The 2009 Auction of Old Summer Palace bronze heads took place in February 2009. Two bronze sculptures looted from the Old Summer Palace during the Second Opium War in 1860 were auctioned by international auction house Christie's. On 25 Feb 2009 the disputed 18th-century fountainheads — heads of a rat and a rabbit — were sold to a Mr. Cai Mingchao (蔡銘超) for 28 million euros as part of an auction of art works owned by the late French designer Yves Saint Laurent. Cai is an adviser to China's National Treasures Fund, which seeks to retrieve looted treasures by foreign invaders during the Qing Dynasty. He then refused to pay the sum bid, claiming that he was bidding on moral and patriotic grounds.
Read more about 2009 Auction Of Old Summer Palace Bronze Heads: Auction, Internet Video Links, See Also, External Links
Famous quotes containing the words auction, summer, palace, bronze and/or heads:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Farmers in overalls and wide-brimmed straw hats lounge about the store on hot summer days, when the most common sound is the thump-thump-thump of a hound’s leg on the floor as he scratches contentedly. Oldtime hunters say that fleas are a hound’s salvation: his constant twisting and clawing in pursuit of the tormentors keeps his joints supple.”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“It takes a heap o’ children to make a home that’s true,
And home can be a palace grand, or just a plain, old shoe;
But if it has a mother dear, and a good old dad or two,
Why, that’s the sort of good old home for good old me and you.”
—Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977)
“What will our children remember of us, ten, fifteen years from now? The mobile we bought or didn’t buy? Or the tone in our voices, the look in our eyes, the enthusiasm for life—and for them—that we felt? They, and we, will remember the spirit of things, not the letter. Those memories will go so deep that no one could measure it, capture it, bronze it, or put it in a scrapbook.”
—Sonia Taitz (20th century)
“The heads of strong old age are beautiful
Beyond all grace of youth.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)