With China Treasures Under Wraps, Pa. Museum Takes 'Dummy Mummy' Route
Some of China's most treasured antiquities — the mummies of Xinjiang — have been museum-hopping in America for the past few months. It took decades of negotiations to get them here. And they've been seen by tens of thousands of visitors at museums in Santa Ana, Calif., and Houston.
But a much-anticipated final stop in Philadelphia — where the mummies were meant to headline the Secrets of the Silk Road exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology — has run into an unexpected roadblock involving the Chinese government.
The exhibition opened in time. The mummies are still in Houston, though. And the artifacts that were supposed to go on display with them? They're in Philadelphia — in giant wooden crates, unopened. It's a show on artifacts from China's Silk Road that's lacking any artifacts from China's Silk Road.
Ever since they found out they wouldn't be allowed to take the antiquities out of the crates, Quinn and her staff have been working overtime, building "dummy mummies" out of papier-mache. They set up worktables right across from the crated-up objects, printed out images from the catalog and from people's Flickr accounts, and cut them out with X-Acto knives. Then they mounted them on sticks or put them flat in a glass case. It's a little surreal....
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But a much-anticipated final stop in Philadelphia — where the mummies were meant to headline the Secrets of the Silk Road exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology — has run into an unexpected roadblock involving the Chinese government.
The exhibition opened in time. The mummies are still in Houston, though. And the artifacts that were supposed to go on display with them? They're in Philadelphia — in giant wooden crates, unopened. It's a show on artifacts from China's Silk Road that's lacking any artifacts from China's Silk Road.
Ever since they found out they wouldn't be allowed to take the antiquities out of the crates, Quinn and her staff have been working overtime, building "dummy mummies" out of papier-mache. They set up worktables right across from the crated-up objects, printed out images from the catalog and from people's Flickr accounts, and cut them out with X-Acto knives. Then they mounted them on sticks or put them flat in a glass case. It's a little surreal....