Book on Chinese relics abroad launched

The Collections of Chinese Ancient Cultural Relics Abroad: Volume Victoria and Albert Museum has just been published, the fruit of ten years' efforts by Chinese experts.

The book is the first of an upcoming series that centers on ancient cultural heritage collections in different museums around the world. The book details 195 out of 18,000 items now currently in the Victoria and Albert Museum in England.

More than 1.64 million ancient Chinese artifacts have been transported out of China because of different reasons such as wars and smuggling since the mid 19th century. More than 200 museums in 47 countries hold such collections, according to a report from UNESCO.

"The information we now have about these pieces is still very patchy," said Lv Zhangshen, curator of the National Museum of China. "In order to have a clearer picture about these items, National Museum of China decided to start the Chinese Ancient Cultural Relics Abroad book project in 2005. But after we began, we found it really difficult to collect information for every piece from each museum. That’s why the first volume took us ten years."

"The pieces in the book include 102 porcelains, 31 bronzes, 22 lacquer, 10 enamel vessels and so on," Liu Mingqian from Victoria and Albert Museum said.

According to the National Museum of China, the volume of the Japanese museum Sen-oku Hakuko Kan is coming out soon and the museum will seek more cooperation from museums worldwide to accelerate the project.