As an ancient country with a history of 5,000 years of civilization, China has inherited its rich historical heritage. Most of them lay dormant underground until modern times when they were excavated by archaeologists and rediscovered; But there are also some items that have been passed down from generation to generation by the family, and after years of precipitation, they have finally been given the title of cultural relics by history and become valuable heirlooms.
In recent years, there has been controversy over whether heirlooms should be recognized as cultural relics and kept by the state or by individuals. There was such an incident in Hebei: a woman brought two heirlooms to verify the authenticity, but was judged to be unearthed cultural relics by the cultural relics management department and confiscated.
It took a woman 29 years to recover the two precious heirlooms, and the court finally ruled that the antiquities management department must return them.
Similarly, in November 1983, a rural woman was working in a field in the cold village of Beizhangli in Jinzhou City, Hebei Province, when she accidentally discovered an ancient tomb.
She immediately reported it to the authorities and handed over the artifacts she had found in the tomb. The woman was honored for her noble deeds.
The Liu family dug a tomb in their field and found items such as copper bottles and jade medicine mills, which looked old but the Liu family knew that they had important value.
The Liu family brought these items home, and the villagers of Beizhangli Village asked them about the ** of these old objects, and Liu Cuichai replied that they had dug them up in their own fields.
What is dug up in the ground is a treasure, and it will be handed over to the state. The villager muttered. At that time, cultural relics dealers were rampant, and the country lost a large number of precious cultural relics.
In order to protect cultural relics, on November 19, 1982, the Standing Committee of the Fifth National People's Congress passed the "Cultural Relics Protection", which stipulates that the cultural relics in the ground, internal waters and territorial waters within the territory of China belong to the state.
Liu Cuichai thought to herself: These may really be cultural relics, and we have to confirm them quickly. So, she went to the village chief and reported the discovery of the ancient tomb.
The village chief immediately reported the archaeological discoveries of Beizhangli Village to his superiors. ** Archaeologists were immediately dispatched, and under the leadership of Liu Cuichai, the field where the tomb was found was carefully explored and studied.
After comparative analysis, archaeologists confirmed that the tomb was a tomb in the middle of the Tang Dynasty. Some of the items that Liu Cuichai brought back are precious cultural relics. After learning this information, Liu Cuichai's family did not hesitate to hand over the cultural relics to the local cultural relics management department.
In order to commend Liu Cuichai's family for taking the initiative to report and hand over cultural relics, the local ** gave them a cash reward of 600 yuan.
Seeing that other villagers in the village began to look for old objects at home, Liu Cuichai from Beizhangli Village was also moved. After all, in 1983, 10 yuan could buy 700 catties of cabbage, and the annual income of a peasant family was only 600 yuan.
However, as time went on, things turned out more than she expected. On November 11, 1983, Liu Cuichai took her family's heirloom to the Hebei Provincial Museum in Shijiazhuang, hoping to identify its value.
However, the results of the appraisal disappointed Liu Cuichai - her family heirloom was confiscated. This news made Liu Cuichai feel helpless and disappointed, but it did not discourage her enthusiasm for identifying cultural relics.
For 29 years, she has been working to find the whereabouts of the heirloom and hopes to get a satisfactory answer.
According to the description of the museum staff, when he saw Liu Cuichai that day, she looked very tired and carried a tightly wrapped package. The staff immediately took her to the reception room and asked her about the purpose of her visit to the museum.
Liu Cuichai said that she came to identify cultural relics. The staff told her to take a break in the reception room and then go to the artifact identification expert. Soon after, Gao Yingmin, the museum's archaeologist, pushed open the door to the reception room.
After briefly introducing himself, he asked Liu Cuichai which artifact he wanted to identify.
Liu Cuichai opened the package, took out two antique items, and begged Gao Yingmin to help identify the authenticity. Gao Yingmin observed carefully and found that these two items have a strong historical atmosphere, one is a black pottery bowl, and the other is a stone medicine mill.
He noticed some dirt on the stone mill. Although he already had a preliminary conclusion in mind, for the sake of rigor, he said to Liu Cuichai: "The identification of cultural relics needs to be compared in detail, and the results may take a day or two."
I can write you a note first and let you know when the results are out. Liu Cuichai expressed her understanding and gratitude, and looked forward to Gao Yingmin's appraisal results.
Gao Yingmin's pen record: received a gift of white stone medicine and black pottery bowl from Liu Cuichai of the Beizhangli Brigade in Jin County. and handed the note to Liu Cuichai. Liu Cuichai took the note, thanked Gao Yingmin, and went straight home.
After Gao Yingmin checked the information and compared, it was found that the two items were genuine. It can be determined that the stone medicine mill is an object of the Tang Dynasty, and its surface decoration style is very similar to the confirmed Tang Dynasty cultural relics.
The black pottery bowl is even older, because the stone kilns of the Tang Dynasty almost did not produce black pottery, and the black pottery bowl given by Liu Cuichai can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period.
Gao Yingmin reported the situation of the two items and his own analysis to his superiors, and after verification, the appraisal results were revealed: the two items are first-class cultural relics and have national significance.
After getting the results, Gao Yingmin was puzzled: why did an ordinary peasant woman have such a precious treasure in her home? At this time, a piece of news caught Gao Yingmin's attention: a few days ago, an ancient tomb in the middle of the Tang Dynasty was discovered in Jinzhou City, and a large number of precious cultural relics were unearthed.
Gao Yingmin found that Liu Cuichai in the news report and Liu Cuichai, who asked him to identify cultural relics, were both from Beizhangli Village, Jinzhou City, and they were obviously the same person! Soon after the ancient tomb was discovered, she came to him to identify the cultural relics, and a cultural relic still had soil on it, which inevitably made people suspicious of the cultural relics.
Gao Yingmin pondered: These two cultural relics may have been hidden in Liu Cuichai's house after we excavated the ancient tomb, not from her ancestors as she said.
After coming to this conclusion, Gao Yingmin already has his own judgment on how to deal with these two cultural relics. A few days later, Liu Cuichai came to Gao Yingmin with a receipt, and estimated that the authenticity of the two heirlooms had been identified.
When Gao Yingmin saw her coming, he told her: "The identification results of the two items have come out, one is from the Tang Dynasty, and the other is most likely from the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, both of which are genuine." ”
Hearing that both were genuine, Liu Cuichai was very happy, so she asked to retrieve the two heirlooms.
Gao Yingmin said: "These two items are no longer in my hands, and I handed them over to the relevant departments for management. Liu Cuichai was a little surprised when she heard it. At first, she thought that Gao Yingmin was making an excuse because she didn't want to return her family heirloom.
However, after seeing Gao Yingmin show the acceptance documents from the relevant departments, Liu Cuichai realized that her family's treasure may have really been handed over to the relevant departments by Gao Yingmin. Liu Cuichai felt angry and disappointed, and she asked Gao Yingmin: "You handed over my baby without my consent, what right do you have?" ”
Gao Yingmin retorted: "These are not your family heirlooms, but your private cultural relics, which should belong to the state." ”
Liu Cuichai and Gao Yingmin quarreled over two precious heirlooms, and finally Gao Yingmin decided to hand over the cultural relics to the relevant departments for management. Liu Cuichai tried to retrieve the heirloom from the antiquities department, but was politely refused because she could not provide valid evidence.
Despite several attempts, she was rejected and finally seemed to give up.
This rural woman's attachment to family heirlooms is beyond imagination, and it doesn't really end there. In October 2003, Gao Yingmin suddenly received a court summons, and someone took him to court.
Although Gao Yingmin has always been cautious, when he saw Liu Cuichai's name on the summons, he remembered what happened 20 years ago. In addition, the Jinju Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports has also received a summons, and the ownership of cultural relics is still disputed.
Although the two heirlooms that Liu Cuichai asked Gao Yingmin to identify back then were finally kept by the Jinzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports and received the most attention, in her heart, the loss of these two heirlooms always made her unwilling.
After 20 years of precipitation, Liu Cuichai decided to take Gao Yingmin and the Jinzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports to court, on the grounds that she did not agree to hand over the heirloom during the appraisal process, and provided the receipt that Gao Yingmin wrote to her that year as evidence.
Although it has been a long time since the incident, Liu Cuichai has always insisted on safeguarding her rights and interests and hopes to get a fair ruling.
Ms. Liu took the Jinju Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports to court because the bureau refused her request to take the two cultural relics on the grounds that she had not handed them in. Her demands are: first, to return her family heirloom, and second, Gao Yingmin to compensate her for 3,000 yuan of economic losses.
Considering that this was a case of "civil prosecution of officials" and that the object of dispute was a state-level cultural relic, the Jinzhou Municipal People's Court reported it to the Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court. The Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court convened a special meeting for this purpose and transferred the case to the Xinji City People's Court for trial.
On July 21, 2004, the Xinji Municipal People's Court heard the case for the first time. The two sides engaged in a heated debate at the courtroom, each holding its own opinion.
Liu Cuichai insisted that the two heirlooms were passed on to her by her grandfather, who was a doctor before his death, and left her the medical books along with the black pottery bowl and stone medicine mill, and presented the medical books left by her grandfather as evidence.
She accused Ko of handing over the two items without her permission.
Moreover, these two cultural relics have existed for more than a thousand years, and the ancestors of Liu Cuichai's family did not have any big names, how could there be such a long-term inheritance of items? ”
However, Liu Cuichai does not accept Gao Yingmin's view, and she insists that the two artifacts are her family heirlooms. She said that when she saw that the things unearthed from the ancient tomb were very similar to these two cultural relics, she thought of identifying them.
The artifacts unearthed from the ancient tomb were first kept at her home, and a lot of dirt was dropped when cleaning the artifacts at home, so the soil on the stone medicine mill may have accidentally stuck to her while cleaning.
Liu Cuichai persisted for 29 years, hoping to return the family's ancestral old objects, including ancient vases, tin pots, lion copper plates and ancestral deeds. Although the two sides were well-founded in the trial, the judge did not give a final decision that day and announced a retrial at a later date.
In the end, the Xinji Municipal People's Court ruled that the dispute over the ownership of the cultural relics was an administrative lawsuit, not a civil case, and therefore rejected Liu Cuichai's lawsuit. This means that these artifacts are still in the custody of the Jinju Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports.
Liu Cuichai could not accept the result, so on 28 June 2005, she again appealed to the Jinzhou Municipal People's Court. The Zhengding County People's Court is responsible for hearing the case.
In this appeal, Liu Cuichai requested that the administrative act of nationalizing the two cultural relics be revoked. She explained that there were six cultural relics unearthed from the ancient tombs of the Tang Dynasty, and she had handed them over to the Jinzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports.
However, the Jinju Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports insisted that a total of 8 artifacts were unearthed, but when checking its registration records for that year, only 7 records of unearthed artifacts were found! Therefore, whether the Bureau of Culture and Sports still has the eighth cultural relics in its collection has become an unsolved mystery.
According to the provisions of the "Cultural Relics Protection**", citizens have the right to request the cultural relics department to appraise the cultural relics held by them in accordance with the law. If, after appraisal, these cultural relics are indeed legally held by individual citizens, they shall be returned in a timely manner.
According to the regulations, if the cultural relics are unearthed from tombs, the cultural relics management department has the right to confiscate them in accordance with the law, but it must be carried out in accordance with the prescribed administrative procedures and make a written decision.
However, when the Jinju Municipal Bureau of Culture and Sports confiscated Liu Cuichai's two items, it did not follow any procedures and did not provide registration records to prove that the two items were cultural relics unearthed from the ancient tomb.
Therefore, the Zhengding County People's Court made a judgment to revoke the administrative act of the two items being recognized as unearthed cultural relics and being owned by the state. Although both sides disagreed with the decision, they both argued that the court did not make a clear judgment as to whether the two artifacts were heirlooms or whether they should have owned them.
Gao Yingmin and other defendants also expressed dissatisfaction with the verdict, because the cultural relics they had kept for 20 years were now found not to belong to the state.
During the trial of this case, both parties expressed their dissatisfaction with the verdict, so the Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court decided to retry the case. After a new round of trial, on June 18, 2008, the court ruled that the defendant's act of storing black pottery bowls and stone medicine mills was illegal, and required the defendant to return the two precious cultural relics within 60 days.
Although Liu Cuichai expressed satisfaction with the result, Gao Yingmin and relevant departments held a different view. They are concerned that Ms. Liu's ability to take care of the artifacts is insufficient, and that the verdict will lead to more requests for them.
After 29 years, Liu Cuichai finally got back the family heirloom, but the Hebei Provincial Cultural Relics Management Department has not given up and has submitted a report to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage for coordination. The dispute over the ownership of the two artifacts is likely to continue.
Cultural relics are irreplaceable historical heritage, and we hope that whoever keeps them can properly protect them with a non-utilitarian heart, so that the traces of history can be passed on.