On October 12, Asia Weekly reported that Xu Huping, the former director of the Nanjing Museum and the central figure in the museum's antiquities case, died of lung cancer less than a month after being sentenced; on October 14, the Nanjing Museum's customer service said it had not yet obtained the information, and no official notice had been released.
On September 16, Xu Huping, former director of the Nanjing Museum, was sentenced to 3 years in prison and fined 200,000 yuan for accepting bribes in engineering contracts and commercial cooperation. Previously, Xu Huping had been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and stripped of his benefits. This ruling did not involve the illegal allocation of cultural relics.
On December 21, Guo Dianli, a former curator at the Nanjing Museum, filed a real-name report against former director Xu Huping, accusing him of massively and illegally embezzling and smuggling cultural relics relocated from the Palace Museum during his tenure, and selling them to overseas businessmen and domestic artifact dealers for huge profits.