The vase was supposedly ancient. It bore cartoon characters from contemporary Chinese television. Another artifact, labeled as dating to 2700 BC, was inscribed with simplified Chinese characters -- a writing system that was not introduced until 1956. The Jibaozhai Museum in the village of Erpu, Jizhou, Hebei Province, housed 40,000 exhibits across twelve halls, all presented as genuine cultural relics and promoted as a 'patriotic education center.' It took a single blog post to bring the entire enterprise down.
The museum was built in 2007 by Wang Zongquan, the local Communist Party chief, at a stated cost of 20 million yuan. The collection was displayed with the trappings of legitimacy: labeled exhibits, educational signage, organized galleries spanning twelve exhibition halls. The museum marketed itself as a center for patriotic education, leveraging China's respect for cultural heritage to attract visitors and institutional support. A former village accountant later claimed that the collection's actual cost was closer to 30 million yuan, a discrepancy that raised suspicions among villagers that the museum might be serving a purpose beyond education -- possibly functioning as a front for money laundering.
On July 6, 2013, Ma Boyong -- a popular writer from Beijing known for his sharp eye and large social media following -- visited the Jibaozhai Museum. What he found was not so much a collection of fakes as a collection of absurdities. Artifacts alleged to be thousands of years old displayed anachronistic features that required no expertise to spot. Ma documented his findings in a microblog post that spread rapidly across Chinese social media. The post triggered an official investigation, and the results confirmed what Ma's photos had already made obvious: the vast majority of the museum's 40,000 items were forgeries. Authorities closed the museum and revoked its operating license for fraud.
The Jibaozhai scandal touched a nerve in China because it exploited something genuine: the country's deep reverence for its archaeological heritage. China has thousands of legitimate museums housing authentic artifacts spanning five millennia of civilization. The imperial examination halls, Buddhist temples, and ancient tombs of Hebei Province alone contain some of the world's most important cultural relics. Against that backdrop, a museum full of cartoon-decorated vases and impossibly inscribed antiquities was not just fraud -- it was a mockery of the real scholarship and painstaking conservation that legitimate institutions perform. The case became a cautionary tale about the intersection of local political power, inadequate oversight, and the surprising ease with which a fraudulent institution can operate in plain sight when it wraps itself in the right language.
The former Jibaozhai Museum site is located at 37.56°N, 115.58°E in the village of Erpu, Jizhou, Hebei Province, on the flat agricultural landscape of the southern North China Plain. The site is not visible as a distinct landmark from altitude. Nearest major airports include Shijiazhuang Zhengding International Airport (ICAO: ZBSJ), approximately 160 km to the northwest, and Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport (ICAO: ZSJN), approximately 170 km to the south.