient tombs from the Neolithic Age to Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in seven provinces and 10 cities, it said.

Police have recovered some extremely precious artifacts including jadeware and earthenware dating to the Neolithic Age, porcelain from the Liao Dynasty (907-1125), as well as ironware, silverware and gold items from the Jin (1115-1234) and Yuan (1206-1368) dynasties, The Beijing Times reported yesterday.

“Many recovered pieces fill in gaps that existed in our archaeological finds,” said Zhang Guilian, director of the Liaoning cultural relics administration.

The pieces included a coiled jade dragon, one of the earliest known representations of the Chinese totem. It had been sold by an archaeologist surnamed Deng for 3.2 million yuan (US$516,000), the report said.

The cross-provincial network emerged after police in Liaoning Province found signs of illegal excavations in Niuheliang, a Neolithic site in Chaoyang City, the newspaper said.

The site was discovered in 1981 and given protected status in 1988. It boasts ancient temples, altars and tombs believed to have significant scientific, historical and artistic value. The discovery of the site provided new evidence that Chinese civilization originated about 5,000 years ago.

After a five-month investigation, Chaoyang police located several gangs and their ringleaders, the report said.

One alleged ringleader, surnamed Yao, 53, had more than 30 years of grave robbery experience, according to the report. He used astrology and feng shui, a Chinese system of geomancy, to decide where to dig. He asked subordinates, mostly farmers, to do the excavation work, police were cited as saying.

He robbed tombs in Inner Mongolia, Liaoning and Hebei and his actions damaged the relics, police said in the report.

His group was found to have committed 23 robberies at ancient tombs or cultural relic sites, the report said. Police have recovered 263 pieces from the group, the newspaper added.

Last December, police from seven provinces and 10 cities launched the first intensive crackdown and netted 78 suspects. In follow-up operations police caught another 97, according to the newspaper report.

Author: Li Qian | Source: Shanghai Daily [May 28, 2015]

The first phase of the project covers 18 sections of the "Great Wall of Qi" with a total length of 61 km. It will cost 208 million yuan (34 million U.S. dollars), according to Xie Zhixiu, head of the provincial cultural heritage administration.

Shandong will also launch projects this year to protect the natural environment and ancient military facilities along the Wall, said Xie.

Built between 770 BC and 476 BC in the ancient state of Qi, today's Shandong, the Great Wall of Qi started at a small village in what is now Changqing District of Jinan City, with passes, gates, castles and beacon towers along a total length of 641 km till it met the sea near Qingdao.

Due to natural erosion, construction, mining and land reclamation, the Great Wall of Qi is in a worsening condition.

As military defense projects, more than 20 emperors in ancient China ordered the building or renovation of walls and fortifications. The Great Wall of China was made a World Heritage Site in 1987.

Source: Xinhua [June 26, 2015]

Prak Sunnara, director-general of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts’ heritage department, confirmed Sunday that the statue was set to arrive last night at the Phnom Penh International Airport.

“The statue will arrive at 8:30 tonight and this statue was made in the 10th-century Koh Ker style,” he said. “It has been returned from the U.S.”

He declined to comment further, noting that an official press conference about the statue would be held at the Council of Ministers on Tuesday.

According to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s website, the 10th-century sandstone sculpture stands about 116 cm tall and 54 cm wide and depicts the god in a crouching position, with the body of a man and head of a monkey.

Anne Lemaistre, head of the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO in Cambodia, said it was clear the statue had originally been attached to a base, but it wasn’t until archaeologists unearthed previously undiscovered pedestals in the Koh Ker complex’s Prasat Chen temple last year that the statue’s exact location was determined.

“I think the proof has been established that it is coming from that place, because it was a matter of matching the pedestal with the sculpture,” Ms. Lemaistre said, referring to Prasat Chen.

“UNESCO is extremely satisfied and very grateful to the Cleveland museum for accepting to give it back,” she added.

Kong Vireak, director of the National Museum in Phnom Penh, said the statue would be handed over on Monday to the museum, where it will be displayed.

In May last year, Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer newspaper reported that Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, the Cleveland museum’s curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, traveled to Cambodia several months earlier to attempt to determine whether the statue came from Prasat Chen.

“Our work on the piece and its provenance is still underway, and terribly time-consuming, but so far, based on my extensive fieldwork in Cambodia earlier this year, I can report that I did not find any physical evidence to confirm that the Cleveland Hanuman is from Prasat Chen,” the newspaper quoted Ms. Quintanilla as saying at the time.

Neither Ms. Quintanilla nor Caroline Guscott, the museum’s spokeswoman, immediately responded to requests for comment.

Ms. Lemaistre of UNESCO said that while she did not know what had motivated the museum to give back the statue, it would have been premature to ask for its return before the additional pedestals in the temple were discovered last year.

“I think we could not have really asked without having established the evidence,” she said.

Authors: Mech Dara and Chris Mueller | Source: The Cambodia Daily [May 11, 2015]

A team of heritage preservation experts inspected the work on Wednesday and announced that the project was complete.

"This repair work has tackled a series of technical challenges to preserve the cultural relic with modern scientific technologies and new materials to ensure the authenticity and integrity of the statue," said Huang Kezhong, the leader of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage Inspection Team.

The team has also suggested the local government should repair the Great Mercy Pavilion, which houses the statue, as soon as possible.

The Dazu Rock Carvings, 60 kilometers west of Chongqing, date to the Song (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties and comprise more than 5,000 statues. They were opened to Chinese visitors in 1961 and foreign visitors in 1980. The carvings were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.

"They are remarkable for their aesthetic quality, their rich diversity of subject matter, secular and religious, and the light that they shed on everyday life during this period. They provide outstanding evidence of the harmonious synthesis of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism," the citation said.

The statue of Kwan-yin in Baoding Mountain was carved about 800 years ago during the South Song Dynasty (1127-1276), with 830 hands in an area of 88 square meters in the hillside. It is 7.7 meters tall and 12.5 meters wide, featuring color painting and gold foil. It is the largest of its kind in China.

Water seepage and weather damage caused the statue to deteriorate, and a conservation project began in April 2011. It was listed as the top restoration project by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

The work was led by the China Cultural Heritage Protection Research Institute. Experts from Dunhuang Research Academy, the Academy of Dazu Rock Carving, Peking University, Tsinghua University and China University of Geosciences also participated.

Three phases

The project went through three phases from inspection, planning and the actual repair work. The team used X-ray and 3-D laser scanning to collect information needed to effect the restoration.

"We found 34 kinds of viruses on the sculpture that have greatly damaged the historical and artistic value of the carving," said Zhan Changfa, the chief scientist of the restoration project.

They also found that 283 of the statue's 830 hands and arms were damaged. To respect the religious history, the team consulted reference books and pictures to ensure the restoration was accurate.

The major part of the restoration involved attaching a new layer of gold foil to the statue. The original foil was between 83 percent and 92 percent gold. In some parts the statue had six layers of gold foil as a result of restoration work in the past.

An ancient technique from the Song Dynasty was applied. The gold foil was first separated from the statue, washed in pure water and alcohol before being reapplied. Once in place, it was painted with three coats of lacquer.

The statue is due to reopen to the public on June 13, which is China's Cultural Heritage Day.

Author: Tan Yingzi | Source: China Daily [May 30, 2015]

According to research by the China Great Wall Society, it is not optimistic about the protection of the Great Wall. For example, only 8.2 percent of the Great Wall built in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) is in good condition presently.

Moreover, in the report released by the Chinese State Administration of Cultural Heritage in 2012, less than 10 percent of the Ming Great Wall is preserved adequately, 20 percent is moderately preserved, and almost 30 percent has disappeared.

The World Monument Fund based in New York announced in 2003 that the Great Wall was among the 100 most endangered historic sites.

Bad weather is one of the main causes of damage to the Great Wall. Dong Yaohui, the deputy of the China Great Wall Society, said that most parts of the masonry structure of the Great Wall are in Beijing and Hebei province. Though they are more stable than the sun-dried mud brick Great Wall, in the rainy seasons during July and August, they can be easily broken by storms.

Local data shows that in the summer of 2012, 36 meters of the Dajing Gate part of the Great Wall in Zhangjiakou, a city in northwestern Hebei province, was damaged by storms; the Shanhai Pass part in Qinhuangdao, a city in northeast part of Hebei province, leaked badly; while some fighting towers of the Wulonggou portionin Laiyuan, a city in western Hebei province, totally collapsed.

Even in the dry seasons, because of lack of protection, the Great Wall in the mountain areas in Hebei province was eroded by mountain springs or even plants. In Funing County, a county in Qinhuangdao, if you slightly touch the wall of the watchtowers, you will find soil peeling off. There are also trees growing in the cracks of the Great Wall.

People living around or travelling to the Great Wall which has not been developed into tourist attractions are also damaging the wall. According to Zhang Heshan, a Great Wall protector in Funing County, more travelers have been exploring the wild Great Wall in recent years. The frequent trampling has led to damage, causing the bricks to loosen, and even walls to collapse. However, there were not enough protectors to patrol around these areas, and not enough money to restore the damage.

Journalists from the Beijing Times also found that people in some villages of Lulong County, in the west part of Qinhuangdao, lived in the houses built with ancient blue and grey bricks. They told the journalists that these bricks were removed from the Great Wall nearby.

Some villagers even sold the Great Wall bricks with carved characters. An unnamed villager in Dongfeng Village told the Beijing Times journalist that the market price of these bricks is 40 to 50 yuan ($6.4 to $8.05) a piece, or even as low as 30 yuan ($4.83). The villagers collect such bricks from the Great Wall without a second thought.

Accordign to Dong Yaohui, it is difficult for the government to fully protect the Great Wall. "In Funing County, there are only 9 people in the department of cultural relics, but they have to go on a 142.5 km tour of inspection. It’s definitely impossible to take good care of the Great Wall by themselves," Dong said.

Dong also stressed that the counties along the Great Wall are relatively poor. Most of the counties surrounding the Great Wall in Zhangjiakou are national assigned poverty counties. Local governments cannot afford to repair and protect the Great Wall, or only invest in the parts which bring in revenue from tourism.

To some people, developing tourism is an effective way to protect the Great Wall. Xu Guohua, the head of Banchangyu Great Wall Development Company, said that the destruction from the villagers has stopped after development. Meanwhile, tourists know which part of the Great Wall is endangered.

"You have to admit that the development of the wild Great Wall brings rules and regulations to both the villagers and travelers. In recent years, the protection of the Great Wall in our scenic spot became much better than the undeveloped parts in our county," said Xu.

However, many point out that it is impossible to develop the whole Great Wall into tourism sites. And the development may bring more visitors to the endangered Great Wall, but not all the tourism development companies are committed to protecting the Great Wall. Instead, some of them only focus on the income from tickets, regardless of the intrinsic value of the Great Wall.

How to protect the disappearing Great Wall? Obviously, it is an important test for Chinese society. Just like what Dong Yaohui said in an recent article, "the Great Wall belongs to everybody of China. The duty of protection of the Great Wall not only belongs to the government, but also to the common people. The most urgent goal for us is to arouse the enthusiasm of the public to protect the Great Wall. "

Source: China Daily [June 30, 2015]

The dealer, Subhash Kapoor, is now awaiting trial in India for allegedly looting artifacts worth tens of millions of dollars.

Mr. Kapoor operated a now-defunct gallery on the Upper East Side called Art of the Past. Prosecutors allege that between 1995 and 2012 he illegally imported and sold stolen antiquities from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, often using forged documents to pass the items off as legitimate.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit and the Manhattan district attorney’s office have together recovered more than 2,500 artifacts worth more than $100 million from the gallery and storage facilities in and around New York City.

Kenneth J. Kaplan, a lawyer in New York representing Mr. Kapoor, declined to comment Wednesday, but said his client had asserted his innocence both to him and to his counsel in India. Mr. Kapoor has not yet entered a plea in India, according to a spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

The item recovered this week is a Chola-period bronze representing a Tamil poet and saint that dates to the 11th or 12th centuries, according to Brenton Easter, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations. The statue, which stands nearly two feet tall and weighs more than 80 pounds, was allegedly looted about a decade ago from a temple in a village in the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

The theft of the figure was “completely devastating” to the villagers, Mr. Easter said on Wednesday afternoon, as he stood by the open door of the van containing the relic parked on East 91st Street near Park Avenue. The item was smuggled into the U.S. labeled as a handicraft, and then offered for sale at Mr. Kapoor’s gallery on Madison Avenue.

In recent months some institutions that purchased objects from Mr. Kapoor have surrendered the items to Homeland Security Investigations. They include the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.

In a statement, Honolulu Museum Director Stephan Jost said in April that “clearly the museum could have done better” with its past vetting of objects. Dan L. Monroe, the Peabody Essex Museum director, said in a statement that month that the institution has undertaken “a rigorous internal assessment of its collection and is working in full cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security.”

This time around, the stolen object was voluntarily surrendered by an anonymous collector who had been contacted by investigators about the piece. Officials said the buyer was considered a victim because the statue was accompanied by a false provenance, or ownership history, that predated its theft.

“We commend this collector for his conscious decision to return this stolen idol,” said Raymond R. Parmer, Jr., special agent in charge of HSI New York. “We hope that other collectors, institutions and museums will continue to partner with HSI, and to see this surrender as a successful way to move forward when dealing with artifacts that might be of concern.”

The agency has recovered at least six other sacred Chola bronzes that it anticipates repatriating to the Indian government.

In April, the Manhattan district attorney’s office filed papers in New York State Supreme Court seeking the forfeiture of 2,622 items seized from the gallery and storage units in Manhattan, Queens and Long Island. The items were worth $107 million, according to the summons. Among them: a statue from India valued at $15 million, a large bronze statue from Cambodia or Thailand worth $5 million and a large standing Buddha from North India estimated at $7.5 million.

According to the April summons, Mr. Kapoor and his gallery manager, Aaron Freedman, “engaged in a common plan and scheme to illegally obtain and sell stolen items of art and conceal or disguise the nature, source and ownership of the illegally obtained property.”

Mr. Freedman pleaded guilty in December 2013 to five counts of criminal possession of stolen property and one count of conspiracy, according to the summons. Prosecutors said the antiquities were forfeitable from Mr. Kapoor and his gallery as proceeds and/or instrumentalities of crime.

Author: Jennifer Smith | Source: The Wall Street Journal [July 03, 2015]

Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is one of the most important archaeological sites in the Near East, and one of the best preserved city-states in the world.

"In the face of current tragic upheavals in Iraq and Syria, every stone, arch and carved relief plays a greater historical and cultural role than it has in the past," said Julian Raby, the Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. "Like the relief of Haliphat, each stone can remind a people of its past, and fashion identity both individually and collectively."

Once lush, wealthy and cosmopolitan, Palmyra ("the city of palms") was an oasis in the desert at the hub of trade between the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, ancient Iran and Southeast Asia. Two millennia ago, its inhabitants constructed monumental colonnades, temples, a theater and elaborate tomb complexes, a significant amount of which survives today.

Dating from 231 AD, the limestone funerary relief sculpture depicts an elegant, bejeweled figure with both Roman and Aramaic artistic influences, reinforcing Palmyra's status between the Eastern and Western worlds.

The accompanying photographs were taken 1867-1876 by prolific photographer Fèlix Bonfils and provide the most complete visual record of Palmyra from the 19th century.

The engraving images are from Robert Woods' 1753 The Ruins of Palmyra, a publication that inspired the popular neoclassical architecture style in Britain and North America. Its image of an "Eagle Decorating an Ancient Roman Temple" was the model for the image on the seal of the United States, and its depictions of Palmyra's coffered ceilings shaped the ceiling of the north entrance of the Freer Gallery of Art.

The display will be on view indefinitely.

Source: Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery [June 09, 2015]

The city is situated about half a kilometre north east of the district, on the banks of River Daur near Sera-e-Saleh. Once housed by the last of the Central Asian kings Azes I and II in Gandhara, the city today is a graveyard of yesteryear.

At a height of about 1,000 feet above the river, the settlement overlooks the entire Haripur landscape, whispering anecdotes of the past. Indo-Scythians were essentially Central Asian tribespeople who migrated to South Asia in 2 BC. They were called ‘Shaka’ in the vernacular, a morphed version of their Persian name Saka. They have been repeatedly mentioned in classical Hindu texts as a warrior nation. Their foothold in the region remained firm for several centuries.

Unearthed by accident

Legend has it the ancient city, proverbially called the ‘Castle of three sisters’ – Katiyan, Matiyan and Satiyan, was first discovered in 1993 when locals shovelled the area to cement the grave of Pir Mankay, a saint who used to meditate there. In no time the gravediggers’ spades hit the treasure buried for centuries beneath. A sizeable quantity of silver coins were thus stolen and sold to jewellers in Rawalpindi.

Police subsequently arrested the thieves and recovered the ancient artefacts which were handed over to Peshawar Museum authorities. Thus the existence of this fascinating settlement on Pir Mankey de Dheri (Mound of Pir Mankay) came to be known.

Opening up the black box

Archaeologists were quick to react and soon a full-scale excavation project was launched by the University of Peshawar archaeology department. The initiative was headed by archaeologists and historians Professor FA Durrani, Dr Shafiqur Rehman Dar and Shah Nazar. By 1997, the entire site was brushed up. Spacious houses, a medium-sized fortress, a large temple complex with a smaller place of worship inside, were unearthed. All artefacts, including vessels and tools, were sent to the provincial capital’s museum. The excavators probably lost interest as the project was soon shelved, paving way for illegal digging for valuables, Muhammad Aslam, a resident of Mankrai village, told The Express Tribune.

Another villager Waheed Khan said wild vegetation has enfeebled the structure, but illegal digging has further harmed the site, one shovel-ful at a time.

Who’s to blame?

Social activist Qamar Hayat said following the 18th Amendment, the control of heritage sites has been handed over to provincial authorities whose responsibility is to safeguard them. “Haripur houses most of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s major archaeological sites. A museum should be constructed here, as it was earlier approved in 2008,” he said, adding all unearthed artefacts should be brought back to the district.

When approached for a comment, Peshawar archaeology department official Maseeullah expressed his ignorance over the discovery.

Hazara University assistant professor Dr Shakirullah Khan stressed on the need to preserve the Indo-Scythian city and develop Haripur’s tourism industry.

Answering a question, Shakirullah said the then HU vice chancellor Dr Ehsan had approved the construction of a museum near Fort Harkishan Garh and the late tehsil nazim Iftikhar Ahmed Khan had also allocated land for the purpose. “Following the latter’s assassination and the former’s transfer to Mardan University, the project was put on the backburner,” he said.

Author: Muhammad Sadaqat | Source: The Express Tribune [June 02, 2015]

The Islamic State group has released a video showing that these ruins are still intact. And in an interview released yesterday, the head of the group's military forces in Palmyra, Abu Laith al-Saoudi, stated that they would preserve the ruins—perhaps because some buildings lack religious connotations or worship—but destroy the site’s statues, which the group believes are religious idols.

Recent satellite images reveal no new damage, confirmed Einar Bjorgo, the manager of UNOSAT, a U.N. satellite imaging project. But he and Danti cautioned that a more in-depth comparison with older satellite images and eyewitness accounts are needed for confirmation. UNOSAT’s more complete analysis is expected to be released Friday

Palmyra, a crossroads of trade between Europe and Asia for thousands of years, “was the quintessential romantic archaeological site out in the desert,” Danti says. Famous buildings include a medieval Islamic citadel, the Temple of Bel, and barracks and temples where Roman soldiers lived and worshipped. Danti reports that sources in Palmyra told him that most of the artifacts held in the Palmyra museum were removed before the Islamic State group arrived. What might remain are the large statues and bas-reliefs that were affixed to the museum’s walls, he said.