US man Jeffrey Ying jailed for stealing rare Chinese manuscript from UCLA

A California man who swapped a library’s 17th century Chinese manuscript for a fake was jailed for a year on Wednesday after admitting to stealing a major artwork.

Jeffrey Ying used a number of aliases to gain access to classic works, some over 600 years old, at the library of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the US Department of Justice said.

Ying, 39, would check the works out and return days later with dummy manuscripts. He would frequently travel to China shortly thereafter, officials said.

UCLA’s library system flagged that several rare Chinese manuscripts were missing, and an investigation revealed the books were last viewed by a visitor who identified himself as “Alan Fujimori”.

The rare and valuable works are not in regular circulation in the library and must be reserved and checked out, officials said.

When detectives raided the Los Angeles area hotel where Ying was staying, they found blank manuscripts in the style of the books that had been checked out.