The rape and return of China's cultural property: how can bilateral agreements stem the bleeding of China's cultural heritage in a flawed system?

Beneath the impoverished villages of the Henan province in the People’s Republic of China lays a wealth of Chinese antiquity. Louyang, once the capital city of at least nine royal Chinese dynasties, exists underneath earth, rock, and gravel in the form of historical antiquity and yet undiscovered imperial tombs. Despite the aesthetic splendor and incalculable scholarly value these tombs possess to archaeologists and scholars, the fields of Louyang have been repeatedly raped of much of their buried treasure. Tomb raiders, poor farmers, and rural families with little money and crude weaponry, seek and loot countless cultural relics beneath their fields each year in hopes of earning a buck. Because one major discovery can amount to a year’s worth of farming income, the temptation to pillage relics is often too great to resist. Even more startling is the fact that the destruction and pillaging of Chinese cultural relics has increased in recent decades. China’s National Cultural Relics Bureau estimated that between 1998 and 2003 over 220,000 Chinese tombs have been broken into and looted with the pieces illicitly sold throughout the world.