Less than three months after the Forbidden City's Palace Museum was the victim of an embarrassing burglary, the museum has had to own up to another humiliation after a rare piece of 700-year-old porcelain broke during a bungled "scientific test."

The celadon glazed "Ge-ware" dish was a masterpiece from the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) and had been designated as a Class A cultural relic by China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH). On July 4 the dish was placed in the grip of a precision testing machine which — as it turned out — was set too tight. To the horror of the un-named female researcher supervising the test the dish shattered into six pieces.

The damage was awful enough, but it was what happened next that has China's Twittersphere outraged: the Museum sat on the news of the accident for almost four weeks, clearly hoping to cover it up.

The damage was finally revealed on the weekend on the popular blog of local porcelain lover Long Can. He first heard whispers of the damage from an expert working in the Palace Museum and confirmed the details through other contacts. A day later in the face of a "Twitter-storm," the museum finally made an official statement, claiming that the dish can be restored and that the guilty testing equipment is being "overhauled." The museum also reported that some 50 other relics in their care had been subjected to testing in the same machine without mishap. A full report to the SACH is being prepared.

China's micro-bloggers are more concerned about the attempted cover-up than the damage itself. "Netizens" have become particularly allergic to cover-ups of late, especially in the wake of the Wenzhou bullet train accident last month that left a reported 39 dead and hundreds injured. In that case it was widely believed that the government was bent on hiding details of the disaster, especially after stories got out of damaged carriages being hastily buried at the crash site.

For those entertained by statistics, China's SACH lists 48,006 objects on its database that have been given a Class A cultural relic rating.