Spirited Away — page 5

Nevertheless, isolated victories do occur, as in the case of some of the figurines looted from Empress Dou's tomb. By February 2002, the Xi'an police had caught Wang Cangyan, a local dealer who oversaw the shipment of dozens of Empress Dou's figurines to Hong Kong, sneaking them through customs checkpoints by hiding them inside a truckload of new ceramics. Wang told the Xi'an police the name of a Hong Kong shop to which he had sold 32 figurines.

Packed with legitimate antique shops and those that specialize in fakes, Hong Kong's Hollywood Road is a key Asian transit point for stolen Chinese antiquities. The rarest items—especially those that are hot—are seldom displayed out front. "If someone walks in off the street and asks to see some real antiques, I'll probably show them fakes," says a Hollywood Road dealer who declines to be named. "But if they come in knowing exactly what they want and they know what the market rate is, I'll bring in the real things from my warehouse." In 2001, this dealer—who was busted a few years ago for selling an illicit item that was later impounded in the U.S.—heard about a collection of figurines stolen from Empress Dou's tomb. He says he tried to get his hands on them, but another gallery owner, just down the street, scored the statues instead. In retrospect, he says, "I'm glad I didn't get to buy them. I don't need any more trouble."

For Wang Cangyan, the dealer who had arranged the smuggling of the 32 figurines to Hong Kong, there has been plenty of trouble. He is currently serving a jail sentence, albeit significantly reduced to two years, in return for his cooperation with the authorities. As for the Hong Kong gallery that bought the figurines from Wang, it was allowed to return them quietly to the mainland in exchange for keeping its identity secret.

But several of the other figurines that were smuggled to Hong Kong proved more elusive. The Xi'an police believe they were sneaked out of Hong Kong and into Switzerland, where strict export documentation isn't required. From there, say the police, they made their way to New York City. Tang Xiaojin, the Xi'an cop charged with tracking down the figurines, discovered this by accident when he was leafing through a copy of the March 2002 catalog of Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art from Sotheby's. Flipping past treasure after treasure, Tang suddenly stopped. Lot 32, credited as belonging to "various owners," was very familiar: six charcoal gray figurines that were part of the very loot Tang had been tracking for months. They were set to go on sale in New York City in just a few days' time. "I was astonished," recalls Tang. "I never imagined they would have made it all the way to America."

Tang and his colleagues moved fast. The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., dispatched a representative to the auction house's New York City office. At first, according to a Chinese diplomat, Sotheby's refused to exclude Lot 32 from auction, saying the Chinese didn't have enough proof that the items had been taken from an imperial tomb just months before. Phillips, the Sotheby's spokesperson, says it had an unequivocal written warranty stating that the owner had good title to the objects. She also noted that none of the statuettes appeared in the Art Loss Registry, an international database of stolen art, which Sotheby's itself co-founded. The only indication the auction house had that they were illicit came via a written request from China's Washington, D.C., ambassador, Phillips says. After a flurry of negotiation, the auction house pulled the items—just 20 minutes before the bidding was set to begin.

Now, more than a year later, the six statuettes have been returned to China. They're currently on show at a tatty museum on the outskirts of Xi'an in a display proudly entitled "The Special Exhibition of Returned Pottery Figures of Western Han Dynasty from America." Pointedly, each statue still has a tag from Sotheby's attached to its feet. Li Ku, vice director of the museum, rejoices in the figurines' return. "Looking at these figures, I feel like my family has come home at last," he says.

But, in truth, much of the loot from Empress Dou's tomb—and the vast majority from countless other sites across Asia—is still missing. In India, Superintendent Shrivastava is delighted to have nabbed the nation's top smuggler. But months after the momentous arrest, he has tracked down only a fraction of the relics Ghia is believed to have looted over the past three decades. Since news of the arrest was made public, three collectors have written to the police, offering to return stolen items they say they purchased in good faith. But most of the stolen treasures, still hidden inside a Manhattan loft or a Hong Kong boardroom, will likely never be recovered. "There is plenty," Shrivastava mourns, "that has been lost for ever."

With reporting by Bu Hua/Xi'an, Meenakshi Ganguly/Jaipur, Aparisim Ghosh/London and Robert Horn/Bangkok

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