China shuts museum with ‘fake’ exhibitions

BEIJING - Agence France-Presse

Chinese authorities have closed a museum which contained scores of fake exhibits, including a vase decorated with cartoon characters billed as a Qing dynasty artifact, state-run media reported today.
 
The facility, built in northern China’s Hebei province at a cost of $88 million, has “no qualification to be a museum as its collections are fake”, a local official told the Global Times newspaper.

It had been closed, the paper said, while its founders have been placed “under investigation” after local residents accused them of wasting money.

Pictures posted by the state-run China Radio International (CRI) showed a vase decorated with bright green cartoon animals, including a creature resembling a laughing squid, which the museum displayed as a Qing dynasty relic. Several items lining the museum’s 12 exhibition halls were supposedly signed by the Yellow Emperor, who according to tradition reigned in the 27th century BC, the Shanghai Daily reported. But the signatures used the simplified Chinese characters brought in by the Communist Party after it took over in 1949, it pointed out.