Ching Tsai Loo, commonly known as C. T. Loo (Chinese: 盧芹齋; pinyin: Lú Qínzhāi; 1 February 1880 – August 15, 1957), was a controversial art dealer of Chinese origin who maintained galleries in Paris and New York and supplied important pieces for collectors and American museums by illegally exporting a large amount of significant state cultural relics from China.

He has been called "the preeminent dealer of Chinese art and artifacts for the first half of the twentieth century," [1] but also criticized for his illegal active role in removing antiques and archaeological treasures from China for sale to western collectors.

Loo realized that Westerners preferred later works such as Qing dynasty three-color porcelains, which he could supply in good quantities because of the political ties he formed.

[6] A friend remarked on Loo's sources in China: "being in touch with important people... he was able to know of precious works of art which had been hidden from the storms of many revolutions."

He developed scholarly understanding and expanded public taste in Asian art, particularly sculpture and early jades, by becoming friends with such eminent Sinologists as Edouard Chavannes, Victor Segalen, and especially Paul Pelliot, director of the Dunhuang expedition, whom he commissioned to write catalogs (as he did later with Berthold Laufer in the United States).

[14] The decade long boom in Chinese art came to a close with the Crash of 1929, and by 1931, the volume of China's antique trade with the United States had fallen to about half what it had been in 1926.

In the West, the study of Asia and Asian art became more professional as museums acquired curators to deepen and widen their collections and universities developed graduate programs.

Loo's business reached its peak in the second half of the 1930s as he adapted to a more sophisticated market, expanding his international art network to England, France, Germany, and America.

Among his most successful exhibitions was Three Thousand Years of Chinese Jade, held in 1939 in New York as a fund raiser for China's wartime refugees.

[16] One new client whose interest grew was Eli Lilly, an Indiana pharmaceutical executive who assembled the basic works for the Asian collection of what became the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

[23] Loo created a chain of middlemen who were on the lookout for items they thought he might buy, not only from now impoverished families, but also from imperial tombs, monuments, and monasteries.

[25] His name has been "notoriously" associated with two of the Six Steeds of Zhao Mausoleum, a set of relief panels depicting the favorite horses of Taizong, the founder of the Tang dynasty, among the most important Chinese sculpture pieces outside of China.

When these efforts had failed, he finally shipped them to the United States, where the Philadelphia Museum and Charles Freer bought significant works for prices which now seem quite low.

Xu Jian, professor of history at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, says, "Loo directly and strongly stimulated China's tomb-robbing activities."

Daisy Wang (Wang Yiyou), author of a doctoral dissertation on Loo's career as a dealer, told an interviewer that Loo served as "an exotic Chinese servant for his rich and powerful Euro-American clientele ... based on America's capitalist and imperialist logic that Chinese antiquities were to be consumed by the rich and the powerful in modern America," not in China.

His introduction to the catalog for his liquidation sale in 1950 noted: "No matter which object I exported from my country, they were all bought openly on the market, in competition with others."

He continued: "I am happy today that these objets d'art that I exported are securely and carefully preserved for posterity, because I think that if they had remained in China, many of these beautiful objects would have been destroyed.

"[27] Not long after he opened his Paris gallery, Loo was struck by the beauty of Olga Hortense Libmond (1876–1960), a woman four years his elder who ran a milliner's shop a few doors away.