A traffic police assistant checks out the pole from where a telephone box, part of the bronze statue "young woman speaking on a public phone" has been stolen.
The phone box of the famous bronze statue "young woman speaking on a public phone" has been stolen again in Shanghai.
The base of the phone belonging to the distinctive two-meter statue made of white bronze disappeared last week - it's anti-theft alarm failed to work.
The sculpture was installed in the middle of 2006 at the corner of Huaihai Road M. and Maoming Road S. - where its predecessor, a yellow version of the statue, was stolen by migrant ragpickers in 2000.
"We are very upset that part of the statue has been stolen again," Zheng Jiashi, an official in charge of sculpture management for the Shanghai Urban Planning Administrative Bureau, said yesterday.
Zheng said his bureau would make a plastic replacement so that the statue looks complete for the Spring Festival.
Luwan District government police, who are in charge of the area, said they had begun investigating the case but did not give any more details.
Zheng said the theft would make the bureau re-consider its anti theft policies.
In 2004, the city government began to install anti-theft alarms on hundreds of valuable street sculptures downtown.
The government also had district governors divide the city into grids each of which was covered by assigned patrols.
But this time the efforts seem to have failed.
The original statue, a young woman wearing a midriff blouse and short skirt and talking on a pay phone, was stolen in early 2000 for its copper content. Before that, the statue had been a fixture near a subway entrance since 1996.
The statue was considered one of the best examples of street art and when it was stolen it was city's first major case of public art theft.
The thieves, a gang of three migrant workers, were caught in 2004 - four years after the theft. One of them was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment.
City artist He Yong created both statues.
(Shanghai Daily January 22, 2008)
