President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan appreciated cultural relics that were recently returned from Italy with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and his daughter Laura Mattarella at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

The successful return of the artefacts is another collaborative effort following Italy’s return of 796 artefacts to China in 2019 since the establishment of an intergovernmental cooperation framework against the illicit export and import of cultural properties between the two countries.

China and Italy have long cooperated in the cultural heritage field, especially the retrieval of illegally imported and exported cultural relics. As early as 2006, they signed an intergovernmental bilateral agreement to combat the smuggling of artefacts.

The 56 artifacts that were returned from Italy recently, were found by Caribinieri of Italy from 2021 to this year. It has presented notes to China’s embassy in Italy that they had captured a collective 59 suspected cultural relics from China, asking the Chinese side to evaluate whether the artefacts were exported illegally.

Chinese experts identified 56 of them including a pottery figurine’s head from the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), a female standing figurine from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), a pottery beast from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and painted pottery vessels of Majiayao Culture, a Neolithic archaeological culture distributed in the upper reaches of the Yellow River dating back 4,000 to 5,000 years. The remaining three relics are still under investigation.

Without permission to leave China, based on the law, they were illegally taken abroad. As a result, the National Cultural Heritage Administration in China requested their return through diplomatic channels and the Italian side cooperated and decided to repatriate them.

Nineteen of the 56 artifacts were returned to China at the end of October, and the rest will be returned soon.

Experts say the artifacts are from China’s Gansu, Qinghai and Shaanxi provinces with high historical, artistic and scientific value. Among them the Majiatao pottery vessels can help unveil the origins and early development of Chinese civilisation, while the Han, Tang and Yuan dynasty artefacts are vivid witnesses of the stable, rich, open and tolerant societies of their times.

As of November, China has seen the return of more than 2,113 cultural relics to China through 48 batches.—China Daily/ANN

Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2024