On Saturday, Tibetan activists convened outside the Musée Guimet in Paris to protest the museum’s decision to replace exhibition materials that identify certain artifacts as Tibetan by replacing it with the Chinese name for the region. Activists claim the change to the language is problematic for deferring to a Chinese political narrative that’s historically aimed to erase Tibetan cultural identity from public spaces.
The mass protest, which some sources estimate attracted 800 demonstrators, followed a report in the French newspaper Le Monde alleging that Musée Guimet and the Musée du quai Branly, two prominent Parisian museums that house collections of Asian art, altered their exhibition materials cataloging Tibetan artifacts as deriving instead from then Chinese term “Xizang Autonomous Region.” According to the same report, the Musée Guimet renamed its Tibetan art galleries as deriving from the “Himalayan world.”
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A handful of Tibetan cultural advocacy groups based in France penned letters to both museums, requesting formal meetings to discuss the reasons behind and implications of the terminology changes, a request that activists say was accepted by Musée du quai Branly, but not it’s peer Musée Guimet.
Earlier this month, Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the president of the Tibetan exile organization Central Tibetan Administration, strongly criticized the name alterations in a letter addressed to high-profile French officials including the minister of culture and the directors of each museum, alleging the terminology shifts are “pandering to the wishes of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government” and doesn’t acknowledge Tibet’s independence movement.
The exiled president also argued the move isn’t related to neutrality or factual correction, arguing that it’s related to a strategy initiated by China’s United Front Work Department in 2023 to warp views of Tibet’s history as an independent entity. “It is particularly disheartening that the said cultural institutions in France—a nation that cherishes liberty, equality, and fraternity—are acting in complicity with the PRC government in its design to erase the identity of Tibet,” the letter stated.
Activists accused the museums of being complicit in Chinese political pressure to undermine Tibetan culture by altering and generalizing cataloguing terms that display Tibetan roots as distinct from Chinese regions. Organizers are calling for the terms “Tibet” to be returned exhibition spaces at both museums.