Museums should take special care of loaned exhibits

IN DECEMBER, when 10 terra cotta warriors from Northwest China’s Shaanxi province were on display at the Franklin Institute in the United States, a man having accidentally broken the thumb off one of the warriors, pocketed it and took it away. The man and the thumb have both been found. Thepaper.cn comments:

According to an arrest affidavit, a 24-yearold man broke off the thumb after taking a selfie with one of the statues during the museum’s Christmas party.

Officials from Shaanxi say they had already checked all the security measures of the museum before signing the agreement for the exhibition. Yet these security measures failed to prevent the suspect from damaging one of the exhibits. The concerned US museum might need to improve its security arrangements to prevent similar things from happening again.

But the incident should also teach Chinese museums a lesson. Just like the Art Exhibitions China Shaanxi branch, which organized the loan of the terra cotta warriors for the exhibition, stressed, it is a global tendency to allow visitors to observe exhibited items, but that should be done under strict security measures.

That’s the correct attitude. Cultural relics are the treasury of the whole humankind, and they should be open to audiences of the whole world. Risks of theft and accidents should not prevent them being viewed by the public.

By exhibiting terra cotta warriors in the US, China has also been spreading its cultural influence overseas. That’s a good channel of cultural exchange and one accident is no excuse for stopping that.

To improve security measures, the National Museum of China set a good example in 2011. When Germany held an exhibition called The Art of Enlightenment in China’s national museum in 2011, they took such strict measures that the staff in Germany could see the temperature and humidity in the exhibition hall. More museums should follow that example when holding exhibitions of Chinese cultural relics.