1. Dunhuang Mogao grottoes were stolen.
1900, the Tibetan Sutra Cave, which had been sleeping for hundreds of years behind the north wall of the Mogao grottoes in Dunhuang, was discovered by the Taoist king. 1905, Russian Obruchev traded six bags of inferior paraffin for five bags of precious notebooks. 1907, the Englishman Stan bought thousands of exquisite Buddhist scriptures and silk paintings for 200 taels of silver. 1908, French sinologist Bo Shi paid 500 taels of silver to buy more than 6,000 volumes of scriptures in the Tibetan Sutra Cave, accounting for 10 wooden cases. 1923, Warner stripped off the exquisite murals of Mogao Grottoes 12.
The allied forces of Britain and France looted the Yuanmingyuan.
1860 On the occasion of the Second Opium War, British and French allied forces invaded Beijing and looted the Yuanmingyuan, known as the Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens. A large number of national treasures have been looted, and more than 10 Buddha statues, Shang and Zhou bronzes, exquisite porcelain, ancient books, paintings and calligraphy collected since Kangxi have all been lost. Among them, the most famous is that the Sikuquanshu collected by Wen Yuan Pavilion was looted or lost, and the masterpiece A Woman's History by Gu Kaizhi, a painter of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, also went to the British Museum.
3. Eight-Nation Alliance's invasion of China
1900 Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China, and China's national treasures and cultural relics were plundered by foreign powers again. The only copy of Yongle Dadian was burned and looted in the war. At present, there are about 400 books left in the world, scattered in 9 countries and regions around the world. After being stolen for the second time, the ancient city of Beijing "was swept away from its savings since the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, up to the legal relics and down to the national treasures".
4. Puyi sold it.
1922, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Puyi, smuggled six boxes of 1200 exquisite paintings and calligraphy out of the palace. From 1922 to 1945, these cultural relics accompanied Puyi to Beijing, Tianjin, Changchun and other places, during which they were sold many times. For example, "Five Horses" by Northern Song Dynasty painter Li currently lives in Japan and is kept by a Japanese collector; In the Northern Song Dynasty, Guo's Picture of Trees in Pingyuan, Mi Fei's Poems on Ships in Wujiang River in the Northern Song Dynasty and Castle Peak Tree in the Southern Song Dynasty are now in the Metropolitan Museum. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Song Huizong's "The Bird Map of Jin Ying Qiu" exists in Britain.
The above channels have led to a large number of cultural relics in China flowing overseas. Only by constantly becoming stronger can we protect our own things.