Cultural guardians must be kept on tight reins

A museum is supposed to be a safe haven for the past. In Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, the past has instead exposed some uncomfortable weaknesses in the present.

On Wednesday, Xinhua reported that Xu Huping, former director of the Nanjing Museum, had been sentenced to three years in prison for taking bribes and fined 200,000 yuan ($29,800). Xu accepted money and property in exchange for helping certain parties obtain project contracts and business opportunities.

Other officials connected with the museum and the Jiangsu cultural heritage departments have also been punished for dereliction of duty and inadequate oversight. In all, 29 people have reportedly been held accountable.

Public office is not a license for private enrichment. The more important lesson concerns what happens when the guardians of cultural heritage become its gate-openers.

The case follows an investigation into the unauthorized transfer and sale of calligraphy and paintings, including the disappearance of The Spring in Jiangnan scroll by the renowned Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) painter Qiu Ying.

The details are less a tale of one ingenious thief than of a system that allowed several ordinary safeguards to fail simultaneously.

In the 1990s, Xu approved transfer applications without following the required appraisal and review procedures. A staff member who was both a repository custodian and a salesperson allegedly altered a painting's price from 25,000 yuan to 2,500 yuan. The work was then purchased by an associate for 2,250 yuan.

When the painting reappeared in a preview exhibition of a Beijing auction house in May 2025, its estimated value was 88 million yuan.

The donor's heirs stumbled on the painting at the auction. That discovery — and the trail of similar cases it exposed — is the major reason why Xu's conduct came to light. Holding those responsible to account will help restore public trust in public museums.

Appraisal, registration, storage, transfer and sale were not independent stages of control. They became links in a chain that could be manipulated.

The unsettling point is that regulations existed but they failed their purpose because of those entrusted to enforce them.

Museums are not warehouses in which objects simply sit untouched. A collection is a living administrative system. Items are reappraised, cataloged, relocated, loaned, transferred and, under tightly defined circumstances, removed from collections.

Each change creates an opportunity for error or abuse. Cultural-heritage security therefore requires not merely careful storage, but an auditable chain of custody. But in a specialized institution, where outsiders may find it difficult to question an expert's judgment, such a system can be manipulated for personal gain.

European museums offer their own warnings. A different but related problem emerged in a major European investigation announced in November 2025: Bulgarian authorities, supported by Europol and several countries, arrested 35 suspects in a suspected cultural-goods trafficking network and recovered more than 3,000 artifacts. Investigators said the network was linked to illicit excavations and the movement of objects across borders.

These cases differ from Nanjing's alleged abuse of administrative power, but they underline a common truth: cultural heritage is vulnerable wherever custody, provenance, valuation and supervision are weak.

Security against burglary, controls over professional decisions and scrutiny of cross-border transactions require different tools. But all demand the same institutional habits: clear responsibility, independent checks, reliable records and timely intervention.

The Nanjing Museum case also gives new meaning to the phrase "lifelong accountability". Xu retired in 2008, yet the law has caught up with him 18 years later. That is a reminder that responsibility for cultural heritage does not necessarily expire with a retirement ceremony.

But accountability after the fact cannot substitute for controls before and during an incident. If lifelong accountability becomes little more than a means of settling old scores, it will have failed as a preventive institution.

China's revised Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics, which took effect in March 2025, strengthens penalties, including a dual-penalty system covering both organizations and individuals, and provides for professional bans in certain circumstances. Such measures raise the cost of misconduct and make it harder for those removed from the sector to return through another door. Yet deterrence works best when reinforced by prevention and monitoring.

Authentication and valuation require specialists, but professional authority must not become administrative immunity. Those who authenticate should not automatically control transfers; those who manage collections should not approve their own transactions; and significant decisions should be subject to independent review.

The authorities have begun a nationwide campaign to inventory State-owned museum collections and verify that records match physical objects. New management measures due to take effect in November 2026 are expected to standardize records across an object's life cycle, strengthen handover responsibilities and tighten rules governing deaccessioning.

These reforms should be judged less by their wording than by their execution. Museums should ask: Do old donation and transfer records exist? Do catalogues, photographs, ledgers and objects agree? Which items have not been inventoried for years? Who can alter a record, and who checks the alteration?

The Nanjing Museum case is therefore more than a disciplinary episode. It is a stress test of institutional design. Cultural treasures cannot be protected by trust alone, nor by punishment alone. They need rules that are followed, powers that are divided and records that can withstand scrutiny. Otherwise, the people appointed to guard the walls may discover how easy it is to open the gates.