How a Museum Director Allegedly Turned Authentication Into a Loophole for Looting
In June 2024, a court-ordered inspection at China's Nanjing Museum revealed that five paintings from a prominent family's 1959 donation had vanished. Museum officials explained that experts had identified the works as forgeries in the 1960s and disposed of them in the 1990s. But that spring, one of those supposed forgeries, "Spring in Jiangnan," attributed to Ming dynasty master Qiu Ying, had appeared in a China Guardian auction preview in Beijing with an estimated value of 88 million yuan, approximately $12 million. The paradox exposed a mechanism: if you control who decides what's real and what's fake, and no one checks your work for three decades, authentication authority becomes a tool for systematic theft.
The scandal centers on Xu Huping, who led the Nanjing Museum until 2005. According to allegations made public in December by Guo Lidian, a retired member of the museum's collections department, Xu orchestrated the organized, premeditated, and large-scale theft and smuggling of artifacts from the Palace Museum's southward relocation. The scheme allegedly worked through a simple inversion: museum experts were instructed to deliberately misclassify genuine artifacts, including imperial porcelain and rare calligraphy, as forgeries. Once labeled fake, these objects could bypass required appraisal and review procedures and be transferred to the state-owned Jiangsu provincial cultural relics store for sale. The authentication process, designed to protect cultural heritage, became the mechanism for its disappearance.
The Palace Museum Crates That Weren't Supposed to Be Opened
The objects at the center of this scandal carry exceptional historical weight. In the 1930s, as Japanese forces advanced into China, the Palace Museum began relocating tens of thousands of objects southward to protect them from invasion. Over 2,000 crates of imperial artifacts were eventually stored in a secure facility in Nanjing, sealed and entrusted to the institution's care. These weren't ordinary museum acquisitions, they represented the physical embodiment of Chinese imperial history, removed from Beijing in one of the great cultural rescue operations of the 20th century. During Xu's tenure, seals were allegedly broken without authorization on these crates, and their contents entered a system where authentication could be manipulated.
The Nanjing Museum, established in 1933, houses more than 430,000 rare artifacts and artworks, including Ming and Qing imperial porcelain collections among the largest in the world. This institutional prestige made it a trusted guardian for both the Palace Museum's evacuated treasures and private donations from collectors who believed their family legacies would be preserved. Among those donors was the family of Pang Laichen, a prominent industrialist and collector who lived from 1864 to 1949. In 1959, Pang's descendants donated 137 works from his "Xuzhai" collection to the museum, including "Spring in Jiangnan." That donation represented an act of cultural patriotism in early Communist China, a family choosing to place private treasures in public trust.
The Great-Granddaughter's Inquiry That Broke the System
The scheme unraveled not through internal audit or government oversight, but through a family member's simple question. In 2024, Pang Laichen's great-granddaughter Pang Shuling contacted the museum to inquire about the status of her family's 1959 donation. When the museum's responses proved unsatisfactory, she filed a lawsuit. The resulting court-authorized inspection in June revealed that five of the donated works, including the Qiu Ying scroll, were missing. The museum's explanation, that experts had identified them as forgeries decades earlier and disposed of them in the 1990s, immediately raised questions. No documentation supported the forgery determination. No records showed proper appraisal procedures before disposal. And one of those "forgeries" had just surfaced at a major Beijing auction house with a multimillion-dollar price tag.
Six months after that inspection, Guo Lidian made his allegations public through a WeChat video. His decision to speak out as a retired insider gave the scandal institutional credibility and suggested that staff had known about the misconduct but lacked channels to report it while employed. Guo specifically accused Xu of breaking seals on Palace Museum crates without authorization and directing the misclassification scheme. The allegations implicated not just a single corrupt director but a network of complicit experts, the people whose professional judgment was supposed to safeguard authenticity had allegedly been recruited to falsify it. An official investigation by China's National Cultural Heritage Administration, working under the guidance of the Jiangsu provincial government, ultimately implicated 29 people.
Why Authentication Authority Matters More Than Physical Security
The Nanjing Museum case reveals a vulnerability in cultural heritage protection that physical security measures cannot address. Museums invest heavily in climate control, vault systems, and surveillance to prevent theft. But when the threat comes from authentication authority itself, from the experts empowered to declare what's genuine and what's not, those safeguards become irrelevant. Xu Huping, serving as executive vice-director in the 1990s, allegedly used his position to illegally authorize the transfer of "Spring in Jiangnan" and other paintings to the state-owned cultural relics store. The state store provided a legal channel for selling cultural objects, but only for items properly classified as forgeries or duplicates. By controlling the classification process, Xu allegedly controlled which objects could be moved into that sales pipeline.
The mechanism's elegance lay in its exploitation of institutional trust. Museum directors are expected to have authentication expertise. State cultural relics stores are legitimate entities serving a real function, disposing of forgeries and duplicates that accumulate in museum collections. The appraisal and review procedures that Xu allegedly bypassed exist precisely to prevent abuse, but they only work if someone enforces them. For three decades, apparently no one did. The system assumed good faith from the people operating it, and that assumption created a gap wide enough to move imperial porcelain and Ming dynasty masterpieces through without detection.
What 430,000 Artifacts and No Paper Trail Means Now
The Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism announced the formation of a task force to investigate the scandal, and the Nanjing Museum issued an apology for mishandling donated artworks. The National Cultural Heritage Administration's investigative team focused initially on tracing the whereabouts of the five paintings donated by the Pang family. But the broader question looms over the museum's entire collection: if authentication records were falsified or destroyed for some objects, how can anyone verify the integrity of the rest? The museum still houses more than 430,000 artifacts. Without comprehensive documentation of what was classified as forgery, when, by whom, and on what basis, there's no way to know which other genuine pieces might have been reclassified and sold.
The scandal also raises uncomfortable questions about other Chinese museums holding war-evacuated collections. If Nanjing's seals could be broken without authorization for decades without detection, what oversight exists elsewhere? The Palace Museum's southern evacuation distributed objects across multiple institutions. Each became a guardian of irreplaceable cultural heritage, and each director gained authentication authority over those objects. The Nanjing case suggests that authority, absent robust external verification, creates opportunity for exactly the kind of systematic looting Guo alleged. Museums worldwide face the authentication challenge, experts can be wrong, and determining authenticity often involves subjective judgment. But this scandal exposes what happens when experts aren't just wrong but deliberately fraudulent, and when the institutions employing them lack mechanisms to catch that fraud.
The investigation continues, with 29 people implicated and the task force working to trace missing objects through auction records and private collections. For Pang Shuling, the outcome remains uncertain, even if "Spring in Jiangnan" is recovered, decades of improper custody have damaged the chain of provenance her great-grandfather intended to preserve. For Chinese museums, the scandal demands a reckoning with governance structures that concentrated too much authentication authority in too few hands with too little oversight. And for cultural heritage protection globally, the case illustrates that the greatest threat to institutional collections may not be external thieves but internal gatekeepers who understand exactly which procedures to bypass and which seals to break when no one is watching.