Chapter Ninety-Four: The Looting of Cultural Relics
The Old Summer Palace, located in Haidian District, Beijing, is a group of large imperial gardens of the Qing Dynasty, consisting of the Old Summer Palace and its attached gardens, Changchun Garden and Qichun Garden (later renamed Wanchun Garden), collectively known as the "Three Gardens of the Old Ming Palace". The Old Summer Palace is a magnificent large-scale work, using various gardening techniques and integrating various garden styles, and is the pinnacle work in the history of Chinese garden art. The Old Summer Palace not only brings together a number of famous garden scenery in the south of the Yangtze River, but also creatively transplants Western garden architecture, integrating the ancient and modern Chinese and foreign gardening arts. There are splendid palaces in the garden, and there are exquisite pavilions and pavilions; There are "buying and selling streets" that symbolize lively markets, and there are mountain villages that symbolize idyllic scenery; There are the autumn moon of Pinghu Lake and the sunset of Leifeng that imitate the West Lake of Hangzhou, and the scenic spots that imitate the lion forest of Suzhou; There are also imitations of ancient poets and painters, such as Penglai Yaotai, Wuling Chunse, etc. It can be said that the Old Summer Palace is the crystallization of the wisdom and blood and sweat of the Chinese working people, and it is also a model of Chinese people's architectural art and culture. Not only that, the Old Summer Palace also treasures countless priceless treasures of various styles, extremely rare historical classics and rich and precious historical relics, such as calligraphy and painting of the past dynasties, gold and silver jewelry, Song and Yuan dynasty porcelain, etc., can be called one of the treasure houses of human culture, it can also be said that it is one of the largest museums in the world.
Lin Hong and Liu Xiaoyu's daily life is in this miracle of the world created with the sweat of the Chinese nation, every time I think of Lin Hong I feel extremely proud and lucky, glad that his arrival has preserved this garden of ten thousand gardens, and has preserved the hard work of the Chinese nation.
Thinking of Britain and France, the two barbaric countries that boasted of being civilized in history, Lin Hong always had an unspeakable hatred in his heart, but now that Britain has been defeated by him, the French do not dare to stretch their hands to the east, and he can already be said to have succeeded, making the Chinese nation stand tall among the nations of the world.
However, Lin Hong hated the bronze head of the Chinese Old Summer Palace that Christie's auctioned off in later generations, and what he had to do now was to secretly transport those undiscovered European historical relics to China and let China keep them for them.
Lin Hong's first European intelligence team did to transport the remains of Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519, to China as much as possible, at the age of 67. After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the church where Leonardo da Vinci was buried was destroyed. Revolutionaries destroyed Leonardo da Vinci's Shroud in order to obtain his sarcophagus. Lin Hong remembers that according to the tombstone of the tomb in St. Hubert's church, Leonardo da Vinci's bones were reburied here in 1874. Now he had every chance of finding Leonardo da Vinci's remains and letting him rest in the East.
In fact, it is only 1848, and Vincent Willem van Gogh was not born until 1853; Ilya Efimovich Repin is now only four years old, and the famous French painters Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet are now just children; The French realist and impressionist painter Édouard Manet was working as a trainee sailor on a steamship to Brazil. Therefore, Lin Hong set the scope of the search to the relics of the Renaissance and the works of romanticism and realism at this stage.
Jean-François Millet (October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875), commonly known as Millet, was the most outstanding French realist painter of the 19th century known for his depiction of peasant subjects, a French Barbizon painter, and a famous French painter for his touching humanity in rural paintings. But now he is in the most confused period of his life.
Miller was destitute in Paris, overwhelmed by the devastation and poverty of his dead wife. In order to survive, he used sketches to change shoes to wear, oil paintings to change beds to sleep, and once painted signs for midwives to exchange some money, and in order to cater to the sensory stimulation of the bourgeoisie, he also painted vulgar and low-class nudes. On one occasion he heard people say that he said, "This is the Miller who can't paint anything but obscenity." It broke his heart. From then on, he decided not to cater to anyone anymore and resolutely followed his own artistic path.
Millet always wanted to paint the image of the French peasant as simple and industrious. When Henry, the head of the European Intelligence and Justice Station, found Miller, Miller had just finished "The Woman in the Dustpan", and Miller was still very warm to the nobleman (Henry's cover identity) Miller was still very warm when Miller learned that Henry was going to fund him, Miller was dumbfounded, because Miller's reputation in France at this time could be said to be quite bad, he couldn't believe that someone would come to fund him, and then Henry bought Miller's "The Woman in the Dustpan" for 10,000 francs (historically sold for 500 francs) Miller had to believe Henry's words.
With Henry's patronage, Miller used the money to settle in Barbizon, that is, during his settlement in Barbizon, Miller met painters such as Corot, Rousseau, and Trojon, and formed the famous "Barbizon School" in the history of European art with their paintings. However, such as "The Sower" (1850), "The Shepherdess" (1852), "The Gleaner" (1857), "The Evening Bell" (1859), "The Man with the Hoe" (1863), "Feeding" (1872), "Spring" (1873), etc., were sent to China and entered the Old Summer Palace in Beijing under the operation of Henry.
In 1912, Wilfridvoynich, an American rare book dealer, would have found the biggest discovery of his life in a Jesuit university library near Rome: a 230-page manuscript written in a strange font, with many bizarre pictures of plants, celestial bodies and bathing beauties. However, now this manuscript should now be called the Alexander Manuscript or the Bishop's Manuscript, because it was Alexander, the head of the Roman station, who was the secret son of the Empire in the Holy See, and he was now the candidate for alternate bishop. As a candidate for bishop, when he found it, he found it extraordinary. However, he could not understand the contents, which is normal considering that Voynich had urged the top cryptographers of the time to crack the strange manuscript after discovering it, but it did not seem to match any known language. After 90 years of hard work by many of the world's leading decoders, no one has been able to decipher the script, now known as Voynich, and the true nature and origin of this manuscript remains a mystery.
However, Lin Hong believes that with the help of the system, he should be able to unlock the secrets of this manuscript.
But what excited Lin Hong the most was that the European Intelligence Department came with news that the Ark of the Covenant had been found. O Ark of the Covenant! O legendary Ark of the Covenant! The Indiana Jones movie made Lin Hong know about the Ark of the Covenant for the first time, and he originally thought it was just a fiction of the movie. Now he couldn't wait to see the legendary Ark of the Covenant.
The ark of the law is also called the ark of the covenant. According to the Bible, only priests were allowed to approach the ark of the covenant, but ordinary people were not allowed to approach the ark because of their sins, and if they did, they would die immediately. However, the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant are still unknown until the disappearance, and whether it still exists today has become a major mystery that attracts the world. The Lost Ark of the Covenant is one of the greatest mysteries in biblical history. For believers, the Ark of the Covenant contains the "Ten Commandments" written by God himself, which hides the ultimate link between God and mankind. The Bible also records its great power in many places: such as razing mountains, destroying armies, exterminating cities, and so on. However, one day 3,000 years ago, the Ark of the Covenant mysteriously disappeared from Solomon's Temple, and since then it has become the greatest mystery in archaeological history. According to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, the Ark of the Covenant was destroyed along with the temple when the Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem. However, Lin Hong received the news that the Ark of the Covenant was smuggled out of Jerusalem, and it is said that it is now stored in Abyssinia is Ethiopia, Lin Hong has asked Zheng Qi to send someone to find it, and now all Lin Hong can do is to wait patiently for news from East Africa.
Legend has it that during the Second World War, the Germans believed that the Ark of the Covenant was a weapon that could rival thousands of troops, so they searched everywhere, hoping to use its divine power to influence the tide of the war. Lin Hong would not be stupid enough to believe that the Ark of the Covenant had any magical power, the reason why he went to great lengths to collect cultural relics from Europe and the United States was completely influenced by the thoughts of his previous life, and he was unhappy to see foreigners holding Chinese cultural relics for a while to display and auction for a while