Why China’s demand that Japan return an ancient tablet could mark a ‘historical reckoning’

Illustration: Brian Wang As one of the biggest targets of wartime looting in centuries past, China is now positioning itself as a global pioneer in repatriating lost cultural artefacts.

This article, the first in a two-part series, Xinlu Liang looks at whether a stolen 1,300-year-old Chinese stone now housed in Japan’s Imperial Palace can become a test case for a reckoning over wartime plunder.

In 1945, following Japan’s surrender to the Allies, supreme commander General Douglas MacArthur ordered the country to return looted cultural treasures to their rightful nations across Asia.

However, the directive was limited: it applied only to items seized after the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident, ignoring earlier plunder during the first Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars.

The bureaucratic process was also complex, requiring detailed records of each theft – documentation that many war-ravaged nations could not provide.

By the late 1940s, China had compiled a list of more than 150,000 books and 2,000 artefacts – a figure researchers later deemed to be an underestimate.

For 80 years, except for a trickle of relics handed over to the defeated Kuomintang in Taiwan in the 1950s, the vast majority of China’s stolen heritage remained in Japan, with some 2 million Chinese items scattered across various museums.

But this could soon change.

Chinese and Japanese researchers and civic groups have been demanding that Japan return a Tang dynasty (618-907) stele, or stone tablet, held in Tokyo’s Imperial Palace for over a century.

Activists and observers view this as the opening move in a campaign to make the return of a single artefact a template for broader restitution efforts.

In doing so, the goal is to break down long-standing barriers to the return of countless other relics.

This case will test whether a new model – built on solid academic evidence, transnational civil society and diplomatic pressure – can succeed where post-war mechanisms failed, they say.

It could also be a test of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

A monument marks the place where the Tang Honglu Well Stele once stood in Lushun, Liaoning province, before it was taken to Tokyo’s Imperial Palace in 1908.

Photo: Handout Erected in AD714 in present-day Lushun, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, the Tang Honglu Well Stele has a 29-character inscription that commemorates a Tang envoy’s visit to the Bohai Kingdom, a neighbouring state to the northeast.

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原文链接: 南华早报