The sale in 2009 by Christie's of the late Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge's collection in Paris included two bronze heads looted from a zodiac fountain in the Xiyang Lo gardens in the Summer Palace in Beijing by French and English troops during the Second Opium War in 1860.
 
The heads of the rabbit and rat were famously knocked down to Chinese Cai Mingchao for €31.6m (est €16m) after which he refused to pay on moral and patriotic grounds. This, and several other high profile failures to pay for high-priced Chinese lots has had a rebound effect on Chinese purchases as some top Western auction houses have now been reported as asking for large deposits from Chinese bidders.
 
After the sale in 2009, China announced that it planned to tighten export controls on Christie's operations in China. The Chinese government had protested the auction of the two sculptures. Bergé provocatively offered to return them to their country of origin at no cost if China restored political freedom to Tibet.
 
The Xiyang Lo, literally Western Gardens, in the grounds of the Summer Palace were built for Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong by Chinese workmen, 1747-51, under the direction of the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione who was a court painter and the French Jesuit scientist Michel Benoist for engineering the fountains, the German Ignatius Sickelpart and the Florentine Bonaventura Moggi. The Haiyantang was the area at Xiyang Lou that included a water clock fountain consisting of twelve carved stone zodiac figures with bronze heads, of which the rat and rabbit were two.
 
Of the other ten original heads the ox, tiger and monkey were acquired in 2000 by state-owned Poly Group Corp for $1m-$2m each, and the Hong Kong industrialist Stanley Ho acquired the pig in 2003 for $770,000, and the horse in 2007 for $8.9m. The whereabouts of the remaining dragon, snake, sheep, rooster and dog heads is unknown.
 
The zodiac episode set China's most prominent maverick artist, Ai Weiwei, to producing a new set of monumental bronze oversize heads as an artwork, replicating the known heads and reinterpreting the others. The group of outward-looking heads on 2m bronze stalks, known as 'Circle of Animals', have already been shown in Brazil and will shortly be on show in New York and at Somerset House in London. The sculptures are in an edition of six plus four and will be marketed at about $500,000 each. A smaller set of gold-leaf works will sell for around $200,000 each.
 
On Ai Weiwei's web page about 'Circle of Animals' he describes the work: 'I want this to be seen as an object that doesn't have a monumental quality, but rather is a funny piece- -a piece people can relate to or interpret on many different levels, because everybody has a zodiac connection. A sculpture always functions as an object that people would question the meaning and content of. They're just objects that could suggest something else.
The style of the original zodiac fountain is very interesting- -Chinese, but mixed. It is a Western understanding of a Chinese way. You can see those things happening during the eighteenth century. The West had Chinese gardens and Chinese pagodas in their parks and houses. And images. It was always about illusions of Oriental-ness, or Chinese-ness. My work is always dealing with real or fake, authenticity, what the value is, and how the value relates to current political and social understandings and misunderstandings. I think there's a strong humorous aspect there. The Yves Saint-Laurent zodiac auction in February 2009 really complicated the issues about art, about the real, about fake, resources, looting, about the appreciation of objects- -all these kinds of issues. Because Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is animal heads, I think it's something that everyone can have some understanding of, including children and people who are not in the art world. I think it's more important to show your work to the public. That's what I really care about. When Andy Warhol painted Mao in the 1960s and 1970s, I don't think many people understood Mao, either- -it was just this image that people knew, like Marilyn Monroe or somebody. So they might see these zodiac animals like that- -like Mickey Mouse. They're just animals. Eleven real animals and one mystic animal.'
 
Ai Weiwei, who designed the bird's nest around the Beijing Olympics stadium, and who covered the floor of Tate Modern with ceramic sunflower seeds, was arrested by police at Beijing airport on 3 April 2011 has not been heard of since and his whereabouts are presently unknown. Several governments have lodged protests with the Chinese government, to no avail. Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, said she was deeply concerned at the human rights situation in China, referring to the arrest, harrassment, sentencing and disappearance of lawyers, writers, artists and dissidents, and new restrictions imposed on foreign journalists. "In this context, I am alarmed at the arrest of Ai Weiwei," she said. His arrest was for alleged economic crimes.
 
Update: The Guardian reports Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and activist has since moved to Cambridge, UK. See more about his latest work at the link below.