Chinese officials have opened multiple investigations into allegations that staff at the state-run Nanjing Museum secretly removed cultural treasures from the collection and sold them on the open market—claims that have gone viral on social media and drawn comparisons to the recent Louvre heist.

According to the South China Morning Post, the scandal surfaced after a 16th-century Ming dynasty painting, Spring in Jiangnan by Qiu Ying, appeared in a Beijing auction catalog this year with an estimate of 88 million yuan ($12.5 million). The work was part of a 137-piece donation made in 1959 by the family of renowned collector Pang Laichen but was discovered missing during a 2023 court-ordered inventory check. The museum later said the painting, along with four other donated works, had been deemed forgeries in the 1960s, formally deaccessioned in 1997, and sold to a provincial relics store in 2001 for 6,800 yuan—though how it resurfaced at auction remains unclear. Pang’s descendants have publicly disputed the museum’s account and demanded documentation and the return of the disputed works.

The case escalated over the weekend when an 80-year-old retired museum employee, Guo Lidian, accused former museum director Xu Huping of orchestr...