China buys back $1m old painting

China buys back $1m old painting

BEIJING (Reuter): China's Palace Museum has bought back a 500- year-old Ming dynasty painting, once among its top 100 treasures, from a private owner for 8.8 million yuan (US$1.06 million) at auction, the China Daily said on Monday.

The landscape painting by Shen Zhou, an artist of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), had been stored at the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in 1973 during the chaotic Cultural Revolution, when ultra-leftist Red Guards destroyed "bourgeois" relics of the imperial past.

The painting was returned to its original owner, a private collector, after the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976, the newspaper said.

The museum paid the princely sum for the work at a three-day auction held by Beijing's Hanhai Art Auction Corporation over the weekend, the newspaper said.