American Chinese Collector's Association Chairman Zhou Dezhao recently brought back to China a batch of Chinese cultural relics lost abroad. Pictured is the Qing Dynasty (1616-1911) ivory sculpture of Buddhism treasure named "Three Saints of the West" collected by Zhou.

In the year 2002, the Chinese government formally set up a special fund to recover national key cultural relics and allocates 50 million RMB (US$6.25 million) annually to reclaim precious cultural relics that are lost overseas. To date, actual spending added up to about 200 million RMB, recovering 204 pieces of precious cultural relics from abroad. ¡¡¡¡

According to statistics from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, among the collections of 200-odd museums in 47 foreign countries, 1.67 million pieces of cultural relics are from China. The number of Chinese cultural relics preserved by individual foreign collectors might be several folds, even a dozen times more.

Editor: Wing