Bones of contention
A museum in China has a moa skeleton on display. How it got there is a classic example of museum diplomacy. Will Harvie explains.
In 1956, the director of Canterbury Museum, Roger Duff, travelled to China. One purpose was to meet with Rewi Alley, the New Zealander already famous for his work with the Chinese Communists and who was a deft collector of Chinese antiquities.
Duff and Alley had been corresponding since the 1940s and Alley was keen to donate some of his collection to the museum in his native Canterbury.
Alley’s ‘‘pleasure was to collect until his hotel room overflowed, when he would unload on to friends’’, Duff wrote in his diary.
‘‘My arrival coincided with the need to unload – after which Rewi will doubtless start again.’’
But there was a barrier to the gift. In 1950, shortly after the Communists seized power, they banned exports of Chinese art and antiques. Foreigners had been pilfering Chinese history for a long time and the Chinese authorities wanted the remaining objects for their own museums.
Nonetheless Duff was determined to win official approval to export Alley’s gifts, wrote Drs Richard Bullen and James Beattie, in their 2017 book New China
Eyewitness, which explores this ‘‘extraordinary’’ example of museum diplomacy.
To improve his chances, Duff arrived with gifts – Ma¯ ori artefacts and taonga, including pounamu. Some were presented to Wu Chang Chao, president of the Palace Museum and assistant minister of culture, and they ‘‘discussed the possibility of taking old works out of China’’, wrote Duff.
Duff and the rest of the New Zealand party also met Mao Zedong, founder and chairman of the People’s Republic of China, and Chou En Lai, the foreign minister and premier. Chou was probably crucial because he spoke good English and was the urbane master of the cultural diplomacy that has punctuated Chinese foreign policy since 1949.
Cultural and museum diplomacy are hard to define but essentially they seek to create goodwill through the arts and sciences. Within a few years, China was also conducting ‘‘panda diplomacy’’ and ‘‘ping-pong diplomacy’’.
In this case,
museum diplomacy was designed to bring ‘‘home to New Zealand the genius of the remarkable Chinese people’’, Duff wrote. He pressed his case in Beijing and recorded in his diary an exchange – antiquities from China for moa skeletons from New Zealand.
‘‘His persistence, and most likely Alley’s influence with high-ranking politicians, paid dividends,’’ wrote Beattie and Bullen.
‘‘Through Alley’s contacts and Duff’s diplomatic skills, they obtained the sanction of the [Chinese government] to circumvent its own export ban on antiquities and permit the gifting of seven crates of treasures to Christchurch,’’ wrote the current director of Canterbury Museum, Anthony Wright, in the book.
It was extraordinary, said both Bullen and Beattie in an interview.
These antiquities founded the largest collection of Chinese art in New Zealand, which now includes 1400 objects including ceramics, jades, bronzes, paintings, furniture, and currency that reflect almost 4000 years of Chinese culture. And what of the moa?
Duff had access to moa bones from Pyramid Valley in North Canterbury, probably the most important moa site in the country.
Two near-complete skeletons of ‘‘very high quality’’ were shipped to Beijing.
Today, one of them is on display in the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Bullen photographed it on a visit. It’s probably a female South Island giant moa, according to an expert who viewed the photo.
‘‘South Island giant moa was the biggest of them all. Adult females stood up to two metres high at the back, and could reach foliage up to 3.6m off the ground, making them the tallest bird species known,’’ reports NZ Birds Online.
To Nga¯ i Tahu activist and commentator Karaitiana Taiuru, museum diplomacy is nonsense. It’s ‘‘simply trading the theft of one culture with the theft of another’’, he wrote in an email. ‘‘Moa are a taonga to Ma¯ ori.’’ They belonged to the local iwi or hapu¯ .
‘‘The average Kiwi needs to ask if they would be comfortable with an immigrant digging up their great-great-grandparents’ family heirlooms . . . and pets to be put on display in an immigrant museum,’’ he wrote.
‘‘While in the 1950s it may have been acceptable, it is certainly not appropriate [now] and some form of reparation or loan agreements need to be considered for both parties,’’ he argued.
This was the ‘‘end of an era’’, said Wright – the last major exchange of Aotearoa taonga for overseas treasures by his museum. Canterbury Museum, and indeed all of the country’s major museums including Te Papa’s predecessor, built their collections through trades, he said. Historically, these museums had little money but possessed New Zealand stuff that overseas
museums and collectors keenly desired – Ma¯ ori objects and art or Aotearoa flora and fauna.
Most valuable of all were moa bones and whole skeletons, which were ‘‘almost worth their weight in gold’’, said Wright. Museums the world over wanted examples of the extinct, giant, flightless bird.
‘‘It’s not a happy history,’’ he said in an interview and ‘‘not the norm now’’.
New Zealand museums are ‘‘a lot more professional today’’, he said, and it is ‘‘extremely unlikely’’ that Canterbury would trade away anything in its collection today.
The New Zealand government tightened moa exports in 1962, although they are still not banned entirely. Rather, exporters need permission from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, which assesses whether the bones are rare or significant.
Since 2007, 14 applications to permanently export moa have been approved and one is pending, according to the ministry. Two temporary exports have also been approved.
Canterbury Museum holds the world’s largest collection of moa, including 182 complete or nearcomplete moa skeletons and about 30,000 individual bones.
Whether they are still worth their weight in gold is unknown, but in 2018, a 1.4m high moa skeleton sold at auction for £22,000.
Chinese generosity towards Canterbury Museum did not start or stop in 1956. For example, in 1957, a shipment of furniture and carpet from the Palace Museum arrived.
It was this shipment that prompted Duff to reciprocate with the moa skeletons.
Rewi Alley also continued donating throughout his life. He pressed objects into the luggage of New Zealand visitors, with instructions to see them into the Christchurch Museum. He also visited New Zealand and left gifts.
Communist China has been through several tumultuous and deadly periods since its founding in 1949. Alley is controversial in some quarters for being a Communist propagandist and for the alleged age of his sex partners.
The Government should ban exports of extinct species and should better protect taonga species, wrote Taiuru.
Bullen and Beattie are working on a new illustrated book that understands Alley through his engagement with Chinese art, history and architecture.