 I would like to welcome you to this event organized by the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. It's titled, of Jesus and Opium, Missionaries and the Opium Wars. In the title, you have all the components of the exhibition, which was organized by the curator of this exhibition, namely Iris Yao, who has a lot of experience with both the subject matter and the historical background. She's a lecturer and curator at the University of the Arts, London. She's also a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the Royal Society of the Arts. Her background in clothes is coming to the fore in this exhibition too. Before she joined the academic world, she was active in the procurement of clothes on the international market and therefore she knows very well also the history of the clothes production, especially silk and the usage of certain commodities that were being transported from China to the West. We're going to start off with this point, but I would also like to say that the experience of my counterpart in this conversation is visible in every single object that you can see in this exhibition and it's my great pleasure to be able to introduce these to you. If you have any questions, you can send them to us afterwards, perhaps as well. Of course, this will be a different format now, but it doesn't matter. We are very happy to have you here at SOAS in order to show you some artifacts which show us the development of the trade between, especially Britain, the West, but especially Britain and China during a very crucial point in time. Myself, just two words, my name is Dr. Lars Peter Laman. I work for the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies. You can visit the AHRP website, History, Religions and Philosophies in order to find out a little bit more. My own background in terms of Chinese history is that I have lived in the North of China and Beijing, but I visited Hong Kong on a number of occasions, so I'm also familiar with the setting of today's session. I'm going to start off by introducing the star of the exhibition, namely the opium copy. You can see that the specimen that you have here, namely the Papa Versumiferum, the sleep-inducing copy, is the plant out of which the raw opium was produced, which in turn was refined in order to produce the smoking opium, Chengdu in Malay, which was to become the hallmark of 19th century leisure life in China. Here in this image, you can see in this very nice little object, you can see a reclining couple and this just shows an aspect of opium culture, namely that it was used for relaxed conversation between friends, between couples, sometimes even with the entire family, but also in opium houses, which were more or less the extensions of tea houses, so this becomes part of China's public sphere during the 19th century. Now, if we look at the way that opium is produced, the opium paste is produced by extracting the sap that flows out of the poppy once it is cut with a sharp implement, something like a scalpel or a razor blade, and it has to be collected before sunrise, because otherwise it becomes too solid to be condensed into the paste that is then boiled and preserved, and it's this substance that from roughly the end of the 18th century onwards, from the 1790s onwards was being exported to China. My question, my first question to you is, what do you think the long-term impact of this early opium trade was? How do the Chinese people remember this period today? Wow, that is a long question, a long answer I think, but then this is the result of Hong Kong becoming British colony, and then a century of untreaty, uneco-treaty of China, China, and West, mainly England, Britain, and America, and France. Also, it's very interesting, because opium, you know, it was a plant, and it became a currency to buy things from China, and also became a weapon, so it's, you know, along the way, and it really changed the history, and in a big time. So it's a very ambivalent plant to start with, or the bivalent drug that was extracted from the plant, initially over the centuries, and you can trace this back historically to the Tang period, so to the 8th century, 6th, 7th century, where you have Arab traders who transport medical opium, medicinal opium, wrapped into beeswax to keep it dry during the passage. This was used in India, in southern China, this used in various other parts of eastern Asia, especially southeast Asia, in order to enrich the local medical traditions, so Ayurvedic medicine in India, Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, but also the medical traditions of southeast Asia. They all have certain recipes where opium plays a role. Now, opium had a few functions made it medicinal, which made it a very precious commodity. For example, it reduces fever, if you're suffering from malaria, from cholera, it can reduce that fever. Another function is that it stills diarrhea, because diarrhea may you may think it's something that you is very inconvenient, but actually in the pre-model world it was one of the biggest killers, and if you're in underdeveloped areas or at the wrong place, at the wrong time, it can actually kill. So this is one of the functions of opium, it's also a hunger suppressant, so curious, who carried weights, it looked very skinny, but actually with a little bit of opium, the impression, it gave the body the impression that they could cope without food. So there are also other medicinal functions, but probably the most important one is that it acts as an analgesic, so it has a very powerful sleep-inducing quality, reduces pain levels, and of course it's used today as well as such, so morphine, you find morphine preparations in any hospital, because this is simply what the, without morphine, the modern surgical tradition wouldn't have emerged, because you can't operate without sedating patients and sending them to sleep. And then the final function, again today, if you go into any pharmacy, if you have a strong cough, you have medicine that contains codeine, codeine is an opium product, it's an opiate, and this is why people in the past used opium, now how did they use it? In the West they used to drink it, not out of the bottle, but it was blended with other medical substances, and also a little bit of sugar, because it was very bitter, that's the so-called lodenum, and now it's done in Latin, means the praiseworthy drug, and this praiseworthiness is quite simply because it was used as a panacea, a medicine that could cure absolutely everything, and this is the basis upon which opium was being traded, for centuries, for many centuries, going back actually into Roman and Byzantine antiquity origins you find in Anatolia, but the Chinese knew the opium, medicinal opium very well, but it was never actually abused until the 18th century, when it was being blended with tobacco, and then in just a few decades later it was being developed into a smoking paste, which could be smoked in long opium pipes, we'll talk about that in a little while, so when I asked my organizer of this exhibition to show us an image of this opium consumption, she produced a wonderful piece which is from Q, I think from Q Garden, can you say a little bit more about the Q Garden's collection? Yes, Q Garden, they have so many just like in this country, many hidden gems, you know, archive, and this is just one of many I discover, or we discover at Q Garden archive, is the economic botany collection, so basically anything make up plants and they will have an item there, so you can see that when it's made of wood, and it's just like what I just said, from an opium, from what I've seen before, it's an ensemble, you know, humble, can we say humble, humble plants, to become a luxury habit, and so this is a really good example, we see this handcraft, it's dating back to the late 19th century, the chain, the highs of society, because it's so rare and so expensive, it's only the high, you know, which are famous, you know, can really afford to have it, and you can, this is just a good example, because you can see, you know, not the costume, the clothes, you know, even though the food is, you know, food binding, because there is a status thing, and then they use opium pipe to smoke, and the furniture they use, yes, so this is one of the many wonderful things I discovered in Cuba, talking about the price, and the fact that it was considered a luxury item during the 19th century, this is something that was actually changed, because in the beginning opium was relatively it was produced in the west, in the eastern Mediterranean, and then also in some areas of Iran, and it was shipped into the eastern half of Asia, where it was being used, both for medicinal purposes, but then also in Southeast Asia for pleasure, not in the same way that we know it, it was blended with tobacco, and sometimes perhaps also with other medicinal herbs, but importantly it was relatively cheap, and this is something which the English traders belonging to the East India Company learned, that it was difficult to market this type of cheap commodity, which was also a medicine, it's like selling cough medicine as an expensive drink, it doesn't work, you have to make something special out of it, so what they did in the 1790s was to cross over different types of opium, which produced a very strong narcotic effect, this narcotic effect was of course been enhanced by the fact that the opium became more expensive, so it could be sold as a luxury item for the upper classes, but it had to be smuggled, because after 1728, an edict, an imperial edict in China by the Nijong Emperor prohibited any kind of opium products that could be smoked for pleasure, and therefore opium that arrived in China had to be medicinal opium, it was very different, so they could immediately tell that to a part, but from the 1790s onwards the traders belonging to the East India Company, but not in the name of the East India Company, they began to smuggle it into southern China, southern Chinese waters where it was taken up by pirates, then smuggled it into the interior along the waterways, and what we can see in the background here are images from India where you see, this is not all opium, but some of it is where it's being planted on territory that belonged to the East India Company or to princes who had contracts with the East India Company, so it comes from Bengal, it comes from the from the subcontinental side of Bengal, Kalpata is the port which was used in order to store the opium, they prepared opium paste in big balls and it was shipped from there from Kalpata to various locations in Southeast Asia, often by Dutch traders, but in order to reach Guangdong, so Canton, the Cantonese province, and then through the waterways of the Pearl River to Yang, it had to be deposited on certain islands where it was picked up by smaller ships that took it in land, so the whole period between 1800 and 1840 is one of increasing illegal trade in opium, so it was basically smuggled into the interior and this is where we enter the years just before the opium war, and of course we have here behind us beautiful examples of objects that were consumed together, sorry, together with the consumption of opium, but before I begin with this, a brief word on the silk, and perhaps you can explain what the significance of silk is, in the China trade? Silk, you know, it wasn't introduced to the West or other countries until the Silk Road back in the 2nd century, before the command era, the Han Dynasty, so because it's so rare again, it's so expensive, that's why the rules called silk road, but then you know, this is the silk, it's just part of it, part of the demand for Chinese art and Chinese goods, like porcelain tea, for the British merchant, we focus on the Britain side to use opium instead of paying silver, and they use opium, because they went out of silver, and in Britain they didn't have enough silver, they had to import from continent, but the continent didn't have it, they import from somewhere else, but then that is another subject, so you know, silk, you know, use it, it's really, you know, it's the status thing, you know, in the old ancient time, it's only the empire, the noble people can afford to wear silk, so it definitely is a status thing, and you know, common people, you know, are to wear silk, but then you know, because it's just so, it's so soft, you know, so shiny, and then, you know, demand is getting higher and higher from other countries, so this is an example of, you know, why, why, you know, the demand of Chinese art and silk goods, you know, are so high at that time, and why, why, why, they need to grow so much opium, yeah, so this is the crux, so how did we arrive at the opium war, because all the imports from China, that is silk, that is porcelain, China wear, and tea, they all needed to be paid for in silver, and the universal currency at the time, were the silver dollars, which were being minted in, by using Mexican silver, and it was, they had the eagle, the double-headed eagle of the Habsburg empire on it, so this is the Spanish silver dollar, or the Habsburg silver dollar, which, because the House of Habsburg united the Austro-Hungarian empire with the Spanish empire, they owned more or less the entire, the Eastern half, the non-Brazilian half of South America, because of this, the Chinese concluded that the only currency that they could accept were these Spanish silver dollars, sometimes also other silver, like little silver ingots that you could get from Japan, but there were a few exceptions, but everybody, all the European traders, they were supposed to pay for their exports in silver, one problem, one in three ships sink, so it was a loss-making exercise, even for, if you take into account the enormous profit margins that the Westerners had when the East India companies arrived in Europe in their different harbours, but the only the British thought of a system of circumventing this payment system in silver, namely they started paying by means of opium, of course that was illegal, but it was very profitable, and this contraband opium quickly replaced a large proportion of the silver that they used to pay to the Chinese customs, the Canton customs, and this was a financial reason why the Qing state decided to penalize the British, because they had started to upset the trade balance, which had been established over the past almost 100 years, 80 years by then, so when we look at silver, when we look at tea, we actually need opium during this time, in the background you can see some of the paraphernalia that was used in order to smoke opium, so behind you as you see these three pipes, they are actually quite simple pipes, they are elegant of course, but if you go to certain museums you can see ones that are made out of very expensive materials with inlays of jade and so on, and they were also a status symbol and it's this quality of being very expensive that made part of the guest picture, you could only present of course china, you come as my guest, I will give you the very best wine, best tea, best opium of course, and this is one of the reasons why opium was being used for social functions that are otherwise out of reach for the normal population, so and here we also have a few other remarkable objects, the one that I perhaps like best is the poster advertising the I think it's Madame Tussaud's exhibition, where you have two wax figures, one showing a Chinese lady with the wife of Lin Zixu, who you see to the right, Commissioner Lin was a person with a strong interest in reducing actually stopping the opium trade completely because he was opposed to any kind of illicit entertainment, he was a very principled Confucian who believed that it was wrong for the population to be drugged more or less and therefore lose their own free will, this is the Confucian, of course it was also the representative of certain political movements, it's a long story, but the main reason why the opium were erupted was because he on behalf of the Qing dynasty decided to have the opium destroyed that was lying outside Guangzhou and this destruction was penalized by the British by means of naval ships, especially one ship the Nemesis which had steel cannons so it was protected by from bullets from ordinary Chinese weapons with the latest inventions of the industrial revolution and this enabled the British navy to sail through the defenses and to lay waste to the city of Guangzhou, so this is the beginning of the opium war, the opium war itself is very short compared to other wars, very destructive and it leads to the first of the unequal treaties which you can see behind us, namely the Treaty of Nineteen, here you can see the battle itself, it was short, the number of ships involved was not enormous but it is the symbolic power because as you know it is the point where in Chinese history where modern history begins, so this is the turning point, so you move from the imperial phase of Chinese history into the natural, into the modern period, it's of course completely artificial from a historical viewpoint but it's meant to indicate that from this time onwards China was no longer the most important power in this part of the world and this is encapsulated in the Treaty of Nineteen, which has a number of stipulations which mostly concede treaty rules to the western traders not just to the British but the traders who used to be confined to the strip of land in the Pearl River in the city of Guangzhou, they could now trade with the cities with the ports where they used to trade before 1756 and this stretch concluded with a new settlement that is known as Shanghai that's far up in the north but in the south maybe you could say that that's the, there was a rock which gave shelter to the ships that the British have brought along and they called it in Cantonese Hong Kong so that's the beginning of Hong Kong, the history of Hong Kong that was actually before signing the Treaty of Nineteen the so-called Westerners, they were gathered in Macau near Hong Kong so they were there already but then it is really after signing the Treaty of Nineteen is officially possess the island of Hong Kong because it's not China, it's so bad you have to serve China sea and they need somewhere the famous Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary at that time he actually he requests demand one or two islands for the Britain, the army, the merchant to rest and to open up trade so they, the Chinese commissioner so he suggests either Hong Kong or Kowloon you know it's just opposite and then what later become the whole power of Hong Kong anyway so they were there this after that and then officially Hong Kong became British Kowloon and then they were there back in 1841 and it was so they picked you know they picked Hong Kong basically and they picked Hong Kong they're there and then continue other business in the smuggling of open trade by itself so that is the this the sound of Hong Kong is really not the Treaty of Nineteen but before but it's officially started there that's right so and it's this it's at this point that the missionaries become legal again because we talked about silk we've talked about opium we talked about trade east-west trade but one aspect of the east-western contacts namely the transfer of knowledge the transfer of ideas that had happened and over the centuries and many of these travelers have been have been communicators of other beliefs religious beliefs so you have Christian missionaries as well for about a thousand years but in the 18th century 1724 the western missionaries are confined to either Beijing or Macau and Macau as Giao Tung Man rightly said was the not the possession it's the harbor where the Europeans were guests guests of the Chinese Empire so it was not the colony it was on the other side of the Pearl River Delta this is from Hong Kong and the British also other Protestant traders they were uncomfortable there because that was in the it was predominantly inhabited by Catholic Europeans and they wanted another possession which where they could be through yes and it's this idea that made them look out for another type of Macau but on the other side that's what that's right yes so this is this is initially the this is the initial point of the the new missions and of course it starts off with Robert Morrison but Robert Morrison is not actually involved in the open trade he's a very he deals with the the normal the ordinary trading functions of the East India Company but it's from that time onwards that missionaries who were based in in Melaka in Southeast Asia what is now Malaysia some of them also from Batavia they made their way over to Hong Kong and gradually gradually the it became a colony an inhabited colony and the role of the westerners was initially much stronger because there were fewer Chinese the Chinese came in waves and these waves were often refugee waves for example the first one the Taiping Rebellion after only 15 years you had the first significant members of Chinese who arrived and of course by the end of this long process the Chinese were in the vast majority and the westernness especially the British apparently minority so talking about the missionaries we move on to another section of the exhibition which is on the opposite side where we can see books and you can see on the well you can see the you can see the symbol of the the New Hong Kong of course with the Bahia flower which is which you will find on every official document and the insignia of the of the territory which is now of course a lot in the news but it's the it's the from 1997 onwards Hong Kong is no longer a British possession it's this period that in Chinese history books is characterized as the the century of the long century of national humiliation watch and when Dong Xiaoping of course he died passed away but his last wish was to bring this period of national shame to an end and this is symbolized by the transfer of Hong Kong from the status of a colony to that of a part of China mainland China and this is the this is significant so if people in the west talk about Hong Kong they often forget that in the Chinese context Hong Kong is always linked to the open wars and this is why there is a basic misunderstanding between Chinese people and westerners often because in the west people are quite oblivious of this open war as the founding principle of the of as the founding reason for Hong Kong and here you can see a beautiful mass from the early period so they give you a impression of Hong Kong has been inhabited by very few westerners and of course one of the most impressive buildings is still there today the palace of the government and this is the of course now in the middle of a park and Hong Kong itself has very few inhabitable spaces because it is essentially a rock and all the streets are very steep approaches to the to the two peaks which which you have is of course the one that you can travel up to in a cable car so this is the this is very interesting yes this is from the Italian can you tell us a little bit about the the background oh this is just one of the the map when Hong Kong or Hong Kong or still part of China so it's 19th century and it's done by Italian missionary so you know it's a lot of things they you know the mission we had done in in in China or in Hong Kong and then yeah it's like in there you've got the Hong Kong University co-founded by before you know before the before the university it was the Hong Kong medicine Chinese then what Chinese medicine college that's right and he came Hong Kong University in 1912 co-founded by Benjamin Hossen that's right he was from one of the missionaries yes London Missionary Society Missionary Society later becomes the London Missionary Society so you have a very close relationship between the missionaries and the let's go to the periodists or the administrators of the British Empire and the traders and importantly some of the missionaries increasingly towards the end of the 19th century they are trained medical experts as a medical experts rather than medical professionals because the modern medical profession is being shaped during this time and here if you happen to be in London the most important centers of medical learning would not have been in the main hospitals but in private practices such as Harley Street because you have Dr. Harley there the welcome collection yes because you have Dr. Welcome so in other words this was the time when medicine was being transformed into the type of modern scientific medicine that we know today of course also in other parts of the world and if you look at the archives in the welcome collection for example or at SOAS and the special collections SOAS the archival part of the SOAS library you will find letters written by the various medical missionaries and they are discussing the best way of treating diseases and by the end of the 19th century they're also discussing ways of ending the opium smoking habit which people have become used to in the since the moment the material in the special collection found so many letters you know what they recall you know we got some of this play you know we call it opium traffics yes let's let's talk over that and we can see some some examples the medical missionaries they introduced probably if we say western western medicine especially in Hong Kong you know they can do so freely it really this small exchange and combined traditional Chinese medicine and then with western so that that is quite a milestone and then yeah and then what can we see behind you that oh behind here this section is about silk so you can see the you know silk cocoon where the silk come from and then this is some you know part of the gladdest outward collection we'll come to that later and and then this is this is an example the free trade when they're buying silk back in 19th century 1836 and it's very significant it's the original letter by a merchant farmer's reading and he was a secretary to the Royal Society but then what we have got here is the it's a map of China make off what is it make off it may make a silk yes exactly yes so it crossed in any case but so we can see the fine treaty part you know here in a good closer with like with glasses you know for some people yeah and then we you know they register for a missionary here you know we you know the archery is you know it's really amazing you know something like this is just one of the main example but just you know register like you know this page has got again Benjamin Hobson when did he sign up when did he retire when did he die when all this you know in the century of London London missionary so you know this is just really that failed sample from the huge collection so these are all examples from our archives so whether they are textual or physical and of course the significance of silk is very important because that is what had taken the western as since roman times to China that was the the Romans called the serious the silk people and so and here we find a display cabinet which shows you examples of the missionary work the also something from the so as collections this is Robert Morrison with his Chinese assistants assistants while he's translating his version of the bike and of course he was in competition with Marshman who was in in the Danish possession in of in India where they could translate from the the English church the English church so anyway that's a sub chapter of the of the opium war so Morrison is not really involved in the opium trade that initially it's like a good slap travels on British ships and he probably used some of the proceeds of the opium trade in order to print his pamphlets and finance his journey but again he did not profit in an enormous way from this so this connection is slightly misleading also because in the beginning most of the missionaries they were quite supportive of opium because they thought of it as a medicine so it's the even if it was smoked they thought it had the same medical effects of Lord Anum so they thought there was nothing wrong with it it's only from the end of the 19th century onwards especially after the typing was that they become increasingly opposed to opium and the the pamphlets that you can see here over here the writings they are they are these are copies of the New Testament which are of course being printed in Hong Kong now that they were previously previously printed in Melaka and in other places in Southeast Asia um in because the distribution of missionary work in the Chinese interior was still unable until this illegal until the second opium war so-called second opium war the Arab War in 1858 and it's that war which allowed all westerners but especially the missionaries to enter the interior of China and it's from that time onwards so that's the second of the unequal treaties that the people in the interior are allowed to receive these Christian scriptures for the first time in more than a century 120 years but in actual fact they had already received pamphlets and booklets which were have been printed in Beijing or outside Beijing and then distributed throughout yes underground it was underground markets but but anyway this is the age of opium and of course the important thing to remember is that opium smoking proliferates during this time in China so in the end by the end of the 19th century there's hardly any household that wouldn't would not continue to appear then finally have here the something maybe you'd like to say something about this mission so this is a display for greatest outward she she knows she's very remarkable and she had a Chinese name I write up so she was a housemate in London and then she designed she wanted to became a missionary and she started to join China in a mission but they said you know she you know she had an education level it's too low and then they reject her but then you know she's just being her thing you know went to China first by train anyway and then joined the eight ends of happiness one of these places you know giving look after the poor people of an age often and then but she had a main role she her role is you know to cut you know cut the foot binding this foot binding was again you know was popular for the higher society so it was a status thing but then it became a you know less you know less you know popular or you know it just it's just not right and then her job is to cut you know all this you know food you know buying the food into the young girls and then so this is um you look like a very ordinary scissors but it's really extraordinary because that the scissors and you see with the case and I believe this is you know make of silk you know very traditional Chinese embroidery and then like us you know when we go somewhere we collect things souvenir we collect things and then you know the seal you want to be the dough make of silk and the slipper and then we got this with really different you see that she's you know you see the size and it's there the make of silk so these are from from special collection again and then she just she didn't just did that and when she was in China um she that was you know during the Second World War so this is a letter she wrote to her friends you know back in England here and you can tell to the color because you know she didn't write in one go is whenever she can it recorded you know very vivid you know the um she called enemy it was the Japanese invasion to China um getting closer the you know the noise and and it's very but yeah very vivid and she and then she took a group of you know ovens um ovens um to a safety place you know through hills you know mountains and these places but then a wide sea on safety and she's you know she's very remarkable in terms of the series she was one of the very few foreigner has a chinese citizenship um and then when she was you know older she actually did you know set up a uh the whole mission in hong kong and then I think she was 86 and then she passed away in time and this is a this is the book the energy of her life 16 page and you look at what people you know you know what a noble life what a meaningful life she was she was so so we are talking about uh contradictions and one contradiction is that opium which was such a precious commodity from a medical viewpoint that it could actually become a um highly addictive and uh well in the in the longer run uh actually uh a um a very um damaging um uh habit forming drug which um took a long time to be eradicated from China um but of course many of the uh drugs that would be used in order to win the population of the for example heroin heroin was used as a drug and so as an opium replacement drug and um the doctors who administered heroin in the beginning had no idea that it was um that the effects of heroin consumptions were was worse than uh smoking opium but it's of course part of the opium smoking habit which emerged during the 19th century so that's one contradiction that between um recreational uses of opium and um medicinal uses the second one is the role of the missionaries often referred to as agents of imperialism but actually in the vast majority doing very useful work and towards the 20th century concentrating on um on the creation of education of the provision of education and of medicinal services medical staff whether these were doctors or nurses they were often directly related to the missionary stations that the missionaries set up and even feminism because you know the um more you know chinese women they didn't want male to inspect them and they opened up that opportunity so you know that was a demand we need more female missionaries you know to china to help so yeah everything comes in that's right yes so we have um well we almost finished our journey through time and this is in essence the um uh so when we talk about um the opium era in china of course it is very long because it takes us back to the to the beauty things of the chinese empire more or less but um it is particularly significant from the um middle of the 19th century onwards and it dominated the whole of the 19th century up to the fall of the 13th dynasty in 1911 so thank you very much for for your attention and uh of course we would like to know why yes so we have one question from our audience um which is uh from denis he said the exhibition is really excellent educative informative and visual and he asks are there any plans to extend it iris i think you know we should ask john not really we don't know yet you know but we we've got something you want to line up so but then likely we'll be in another another venue it will be if it's on a journey it will go on tour and just in a likely we'll be in another so you you will put it you'll take it somewhere else oh yeah we'll be available to look at again yes and then we need another question that he asks is thinking of all the treasures from around the world including china that's around the british museum how do we get the word out about the importance of exhibitions that done in conjunction and with the permission of diasporas and that address the historic extraction of artifacts from other parts of the world who wants to start with that okay well this is of course an enormous topic but um we well my personal opinion is that that art and knowledge are universal so they should actually be exhibited in as many places in the world as possible so that the local populations get the chance to see um aspects of uh civilization world civilization which they otherwise can't see so this is an a priori opinion uh but of course uh i know that art collectors uh they know what is expensive they know what is precious and they also know how to obtain uh objects illegally so so many objects were simply stolen and um to to have part of those repatriated of course with proper procedures um that that is also a priori and so it's both it's a little bit of both but i i do think that um uh items belonging to minorities or to other ethnic groups in the world um that they um that they should be shared with the rest of the world as well um but um how to do that best is of course down to the representatives of these communities and the museums in the west ideally yes but then i think you know um all this amazing object where it where you know where it came from i think you know need to yeah well we we did really good job because there's so many you know amazing archive but then we can we we can also share this knowledge how to you know preserve all this item in their own country you know if if if the objects obtained from the filing you know under the final circumstances then we should we should return not we you know the you know wherever should but at least say they have that intention to offer because you know you want to return something to some places if we're not wanted because we don't have the resources but then that is i think that is really another level more duty at another level you know we love it so much we can do it but then we help other people and then give it to the rightful place and give people the choice not just think we do better so i'm Lucy Corsett from the Renei Gallery i just wanted to say thank you so so much to our speakers not just for giving up their time but also for their boundless patience tonight and thank you very much to you our audience for also bearing with us and for watching this recording and we hope to see you in our next event thank you and thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you to our audience as well and yeah at so