On February 25, 2009, Christie's Paris sold two 18th-century bronze fountainheads, a rat and a rabbit from the Chinese zodiac group looted from the Old Summer Palace in 1860, as part of the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge collection auction. The buyer was later identified as Cai Mingchao, an adviser to China's National Treasures Fund, who refused to pay and framed the bid as a patriotic intervention. The sale became an art-market flashpoint because it combined trophy collecting, imperial violence, repatriation claims, and the legal limits of auction-house responsibility. It also turned a design-and-fine-art dispersal billed as a glamorous private collection sale into a public dispute over cultural property.
The failed sale intensified debate over repatriating looted Chinese cultural objects from Western collections.