A French museum has reportedly postponed a planned joint exhibition with the Chinese side due to Chinese pressure. France’s Musée d’Histoire de Nantes announced on its website Monday (Oct. 12) that it has decided to cancel a long-standing partnership with a Chinese museum because the Chinese museum is attempting to rewrite Mongolian history and culture in an upcoming major exhibition on Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire.
The Nantes Museum of History says it is postponing the 2021 opening of the exhibit due to overwhelming interference from China’s Inner Mongolia Museum. The exhibit, originally scheduled to open Oct. 17, was postponed until 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic and has now been postponed again.
The museum said it will seek new collections from partners in Europe and the U.S. to launch the exhibition in October 2024.
The French museum says China is trying to erase Mongolian history “for the sake of a new national story,” and that Chinese authorities have demanded the removal of certain names and terms, such as “Genghis Khan,” “Mongolian Empire” and “Mongolian language,” from the exhibit, as well as the supervision of all exhibition production, including text, maps, catalogs and newsletters.
Bertrand Guillet, director of the Nantes Museum of History, said in an interview with Taiwan’s online media NewTalk that Beijing authorities are trying to interfere with the exhibition by demanding that history be rewritten in order to completely erase Mongolian history and culture without any reference to Genghis Khan and his sons, and that the exhibition will even be renamed “Genghis Khan”. “Chinese steppe culture”! Morally and intellectually,” he said, “this is unacceptable.
Gillett said the museum had consulted historians and experts before deciding to cancel its partnership with China and rebuild the project. According to Gillett, the decision to cancel the partnership with the Inner Mongolia Museum was made “in the name of human, scientific and ethical values,” Taiwan News reported, citing the French newspaper Ouest-France.
This is not the first time that China has attempted to revise Inner Mongolia’s history and culture, and in late August there were strong protests by Mongolians after Chinese authorities implemented a school curriculum reform in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, dramatically increasing Chinese language education and reducing Mongolian language classes. Protests were suppressed by Chinese authorities.
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