Museum defies Duke and accepts rare ivory
THE British Museum has acquired an “outstanding” collection of 556 Chinese ivories, months after rejecting the Duke of Cambridge’s plea for a total ban on the movement of ivory.
The Duke has called ivory objects a “symbol of destruction, not of luxury”. But Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, defended their decision to accept a collection amassed by Sir Victor Sassoon, the Shanghai trader, in the early 20th century.
The devotional figurines, brush pots, wrist rests and table screens were made between the 16th and 19th centuries. Sassoon died in 1961 and the collection was looked after by a trust, which has donated it to the museum.
“We are not gaining anything by destroying these objects. Ivory that has come down to us as works of art and artefacts of high cultural value need to be preserved and not destroyed,” Mr Fischer said, adding that discussions about the ivory trade should separate what happened centuries ago from the current plight of elephants.
“When you come to a museum you understand that, in different times, different things were part of social life. And you engage with that, and you try to see how these societies were structured, how they functioned. In a place like ours, that works through objects.
“I think it is very important that we do this. It’s part of the incredible diversity of human cultures that have evolved over millions of years. That doesn’t mean that you want to live like this. It doesn’t mean that you would necessarily change your own ethical standards.
“So I think it’s perfectly right for the British Museum to collect historical specimens, and you can think of many cultures – India, China, Europe, Byzantium – where ivory has played an important role to shape belief and shape social practices, and yet we would never, never buy modern ivory. That is totally out of the question.”
A bill going through Parliament will introduce a ban on ivory trading, although there will be exemptions for museums. Elephant numbers have declined by almost a third in the past decade, with approximately 20,000 a year slaughtered for their ivory.
The Duke has been a vocal critic of the illegal ivory trade in his role as royal patron of Tusk, the conservation charity. Jane Goodall, the primatologist, claimed in 2014 that the Duke had told her he “would like to see all the ivory owned by Buckingham Palace destroyed”.
The British Museum has several ivory collections, including those from Nimrud in Iraq and Benin in Nigeria, and the 12th-century Lewis chessmen from the Outer Hebrides. Some of the ivories in the Sassoon collection have been put on display in the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery of China and South Asia.
Jane Portal, the museum’s keeper of Asia, said the new legislation could render the collection “priceless or almost worthless in future, who knows. The point is that this is a safe home for them and they are going to be available for everybody to study”.
She added: “We are not condoning the present day trade, we are looking after them. I can’t think of any better solution than for us to have them and make them available in a global context.”
The ivories were unveiled at the release of the museum’s annual review, in which it was revealed that visitor numbers fell to 5.8million last year – still the UK’S leading visitor attraction – but down from 6.9million in 2015-16.