Palace Museum admits human error in damage to thousand-year old antique
A researcher accidently damaged a rare thousand-year old porcelain in the Palace Museum in Beijing's Forbidden City, the museum said in a statement on July 31.
The incident occurred on July 4 while researchers were conducting scientific testing and analysis to the antique, the statement said.
The state's top-level celadon-glazed dish, a masterpiece of the Ge kiln porcelain of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), was squeezed by a testing instrument due to an error in operation by the researcher, according to an investigation conducted by the museum after the accident.
Researchers immediately ceased the testing and reported what had happened to the chiefs of the department and the museum.
The investigative report, which includes the cause of the accident and proposals to improve work and prevent future accidents, will soon be submitted to the Ministry of Culture and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH). The punishment for those responsible is under discussion, the statement said.
The damage was caused when a researcher input an incorrect order to the instrument which upraised the dish sample to a level too high and squeezed it to pieces, said Miao Jianmin, director with the museum's department for antique's scientific protection.
Miao said the researcher is a female graduate with master's degree who has worked in the lab since 2004. She has received professional training to operate the instrument and made no mistakes in such kind of research before.
The damaged porcelain, categorized as China's first-class cultural relic, was squeezed into six parts. But the museum has the ability to restore it, according to Lou Wei, another department director with the museum.
The instrument that squeezed the antique was imported from the United States, which is also bought by seven to eight other research institutes in China, said Miao.
Through a month-long investigation, the accident was finally concluded to be caused by human error, said Chen Lihua, deputy curator of the Palace Museum.
A SACH database currently has 48,006 entries of cultural relics with top-level protection, which have been collected from museums across the country.
Existing Ge kiln porcelains are mainly stored in the Palace Museums in Beijing and Taipei. Beijing's museum has 63 pieces. It's believed there are no more than 300 Ge kiln porcelains in existence in the world.
The museum's researchers have introduced high-tech observation and analysis instruments in their research of cultural relics and have already successfully finished testing more than 50 pieces of ceramic relics with the help of the same testing instrument.
Currently, the museum's researchers were told to suspend all testing operations and conduct an overhaul to the instruments due to the accident.
The museum's spokesman Feng Naien said the museum would learn a lot of lessons from the accident but this would not stop its scientific research.
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