The French Museum of History in Nantes (Musée d’Histoire de Nantes) has announced the postponement of a major exhibition on Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, following demands from China about how it should be framed.
The exhibition has been in the works for a long time, in cooperation with the Chinese Inner Mongolia Museum. It has been postponed once due to the Coronavirus outbreak. It has now been put off again until 2024.
The museum said that it was doing this on ethical grounds. The Chinese authorities had demanded that particular words and phrases such as ‘Genghis Khan’ and ‘Mongol Empire’ should be removed. They also required control over various aspects of the exhibition, such as calligraphy and public relations materials.
The museum indicated that the changes demanded by their Chinese counterparts would have fundamentally changed the nature of the exhibition. They would have altered it from a presentation of Mongolian history and civilisation to one in line with the Chinese ‘national narrative’.
The 2024 exhibition will be presented along the original theme, and will use artefacts borrowed from European and American institutions.
China has come under renewed scrutiny for the treatment of its non-Han minorities recently, notably with regard to abuse of the Uighurs. But changes in education curricula are also seen as an attempt to undermine the ethnic identity of the Mongolian minority.
Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire, lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. His conquests included swathes of what is now China. This is a very sensitive historical memory for the Chinese government.
Image by Ichigo121212 from Pixabay