China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Search goes online
New web platform’s goal is to find missing cultural relics
China’s national internet platform featuring information about lost or stolen cultural relics went online on Thursday in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province.
Its goal is to return home listed national treasures.
The bilingual website bdww.sach.gov.cn, in Chinese and English, was launched due to joint efforts from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and Ministry of Public Security.
According to Liu Yuzhu, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, about 2,230 entries from 19 province-level administrative regions nationwide have been included in the database. Some 200 of them were first released online and the rest will be added gradually for the public, with additional entries constantly being added to the online platform.
Liu said on Thursday in Xi’an that the platform will refer “to criteria of the database on lost art pieces of the International Criminal Police Organization”, or Interpol.
“The data is also uploaded to the database of Interpol to enhance international cooperation,” he said. “It is also to facilitate repatriation of lost Chinese cultural relics.”
Each entry includes pictures and basic information of the lost items, such as the time it was lost, historical background, location, condition and the technique used to make it.
The first items published on the platform are varied, from paintings, porcelains and statues to stone lions. Many were stolen in the 1990s, including porcelains stolen from a museum in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province, and Buddha heads robbed from a cultural relic warehouse in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region. Nevertheless, some items went missing more recently.
“We don’t even have clear images for some lost cultural relics,” said Wu Zhongfei, a police officer from Shaanxi’s provincial public security department, who is in charge of the online platform.
“We’re developing new technology to portray digital models of these items to help people search for them,” he said.
Wu said that apps for smartphones will also be released to help the public provide clues on the lost cultural relics.
“The platform is a way to strengthen social supervision,” Liu added. “Our work will be more efficient as we make the public informed. And we need more scientific methods to safeguard cultural relics.”
The administration has recently finished a nationwide investigation of threats to cultural relic safety covering 20,000 institutions across the country.
Du Hangwei, deputy governor of Shaanxi province, said the new online platform echoed China’s more rigorous campaign in recent years against crimes related to cultural relics.
Shaanxi is of key historical importance in China. Xi’an was the national capital at several key times during China’s imperial years, like the Western Han (206 BC-24 AD) and Tang (618-907 AD) dynasties, and thus left abundant cultural relics buried.
In Shaanxi, 2,627 suspects have been detained this year on charges of stealing cultural relics, and 1,536 national-level precious cultural relics were recovered so far, according to Du.