In Beijing

ARE they for real or just putting on a show?

Those questions are being asked of a group of Chinese lawyers who have become the public face of China’s fight to bring home two Qing dynasty bronze sculptures auctioned off for a record sum in Paris last week.

When the rat and rabbit head bronzes were being put up for auction, the lawyers wrote letters of protest and demanded that they be removed from the sale. At the eleventh hour, they applied – but failed to get – a French court injunction to stop the event.

Just before last Wednesday’s auction, one of them flew to Paris to try to do what he could.

And now, days after the pair of rat and rabbit fountainheads looted from Beijing’s old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) almost 150 years ago were bought by mysterious phone bidders for 15.7 million euros apiece, the lawyers are still in hot pursuit.

"We’re hunting for the buyers. We’ll negotiate with him, persuade him to return the relics to China. If that’s not possible, we’ll have to consider legal means," Beijing lawyer Li Xingfeng, told The Straits Times.

He is one of about 90 legal hounds from around the country who have joined the pack – the first time such a group has gathered to chase after China’s cultural relics.

To be sure, they are riding on a wave of patrioitism, and a – contrived or real – sense of lingering injustice from the "century of humiliation" that China suffered at the hands of Western imperialists, a chapter in modern Chinese history vividly symbolised in textbooks here by the sacking of Yuanmingyuan.

Netizens shout their approval from the Web, asking the government to punish auction house Christie’s for defying China’s protests. There seems to be a sense, among Netizens and regular Beijingers one chats with, that as China’s economic and military prowess rises, it wants to speak more loudly on the world stage – and be heard.

As one poster on the popular Sina.com news website wrote: "Our country is strong now, we must be tougher on countries that are gangsters and robbers."

The government too is on side, issuing repeated warnings for Christies to not auction off the bronzes and then, eventually, slapping controls on the London-based auction house immediately after the sale was made.

But does China have a legal claim to the two bronzes?

Local and foreign experts say "no", noting that the three international conventions protecting looted cultural relics – the earliest of which dates to 1954 – cannot be invoked or applied retroactively.

And the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) said as much in a statement on the auction of the Yuanmingyuan sculptures.

But it added that it does "encourage the return of cultural property to its countries of origin" through a 22-country Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation, which can step in to help if negotiations between the two countries involved fail.

Unesco also said it had not received a request for help from China on the two fountainheads as yet.

Professor Wang Yunxia, an expert in cultural relics law at Beijing's Renmin University, said: "I feel there is insufficient legal basis in this case. If the group of lawyers raises a legal case again even now that the sculptures have been sold, it’s a waste of time and society’s resources."

But leader of the lawyers’ group Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer specialising in commerical law, dismissed accusations in the local media that he and his team were just "putting up a show".

He said last week before flying to Paris to witness the auction: "To us, this is not a difficult case. It’s like just another commerical case. It’s just that it’s about a cultural relic. That’s all."

Ultimately, though, it seems the self-appointed legal guardians of the rat and rabbit fountainheads may be out more to make a point than to win a case.

Retired Qing historian Wang Daocheng, a respected authority on the imperial gardens and palaces, said that besides leaning on diplomacy, the legal avenue is one that China now has to experiment with in its bid to recover its 10 million or so antiquities "lost" overseas.

He noted that the rat and rabbit heads were sold for a record price of 15.7 million euros each – well above the earlier estimates of 8 to 10 million euros apiece. More importantly, the sum is much higher than the HK$7million (S$1.4million) to US$8.84 million (S$13.5 million) apiece that state-backed company Poly Group and Macau gambling king Stanley Ho paid to recover five of the set of 12 animal heads earlier. (The remaining five heads have not been found.)

Prof Wang said: "They are clearly trying to exploit Chinese people’s patriotism and to extort our money. It’s clear that our previous strategy of buying back our relics cannot work anymore.

"We must continue to pursue our relics through legal action.

"Even if it doesn’t work, it will remind the French of what their ancestors did to us."