French luxury tycoon François Pinault personally handed over four 2,000-year-old solid gold birds of prey heads to the Chinese embassy in Paris

    FRANCE has secretly returned four solid gold antiquities looted from China and bought by billionaire luxury tycoon François Pinault as China steps up efforts to repatriate pillaged art.

    The return of the four gold heads of birds of prey, worth 1 million euros (US$1.1 million), reportedly proved a diplomatic nightmare since gifts to French Museums are in theory irrevocable.

    Pinault, who owns a string of luxury groups from Gucci to Saint Laurent, had donated the 7th century B.C. solid gold works to Paris’s Guimet museum of Asian art in 2000 as a favor to his friend Jacques Chirac — then French president and an Asian art lover.

    However, it transpired they were looted in 1992 from the tomb of a noble of the Zhou Dynasty (1,100-256 B.C.) in Gansu Province. According to China, they were part of a wave of thefts in the mid-1990s by farmers from sites in the western state of the Qins, who founded the first imperial dynasty in 221 B.C.

    According to several art experts cited by Le Parisien, they were spirited out of China by a corrupt civil servant and sold on to the unsuspecting Pinault.

    Chinese authorities filed a complaint via a French expert around 10 years ago to no avail, but continued to discreetly demand their restitution via diplomatic channels.

    Finally in April, according to the Art Newspaper, Pinault personally handed the four birds of prey heads to the Chinese embassy in Paris, without asking for any compensation.

    “He wanted to help France, but ended up being a benefactor to China,” one source told Le Parisien. Another collector, Christian Deydier, who had bought 28 other artifacts from the same seller, also handed them back May 15 to coincide with a visit to Beijing by the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius.

    The return proved a diplomatic headache, as in theory donations to French museums are irrevocable. In the end, the French culture ministry “retroactively annulled” the gifts and returned them to the donors, both with ongoing interests in China, who then “offered” them to the country.

    Having for decades viewed antiquities as relics of feudal oppression and bourgeois decadence, China now openly promotes efforts to repatriate pillaged works, either pressuring auction houses to cancel sales of contentious items or buying them via the China Poly Group.

    In particular, they are intent on retrieving scores of works lost in the sacking of the Old Summer Palace by British and French troops encircling Beijing in 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War.

    In 2013, Pinault’s son, François-Henri, whose company owns Christie’s Paris, returned to China a pair of animal heads worth 15 million euros wrenched from a zodiac fountain at the palace as a good-will gesture.

    Since 2010, Europe has seen a string of unexplained thefts of antiquities looted from the palace or from Beijing’s Forbidden City — most recently in March, when burglars made off with 15 gold, bronze and porcelain masterworks from the Chinese museum of the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the former royal retreat south of Paris.(SD-Agencies)