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SPEAKER_03: The auction took place at the historic Grand Palais and the items up for sale were 733 pieces that Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bourget had amassed over five decades. The French press dubbed this the sale of the century.
SPEAKER_04: Producer Vivien Leigh.
SPEAKER_03: There was a piece by Marcel Duchamp, a painting from Picasso's Cubist period, even a landscape by Edgar Degas that had once hung at Pierre Bourget's bedside. Interested buyers from all over the world flocked to the Champs-Élysées for a piece of the action. It will be a great, great event. An event the like of which we've never seen before.
SPEAKER_01: Both in terms of people congregating to see Saint Laurent's collection, but also in terms of the prices that will be achieved. But probably the two most anticipated items at the event were a pair of bronze animal heads from China.
SPEAKER_03: One of a rabbit and one of a rat that dated back to the 18th century Qing dynasty. They're quite odd looking and I don't find them beautiful.
SPEAKER_03: This is Audrey Wang. She's a historian of Chinese art and was an Asian art specialist with Christie's Auction House.
SPEAKER_14: Through my time there, I had the opportunity to work with some pretty amazing art. On the third and final day of the auction, the bronze heads went up for sale one at a time, starting with the rat.
SPEAKER_03: The opening bid started at 9 million euros. It quickly rose to 10 million.
SPEAKER_03: Then it jumped to 13 million.
SPEAKER_04: Then someone bid 14 million euros by telephone.
SPEAKER_03: It sold to the unseen telephone buyer for 14 million euros. The rabbit bronze followed a similar pattern, with the same unnamed bidder winning the second bronze for the same price.
SPEAKER_14: After lots of bidding, I believe it was a Chinese collector called Cai Mingchao who eventually bought the heads. Or rather was successful in bidding for the heads. Cai Mingchao was an art collector and dealer based in China, so it wasn't all that surprising that he was the winning bidder.
SPEAKER_04: But what was surprising was what happened next.
SPEAKER_14: Having bid nearly 40 million dollars at auction last week, Cai Mingchao now won't pay up. We have stood up and thankfully I was given this opportunity, which I felt was my responsibility.
SPEAKER_07: And what I want to stress is I will not pay for this bid. He refused to pay the tab as an act of protest.
SPEAKER_14: It was a statement. He was making a statement.
SPEAKER_03: As it turns out, the rabbit and rat bronzes weren't just decorative works of art meant to sit under a dusty glass case in some private collection.
SPEAKER_04: The animal heads were looted from China during one of the worst incidents of cultural vandalism the country has ever seen. By stopping the sale, Cai was signaling to the world that China wanted its stuff back.
SPEAKER_03: These bronze heads are at the center of a big fight over the repatriation of Chinese cultural heritage. But it's not because of their artistic value. It's because of the story behind them. And what that story means to the government of China. Before the animal heads were upending auction houses around the world, they were pieces of a fountain.
SPEAKER_04: So if we were to imagine ourselves walking into this garden, you would actually see not just heads, but these sculptures that are seated around a fountain.
SPEAKER_02: This is Patricia Yu. She studies the history of art at UC Berkeley.
SPEAKER_03: And you would be seeing sculptures with human-clothed bodies, but then the head would be the head of a zodiac animal.
SPEAKER_02: The fountain was sort of like an animated water clock, which featured the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac.
SPEAKER_03: Just as a refresher, the 12 animals of the zodiac are the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and the boar. Every lunar year is represented by a different animal, so you can be born in the year of the tiger, like me.
SPEAKER_04: Or the inarguably cooler year of the dragon, like me.
SPEAKER_03: The bronze fountain heads would spout water out of a different animal's mouth for two hours a day, every day, to signify the passing of time.
SPEAKER_04: The animal fountain was a hybrid European and Chinese design, built by Italian Jesuits for a European-themed garden within a much larger and much more extravagant Chinese palace complex called Yuan Ming Yuan.
SPEAKER_03: The translation of Yuan Ming Yuan is the Garden of Perfect Brightness.
SPEAKER_03: Yuan Ming Yuan was an immense garden complex first constructed in the 1700s for the imperial family of the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. It was his home away from home from his primary residence at the Forbidden City.
SPEAKER_04: That is a home away from home that was the size of Central Park, made up of hundreds of pavilions, and was packed with all sorts of spectacular art and architecture.
SPEAKER_13: This place was huge, and it actually held a very, very large part of the imperial collection of antiquities and artworks and some of the finest treasures of the imperial family. This is Frederick Green, professor of Chinese literature at San Francisco State University.
SPEAKER_03: He says that the Yuan Ming Yuan may have symbolized imperial grandeur, but its story would be defined by tragedy.
SPEAKER_13: So it starts really with the first Opium War, 1839, followed by a second Opium War. And these wars, of course, were also terrible wars in that they were, you know, motivated by, to some degree at least, by a drug that the British then forced upon the Chinese.
SPEAKER_04: Towards the end of the second Opium War in 1860, Qing officials captured a British and French delegation. So Western forces responded by advancing towards the Yuan Ming Yuan.
SPEAKER_03: But when the soldiers arrived at this vast garden palace, they realized just how many pretty things the emperor had. And? A frenzy of looting happened.
SPEAKER_03: They spent days grabbing everything of value, gold, porcelains, jades, watches, enamels, and they did it with a kind of bacchanalian glee, almost like a scene from The Purge.
SPEAKER_02: I hesitate to use the word delightful because I feel like we shouldn't use that in the context of looting, but from their perspective, like kind of this almost carnival atmosphere of sheer indulgence in the taking possession of and destruction of the rare and exotic items around them. But whatever they couldn't carry, they destroyed. They smashed vases and mirrors. There are even accounts of soldiers using rare manuscripts from the library to light their pipes.
SPEAKER_03: And the worst part was that the looting wasn't even confined to inanimate objects.
SPEAKER_02: They also set aside certain things specifically to give as gifts to Queen Victoria, as well as to Empress Eugénie in France. So Queen Victoria got this little Pekingese dog that was named Ludi.
SPEAKER_04: Ludi as in looting.
SPEAKER_03: And just in case that's not icky enough, the British forces were also led by the son of Lord Elgin, the guy who stole the Parthenon marbles from Greece.
SPEAKER_02: And he was a little bit of a family affair in the taking of things that don't belong to.
SPEAKER_13: You know, by some estimates, you know, maybe 1.5 million pieces were there. And, you know, all of that was taken.
SPEAKER_04: Once everything of value was taken, the soldiers set fire to the Yuan Ming Yuan. The complex was so large it took three full days to burn down. One of the few structures that survived from this resplendent Chinese palace was the stone facade of the European section where the bronze zodiacs once stood. Baroque remnants of an homage to Western architecture.
SPEAKER_03: Sometime during the looting, the bronze heads were torn from their bodies. But at that point, there were just 12 of those 1.5 million pieces. No one paid them any special attention, and they went missing in the chaos, presumably lost forever. That is, until the 1980s.
SPEAKER_06: I believe it was in the summer of 1987. This is Lark Mason. He's a specialist in Chinese works of art and president of the Appraisers Association of America.
SPEAKER_03: You might also recognize him from a television show that is, in my opinion, an American institution. I have appeared on Antiques Roadshow since 1996, since the very first season.
SPEAKER_06: But before that, he worked for Sotheby's. And in 1987, he received a very interesting phone call from a couple looking to have a pair of antiquities valued.
SPEAKER_06: They brought them into our gallery. And I watched them as they opened these up and put them before me and thought, oh my gosh, these are wonderful, but what are they? They were two of the 12 bronze animal heads, the monkey and the boar.
SPEAKER_03: Mason could tell from the craftsmanship that these were very fine pieces, but he didn't know anything about the heads. At the time, no one did.
SPEAKER_06: At the time I saw them, there was certainly no recognition of what these were in a broad sense. They were very obscure. The whole idea behind them was obscure.
SPEAKER_03: The owners of the bronzes believed that they'd probably come from the Yuan Ming Yuan. So in the process of researching the palace complex, Mason came across some engravings that dated back to the 18th century. They were the equivalent of photographs that are taken by a proud owner of a new house, or a spread in architectural digest.
SPEAKER_06: And in these architectural engravings were the bronze zodiac heads ornamenting a fountain. Mason was actually one of the first people to figure out that the heads had been disassembled from the fountain.
SPEAKER_04: As far as I know, at the time when I saw the first two, I did not know they were 12 even. I just saw these two animal heads.
SPEAKER_06: Mason was aware of the history of the Yuan Ming Yuan, but the owners had technically purchased the heads legally, and this type of sale was pretty normal in the art market.
SPEAKER_03: If anything, being able to establish a chain of custody that proved their imperial provenance made them more valuable. When the heads went up for auction, Mason estimated the bronzes might be worth anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000, but the sale went even better than he expected.
SPEAKER_04: The monkey head, surprisingly enough, made $150,000. And for the boar head, it was $95,000.
SPEAKER_06: After that, other bronze heads began slowly popping up in the art market. The next to appear were the ox, tiger, and horse in 1989. And by then, the profile of the bronzes had only grown.
SPEAKER_03: You know, it was in the $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 range for each head.
SPEAKER_04: And then in the year 2000, three bronze heads went up for sale. The tiger head was being sold by Sotheby's, while the ox and monkey were handled by Christie's. We gave this auction the code name Yuening Yuan, and that was kind of where all the trouble started.
SPEAKER_14: This is Audrey Wang again, the art specialist who had worked at Christie's. At the time, she was helping to arrange the sale of the ox and the monkey heads. And she expected this sale to be business as usual.
SPEAKER_03: We've always had an imperial sale. We were just doing the same thing.
SPEAKER_04: But this sale went very differently than the last time the bronzes went up for auction. Sure, Christie's and Sotheby's were just doing what they'd always done, selling valuable antiquities. But what they didn't realize was that the sentiment around the bronzes had shifted.
SPEAKER_03: Wang says that on the day of the auction, she was met with a sea of protesters trying to block the sale of the heads.
SPEAKER_14: And I was shocked to be confronted with an angry mob.
SPEAKER_03: She said that in order to keep protesters out, the hotel where the auction was being held pulled down metal shutters to block anyone from entering the building. And as the metal shutters were coming down, the main protester, he did an Indiana Jones style roll under the shutters and managed to make it in, shouting the auction houses were the traitors and that the heads belong to China.
SPEAKER_04: These protesters believe that the heads were more than just pieces of art that could be auctioned off to the highest bidder. They were cultural heritage that should be returned back to China. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, discussions about the protection of cultural heritage increased all over the world. But by the 2000s, these discussions became directed at auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's, especially when it came to the protection of Chinese cultural heritage.
SPEAKER_03: That was the very start of when all the talk about repatriation, you know, when it all started.
SPEAKER_04: So even though it might be legal to put it up for sale, advertising that a Chinese antiquity came from the Yuan Ming Yuan was essentially advertising that it was pilfered from the palace. Literally everything from that place was looted.
SPEAKER_02: You can't whitewash the history of their movement. Patricia Yu again. We know exactly what was destroyed. We know exactly when it happened.
SPEAKER_03: Millions of antiquities have been illegally taken from China, but the bronze heads in particular have been a huge focal point in repatriation efforts. They've in a way become mascots for the return of cultural property. They really have become, you know, national symbols. They have become symbols of patriotism.
SPEAKER_03: One reason they're so sought after is that there's documented visual proof that these heads once stood at the Yuan Ming Yuan.
SPEAKER_04: But there's also something captivating about the idea of traveling around the world to different international auction sites trying to track down the 12 missing animals of the Chinese zodiac.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there is something very quest-like about it because it's a known set. With the zodiac animals, everyone knows there's 12. Everyone knows the order. So what it means is like we kind of know exactly like who's still missing.
SPEAKER_04: Finding the missing heads was such an evocative goal that even Jackie Chan got involved. Jackie Chan, very storied martial arts actor of the Hong Kong martial arts movie scene, has also been a quite vocal proponent of the repatriation of looted Chinese artifacts.
SPEAKER_02: Ladies and gentlemen, there are only four in the world.
SPEAKER_08: Chan even wrote, directed and starred in a martial arts action film called Chinese Zodiac.
SPEAKER_03: He plays a kind of Indiana Jones-like adventuring figure.
SPEAKER_02: This is a huge day for Indiana Jones references.
SPEAKER_04: In the film, Chan plays a treasure hunter tasked with finding the lost zodiac heads. It actually became one of the highest grossing domestic films in China.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the movie itself is, quite frankly, not good as a movie.
SPEAKER_04: But it is good as a vehicle to see Jackie Chan jump out of an airplane and land on an active volcano.
SPEAKER_03: In reality, repatriating the bronze heads and other illicitly stolen property back to China doesn't usually require a bullwhip and a leather jacket. Just a really big bank account. All of the auctions in 2000, 2003 and 2007 ended with the heads being purchased either by groups affiliated with the Chinese government or by billionaires who purchased and then donated the heads back to China. It may sound a little contradictory to both protest and participate in the sale of looted artifacts, but sometimes the easiest way to get around the red tape of international property law is to whip out your pocketbook.
SPEAKER_02: I kind of feel like then it just becomes like, OK, fine, if you won't just give them back through legal channels, well, my wallet's bigger than yours.
SPEAKER_03: There's a very clear message that the bronze heads communicate every time they show up at an auction house. It's the same narrative that has protesters rolling under metal shutter doors or inspires Jackie Chan to make huge blockbuster movies about it. There's no real ethical or moral reason to hold on to known looted objects.
SPEAKER_02: So, yes, I see like giving them back is probably the right thing to do.
SPEAKER_03: It is the right thing to do. But this is where the noble act of finding and returning the bronze heads starts to get muddy because in the case of the heads, the quote right thing to do can happen for the wrong reasons. They're part of culture.
SPEAKER_06: They are a response to culture, but they are used for political purposes in different ways at different periods of time.
SPEAKER_03: There are some people who have actually questioned the Chinese government's efforts to repatriate the bronze heads. People like Ai Weiwei.
SPEAKER_05: This is Ai Weiwei. I'm an artist and, well, normally they just call me an artist. Ai Weiwei has been openly critical of the Chinese government's mission to repatriate the bronze heads, so much so that he even created his own art piece called Circle of Animals Zodiac Heads, which was a reinterpretation of the bronzes.
SPEAKER_03: To Ai, the animal heads aren't Chinese cultural relics at all, especially if you consider that the bronze heads were actually designed by Europeans. The work is made by a famous Italian priest working in the imperial court.
SPEAKER_05: So by its design and its craftsmanship and how it functions in this imperial garden is not very Chinese, but to choose that as a Chinese treasure was ridiculous.
SPEAKER_04: If you go back to 1987, when the first two bronze heads appeared on the scene, no one was looking for them. In fact, Chinese leadership wasn't dwelling on the history of the Yuan Ming Yuan at all. The Yuan Ming Yuan was a mostly neglected site throughout the 1970s and 80s. Artists like Ai Weiwei took over the space and actually lived and worked in the forgotten ruins of the European garden.
SPEAKER_03: He says that pig farmers nearby would actually use the marble of the ruins as building material for their homes.
SPEAKER_05: The local farmers would bring back those marble pieces to use it as their house's foundation. So often if you walk around, you can say, oh, here's a piece from the Yuan Ming Yuan, because nobody cared.
SPEAKER_03: But that all changed after 1989.
SPEAKER_00: On the streets leading down to the main road to Tiananmen Square, furious people stared in disbelief at the glass.
SPEAKER_13: In 1989, of course, you know, these events at Tiananmen Square, some people in the party, some party elders interpreted these, of course, as a challenge to communist rule.
SPEAKER_03: In response to the events at Tiananmen Square, Chinese leadership felt that they needed to restore communist party loyalty in younger generations. They did this by reshaping China's historical memory through a curriculum called patriotic education. The patriotic education campaign started shortly after the students movement in 1989, and it's related with change of the history textbooks.
SPEAKER_03: This is Jang Wang, a professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. Patriotic education was supposed to boost national pride and loyalty. The curriculum glorified the Communist Party and played up the ways that China had been exploited by foreign powers.
SPEAKER_04: And at the heart of the patriotic education campaign was the Century of Humiliation.
SPEAKER_11: The concept of the Century of Humiliation is a special narrative in China, because during this roughly 100 years, China suffered a lot of foreign invasions and lost wars. And so the Chinese consider this is like the darkest period of time in their history. Beginning with the first Opium War in 1839, and lasting all the way until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, China was getting absolutely clobbered by foreign forces.
SPEAKER_03: It experienced unequal treaties, loss of territory, and multiple wars.
SPEAKER_04: And because of the tremendous loss of cultural heritage that took place, a key event in the Century of Humiliation was the plunder of the Yuan Ming Yuan. The Yuan Ming Yuan became, to some extent, a symbol of the national humiliation.
SPEAKER_11: And so it's being used as a site for the patriotic education.
SPEAKER_04: The goal was to make sure younger generations never forgot the lowest period in Chinese history, or the destruction of Chinese culture by foreign invaders. The Yuan Ming Yuan and the Bronze Zodiac Heads were physical reminders of imperialist aggression. The Chinese government used this Zodiac Heads in a huge propaganda to try to generate the feelings of Chinese being insulted by the foreigners.
SPEAKER_05: But critics like Ai Weiwei have pointed out that if the Chinese government wanted to bring attention to the destruction of Chinese heritage, maybe it should look at its own actions.
SPEAKER_05: China has been victimized by the imperial states, but still, China is a bigger victim by its own government.
SPEAKER_03: Just to take one example, during the Cultural Revolution, countless amounts of Chinese relics and cultural heritage sites were destroyed at the hands of the Communist Party. So to Ai Weiwei, focusing on the story of the Bronze Heads felt like an incomplete telling of history, that the Chinese government was manipulating the past to frame the Communist Party as the victims rather than the perpetrators of culturally destructive practices. And that's how they can manipulate humans' understanding and judgment.
SPEAKER_05: And that is the most evil, but also most efficient way. In many ways, this nationalistic strategy worked.
SPEAKER_04: In the 1980s, the Chinese young people went straight to protesting dictatorship, to asking for democracy.
SPEAKER_11: But in the 1990s, in 2000, they actually went straight to protesting the foreign powers, the foreign hostilities.
SPEAKER_04: China is now an emerging global superpower, but chasing Bronze Heads from one auction house to another was a way of keeping this sense of victimization alive.
SPEAKER_03: But while keeping people's attention towards the Bronze Heads and the century of humiliation has been beneficial for the Chinese government, they're not the only ones who have something to gain. After the 2009 Yves Saint Laurent auction that was famously sabotaged by Tsai Mingchao, the rabbit and the rat were withdrawn from sale.
SPEAKER_04: They were eventually bought by Francois Pinot, the owner of Christie's auction house. And in 2013, Pinot gifted the heads to the Chinese government as an act of friendship between their two nations. Shortly after Pinot gifted the heads, Christie's became the first international auction house to receive a license to operate on mainland China.
SPEAKER_03: So of course, there are other ways to interpret this act of friendship. I don't want to be cynical, you know, donating them back to China, of course, was, you know, the right thing to do.
SPEAKER_13: Frederick Green again. But then, of course, you have this entanglement with business and favoritism and commercialism.
SPEAKER_03: If Green sounds conflicted there, that's not unusual. Almost everyone I spoke with for the story wants to see all 12 Bronze Heads end up back in China. After all, it makes perfect sense that illegally stolen relics should be returned back to their country of origin, whether it's Greece, Ethiopia or China. But on the other hand, many people don't like the way the quote right thing to do has itself been commandeered for political purposes.
SPEAKER_04: The Bronze Heads have the unfortunate burden of being both cultural heritage and propaganda. But as Patricia Yu says, any national treasure is at least a little bit of both. We're quite selective about how we choose to remember any particular place or event.
SPEAKER_02: I just come from the sense like nothing is neutral, that all of the values that we put upon objects and sites, they are constructed, they are negotiated, they are challenged.
SPEAKER_04: In December of 2020, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in China celebrated a big victory. To mark an important anniversary of the sacking of the palace complex, the Bronze Horse Head went on display at the Yuan Meng Yuan Park. It was the first Zodiac bronze to return to the grounds since they were looted from the site 160 years ago.
SPEAKER_12: There was a ceremony with lots of speeches and a countdown to a big unveiling moment.
SPEAKER_03: They sighted tourists crowded around to snap a picture of the horse inside of its glass case. It's unclear whether the other bronzes will eventually join the horse on the grounds. As of now, seven of the 12 known Bronze Heads have been located and returned back to China. The story shows if the dog, rooster, dragon, sheep, and snake will ever turn up.
SPEAKER_04: But for now, at least one of them, having passed through the hands of Jesuits, emperors, earls, and art dealers, had finally come home. Vivian will come back to tell me about what is probably a bunch of really interesting coincidences after the break. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of super foods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A, and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible.
SPEAKER_04: Kachava dot com slash invisible. So I'm back with Vivian Le. Hey, Viv. Hey, Roman.
SPEAKER_04: So as we are recording, we're talking to each other on February 12th, Lunar New Year. So Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I guess I have kind of a Zodiac-themed coda for you, which was inspired by Ai Weiwei. Great.
SPEAKER_04: So this story has been filled with a lot of, like, odd coincidences.
SPEAKER_03: Like, we never really intended this episode to release, you know, around Lunar New Year. It just kind of happened because I've been working on this for, like, a year. I know. It just happened to fall on Lunar New Year, which is kind of cool. Yeah. But also, when I was interviewing Ai Weiwei, he pointed out another coincidence, which was that we were talking to each other in February of 2021, which was almost exactly 12 years after the Yves Saint Laurent auction, which took place in February of 2009, which was the inspiration for both Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals art piece and also for this piece.
SPEAKER_05: This year is complete circle, 12 years. So for Chinese, it's quite meaningful. But also for this interview, it's kind of coincident. Exactly 12 years.
SPEAKER_03: So it was kind of like kismet that we were chatting about this subject at the completion of the Zodiac cycle.
SPEAKER_04: And so what do you mean by the Zodiac cycle?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so we kind of covered this a little bit in the main story, but there are 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac, and each of the animals fall in a specific order and correspond to a different lunar year. And the order of the animals actually comes from this ancient folklore called the Great Race. And there's a lot of variations to this story, but basically the animals of the Zodiac raced against each other to be part of the Jade Emperor's calendar. And the order that they finished the race is the order that they appear in the calendar. So the Zodiac animals in order are the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and then in last place was the pig. So as of February 12th, 2021, we left behind the year of the rat and have entered the year of the ox.
SPEAKER_04: That is not the order I would think that they would place in a race, but...
SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of drama actually that's correlated to this whole story. I don't think I have the time to explain the entire thing, but yeah, the rat is a crafty animal.
SPEAKER_04: I see. So we're in the year of the ox. We finished the rat, we're in the year of the ox. That sounds like a good thing. It's a good solid year, so hopefully we're going to be okay.
SPEAKER_03: But there was one thing that Ai Weiwei mentioned in our interview that really stuck with me, because this is something that I had been feeling deep down in my gut, and I didn't realize that this was a known superstition. But you know how everyone was blaming 2020 for sucking because so many terrible things happened? Yeah. I mean, there were numerous horrible things that happened throughout the year, and people were all very mad at 2020, and were hoping that 2021 would be better, but it's a little shaky as it has been.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we had a shaky start to the new year. But Ai Weiwei said that it may have actually been because of the year of the rat or the year of the mouse.
SPEAKER_05: Chinese always believe the year of mouse would always have a huge disaster, and it's been proved and strange if you look at it in history.
SPEAKER_04: So Ai Weiwei says that we should be ignoring the Gregorian calendar, the year 2020, and focus on the Lunar New Year, the year of the rat, as the source of all of our turmoil over the past year.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, and I immediately looked this up after we spoke, and it's actually a documented, eerie phenomenon that something tragic always happens to China in the year that coincides with the rat, but specifically during the year of the metal rat. So what's a metal rat?
SPEAKER_04: So I'm going to add one more layer to the lunar calendar that I just explained to you.
SPEAKER_03: So every 12-year zodiac cycle falls under one of five different elements. So there's wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. So the year of the metal rat, which is the year that we actually just went through with the 2020 Gregorian calendar year, that actually only happens once every 60 years.
SPEAKER_04: So tell me why people think that the year of the metal rat is cursed. Like, what are some of the disasters if we go back every 60 years? Yeah, so if you go all the way back to the year of the metal rat in 1840, China had just gotten into the first Opium War, which ended with a lot of loss of life, loss of territory, but was also the kickoff to the century of humiliation.
SPEAKER_03: So right out the gate, 1840, not a good year.
SPEAKER_04: Not a good year. Okay, we've demonstrated that in the piece.
SPEAKER_03: And so you fast forward another 60 years to the year 1900, China is in the middle of dealing with the Boxer Rebellion. And it's believed that like up to 100,000 people possibly died during this conflict, and it pretty much ended the Qing Dynasty. So that's another like tremendous loss of life during the metal rat. And then if you jump another 60 years to the year 1960, China was in the middle of the worst famine brought on by the Great Leap Forward, and it's actually considered the deadliest famine in human history.
SPEAKER_04: Wow. And so if you go 60 years after that...
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's 2020. We're in the middle of a global pandemic that hit China particularly hard. Yeah, it's spooky.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a spooky coincidence.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, I guess you could either believe that the year of the metal rat is cursed, and that maybe we have 60 more years to prepare for the next disaster, or you can believe that the world is filled with coincidences and that terrible things happen all the time. I'm pretty inclined to believe the latter. I wonder if you picked any other year and gave it some periodicity if you would find horrible things happening throughout. But this is fascinating that he grabbed onto that and then you got inspired by it. And I learned a little bit about the Zodiac calendar, so that's cool. Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_03: But yeah, whether you believe the curse of the metal rat or not, happy year of the ox, Roman. Yeah, happy year of the ox.
SPEAKER_04: A very special thanks this week to Allison Klainman and Ted Alcorn, and also thanks to Weishu Li and Greg Thomas, whose interviews did not make it into this episode. If you want to read more about the century of humiliation and patriotic education, make sure to check out Zhang Wang's book, Never Forget National Humiliation. And if you'd like to learn more about Ai Weiwei's circle of animals, Zodiac Heads, you can visit zodiacheads.com. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivien Le, mixed by Bryson Barnes, music by Sean Riel. Translation and production assistance for this episode was provided by Wen Ji Yang. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Christopher Johnson, Emmet Fitzgerald, Chris Berube, Joe Rosenberg, Katie Mengel, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered like Zodiac Heads around the world, but will someday come home to beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listeners supported 100% artists-owned podcasts in the world. Find them all at radio-topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram and Reddit too. But for pictures and more about this story, go to 99pi.org.
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