Parts of looted Chu Silk Manuscripts handed back to China

The 2,300-year-old Chu Silk Manuscripts, which were illegally brought to the United States in 1946, were handed back to China on Friday.

China's National Cultural Heritage Administration received the fragments of "Wuxing Ling" (Almanac on Do and Don't) and "Gongshou Zhan" (Attack and Defense Divination) from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art at the Chinese Embassy in the United States in Washington DC.

Unearthed in 1942 from a Chu tomb at Zidanku in Changsha City, central China's Hunan Province, these silk manuscripts, more than a century older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, are the earliest-known examples of text on fabric discovered anywhere in the world.  

These exiled relics include an entire piece known as the "Four Seasons Almanac," along with some fragments of the "Almanac on Do and Don't" and "Attack and Defense Divination," and the original bamboo storage case. They present an early form of the Chinese almanac and attack and defense traditions through text and illustrations.

Measuring 47 by 38 centimeters, the "Four Seasons Almanac" is divided into three parts: a long inner text on the theme of the "year," a shorter inner text recounting a cosmic creation myth and the establishment of the four seasons, and a border of twelve zoomorphic month gods and four symbolic trees, each corresponding to a season.

According to the content of the manuscript, before the sun and moon existed, four spirits divided the year into four seasons through a relay of footsteps. When the heavenly bodies emerged, they brought chaos and imbalance. To restore cosmic order, the four spirits raised colossal trees to hold up the sky, giving rise to spring, summer, autumn and winter.

As the oldest surviving text on cloth, the Chu Silk Manuscripts are of great cultural significance. However, John Hadley Cox, an American antiquarian, tricked the then-owner Cai Jixiang into handing over the manuscripts and then smuggled them to the US in 1946. Cai spent decades trying to recover the manuscripts but failed. In 1965, the Chu Silk Manuscripts were purchased by Arthur M. Sackler, an American philanthropist. After his death in 1987, the manuscripts were placed in the Sackler Gallery in Washington DC, which is now part of the National Museum of Asian Art.

Also, from the Chu tomb at Zidanku, a beautifully crafted silk painting depicting a man riding a dragon was discovered during excavations in 1973. With the return of the looted manuscripts, Chinese scholars will be able to better study the flourishing Chu civilization more than 2,000 years ago.