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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]

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]