Artefacts go on display after return from Italy
BEIJING: After a long journey home, hundreds of Chinese cultural relics repatriated from Italy were finally made available for public viewing at the National Museum of China in Beijing.
The 796 artefacts are believed to have been illegally moved overseas. The exhibition runs through June.
“On a flight, it only takes 10 hours to travel from Milan to Beijing,” Minister of Culture and Tourism Luo Shugang said.
“However, their journey took 12 years.”
The artefacts were found in 2007 at an antique market in Milan by an Italian police squad assigned to fight cultural heritage-related crime, Luo said. Officers suspected the relics were smuggled and confiscated them.
The Chinese embassy in Italy was informed of the case in 2008, and China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration soon began the process of identifying the artefacts and checking them against export documents.
None of the items was approved for export, and most of them showed signs of having been buried and excavated.
The Chinese administration filed papers seeking their return and, after a decade-long judicial process, a court in Milan approved their return in November.
In March, President Xi Jinping and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte oversaw the signing of an intergovernmental agreement in Rome to formally give the green light for repatriation of the artefacts, which arrived in Beijing on April 10.
“Italy and China are the nations with the largest numbers of Unesco World Heritage sites,” said Ettore Sequi, Italian ambassador to China.
“Given that the two countries are important cultural powers, I think this repatriation will set an example for the rest of world.”