Tag: Theft

Noodle Raider

There’s an interesting detail at the start of a recent Economist piece about a network of tomb raiders in China, or bands of archaeological burglars who have been breaking into and stealing artifacts from ancient sites all over the country.

“By day,” the piece begins, “Mr Wei sold pancakes in Shaanxi, a northern province. By night he led a gang of grave robbers who tunneled under an ancient temple near his shop. It took 11 months for them to reach the treasures buried beneath, which included gold statues of the Buddha and the bones of illustrious monks. Mr Wei and his cronies went on to dig several more passages from restaurants that they opened in the vicinity of shrines and pagodas.”

For as many as five years, allegedly, the crew hit graves and tombs, abetted by this false front of restaurants that were actually being used as forward operating bases for underground tunneling operations. This is quite the modus operandi—though, to be 100% clear, it is not something I am commending. Admiration of method should not be confused with advocacy for its implementation.

Nevertheless, the prospect of these restaurants’ secret purpose being discovered, or even suspected, could easily be the start of a novel or comic book: you and your single parent, say, live alone above an empty restaurant on a dilapidated side street in your depressed hometown, near an old historic site of some sort, when a new owner signs a lease downstairs. A week later, a noodle shop opens. But the food is terrible—it’s just a Coke machine and some instant ramen—and there are strange sounds at night and whispered voices coming up through the ducts. Unexplained piles of dirt begin to appear out back in the alley. Then one day you decide to investigate.

In any case, you can read more about Mr. Wei and his noodle-shop tomb raiding over at the Economist.

Carry That Weight

From the annals of moving large objects come two stories, one of a rock, the other a bridge.

[Image: Photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].

A very large boulder is on its way to Los Angeles, we read in the New York Times this morning: a 340-ton rock on a journey moving “through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns.”

The rock is going there for an installation by artist Michael Heizer, called “Levitated Mass,” and it was “dynamited out of a hillside” 60 miles from Los Angeles.

[Image: The rock in question; photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].

“The effort, nearly five years in the planning (though Mr. Heizer has been making sketches of it as far back as the late 1960s), feels nothing short of a military movement: an incursion through a bewildering thicket of state, city and county regulations and a region with a notoriously difficult street grid,” Adam Nagourney writes in the New York Times.

In fact, the rock’s specific route never relied on one path through that “bewildering thicket,” but has been constantly updated and changed; as Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Heizer’s rock will be displayed, points out, “the State of California is always reviewing the state of its bridges and roads. So a route plan that would have worked a couple of days ago doesn’t work today.”

This has the effect of doubling the distance covered: “Door to door,” Nagourney writes, “the distance is 60 miles, though the actual drive is going to be closer to 120 miles, as engineers plot a route that can accommodate the huge size of what is known as the Prime Mover, and one that steers clear of low bridges and wires. Any route must have stopover spots to park the rock as it waits for night.”

[Image: Photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].

The museum’s $10 million boulder-displacement project has, of course, faced some public criticism—but Govan has a response for that: “we are putting more people to work here in L.A. than Obama,” he quips. This includes “teams of workers… deployed to lift telephone and power lines, swing traffic lights to the side and lay down steel plates on suspect patches of roads or bridges.”

Read more at the New York Times.

Elsewhere, meanwhile, thieves have dismantled and stolen an entire steel bridge near Pittsburgh. “Pennsylvania State Police are looking for a steel bridge worth an estimated $100,000 that was dismantled and taken from a rural area in Lawrence County,” we read. “Police said they believe a torch was used to cut apart the bridge, which measured 50 feet by 20 feet, near Covert’s Crossing in North Beaver Township.”

If you see the bridge—or its parts—moving slowly down a remote Appalachian road somewhere, I’m sure the police would appreciate a heads up.

(Bridge story via @wired).