Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 11 shown for “Chinese” — 64 records examined, 46 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-26 22:11 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Bowl Emulating Chinese Stoneware
Artist not stated in the record · 9th century

Chinese musicians
Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory · ca. 1755

Chinese Pavilion
Frankenthal Porcelain Manufactory · ca. 1770

Seated Chinese
Saint-Cloud factory · ca. 1730–40

Guqin (古琴 )
Prince Lu · 1634

Goqing
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century

Pipa (琵琶 )
Artist not stated in the record · late 16th–early 17th century

Dung-Chen
Artist not stated in the record · 1368–1644

Chinese figure with bird
Meissen Manufactory · ca. 1727, mounts and flowers ca. 1750

Saddle (清 馬鞍一套)
Artist not stated in the record · 17th–18th century

Sword with Scabbard Mounts
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 600
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 9800 matched · 24 examined · 6 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 14911 matched · 40 examined · 40 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.0 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-26 22:11 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.