Part of the Terracotta Army
The exhibition The Warrior Emperor and China's Terracotta Army will not be coming to the Glenbow Museum in Calgary or the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, as planned. Chinese cultural officials have cancelled the stops because of "strict new enforcement" of a regulation limiting the time Terracotta Army artifacts can remain outside China, according to the Royal BC Museum.
Under the rules, the artifacts can only be outside China for one year.
The exhibition opened at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in June. It was scheduled to be at the Glenbow Museum from July 30, 2011 until November, and was then scheduled for a four-month run at the Royal BC Museum beginning Dec. 23, 2011.
The exhibition will now return to China following its run at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which begins Feb. 11, 2011.
Pauline Rafferty, CEO of the Royal BC Museum, said in a written statement that she accepts the decision but is "extremely disappointed."
The Terracotta Army, consisting of thousands of full-sized figures depicting the armies of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, was discovered in a farmer's field in northern China in 1974, some 2,000 years after the intricate works were created. It is considered to be of enormous cultural importance and one of the greatest archeological finds in history.
Marsha Lederman