Chinese masterpieces stolen, only to be replaced by fakes — and then the fakes are stolen too

At the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, it has become so routine to steal masterworks that even the fake paintings used to replace them are being stolen, too. The scandal came to light as the chief librarian himself was accused of taking more than 140 paintings from the galleries and replacing them with fakes he painted.

"I realized someone else had replaced my paintings with their own because I could clearly discern that their works were terribly bad," the librarian, Xiao Yuan, 57, told Guangzhou People's Intermediate Court, as reported by The Associated Press. Xiao is alleged to have made over $11 million from selling the famous paintings.

Some of the stolen works include landscape pieces by Zhang Daqian and watercolors by Qi Baishi — who might have had a thing or two to say about his paintings being forged and replaced. “Paintings must be something between likeness and unlikeness...but not like to cheat popular people,” Qi famously said, although perhaps this wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind.

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