Restaurant Owner Who Reported a Missing Yuan Vase Says Five Agencies Came Knocking
A man in Heze, Shandong, reported that a 600-year-old Yuan-dynasty blue-and-white cup shown in a 2011 CCTV documentary had vanished from the provincial inventory of a famous shipwreck excavation. Since then he says five government agencies have inspected his barbecue restaurant about fifteen times, and he has shut it down.
When a construction crew cut into central Heze in September 2010, they found a merchant ship that had sunk in a river there more than 600 years earlier, during the Yuan dynasty. The excavation yielded more than 110 artefacts — porcelain, ironware, coins — with an estimated value approaching one billion yuan, including three pieces of Yuan blue-and-white ware, among them a dragon-pattern meiping vase now designated a first-grade national relic and the pride of the Heze Museum.
Fifteen years later, the excavation has a problem nobody can quite account for: one cup appears to be missing.
Zhang, a Heze resident who runs a barbecue restaurant, noticed while rewatching the CCTV documentary Approaching Discovery that aired in December 2011 that a blue-and-white cup sat half-buried in the earth beside a fish-and-algae design stem bowl as it was lifted from the ground. That cup, he says, appears on no transfer inventory and in no museum collection. In late June he filed a real-name report with Shandong's provincial culture and tourism department and posted the comparison online. By early August, both the provincial department and the Heze culture and tourism bureau confirmed they were investigating — and people familiar with the original dig told the Langchao News report that broke the story that the excavation had other irregularities: original site photographs lost, no accession register at all. More than one artefact may be unaccounted for.
What happened to Zhang next is the reason the story is still trending. From early July, he says, inspectors began arriving at his barbecue park — five different agencies in rotation: market regulation, comprehensive law enforcement, agriculture and rural affairs, natural resources, and the fire service, roughly fifteen visits in two months, three of them in a single day. The cited complaints were eclectic: an unlicensed kitchen, the sale of dog meat, an unauthorised shed, hygiene, smoke nuisance. Most, he says, were unsubstantiated. On 7 September he closed the restaurant. "In two months, five enforcement agencies came to my barbecue park about fifteen times," he told Langchao News. Before June, he says, it had never been inspected at all.
On Weibo, the case has been read through a lens Chinese readers apply easily and warily: the whistleblower who is made to pay for reporting. One widely shared post put the two questions bluntly: protecting whistleblowers cannot stay a slogan, and both matters need investigating — where the relics went, and who is behind the wave of anonymous complaints (one such post drew close to a thousand likes). Commentators have also marvelled at the object itself: Yuan blue-and-white porcelain is among the rarest ceramics in the world, and the Heze shipwreck's three pieces were hailed as "shocking China and the world" when they were found.
The Heze natural resources and planning bureau, contacted on 11 September about a complaint that Zhang's canopy was an illegal structure, said it had acted on a tip passed through the city's 12345 government hotline, and that it was "unclear" who had filed it or why.