Staff members take out remnants of the Zidanku silk manuscripts from their package to hand over to the National Cultural Heritage Administration at Beijing's Capital International Airport on May 18 last year. LI HE/XINHUA

During the reign of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century, he commissioned Chinese and Western court painters to portray distinguished generals who had taken part in several major battles, honoring officers who had contributed to national unification. Over time, hundreds of these official portraits were produced.

Between 1900 and 1901, when the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion, these portraits were looted and scattered overseas. Many are now held in overseas museums. Among them, 29 pieces are held in seven German museums. The original home of the portraits, the Forbidden City — today's Palace Museum — holds only two copies.

For more than half a century, because the portraits were missing, these works were completely forgotten. It was not until 1985 that Nie Chongzheng, a scholar at the Palace Museum, discovered the group of works while in Germany, according to Yuan Hong, deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Palace Museum. The museum is currently working with seven German counterparts on a project to trace cultural relics looted during the Boxer Rebellion that are now part of the German museums' collections.

Yuan said that this Sino-German project focuses on the large-scale loss of the portraits in 1901. Because there are relatively detailed Qing Dynasty archives for this group of official paintings, the joint Chinese-German provenance research has been made easier. "Provenance research is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, but cooperative work of this kind also provides academic support for future returns," said Yuan.

Part of the Zidanku silk manuscripts at the Hunan Museum. XUE YUGE/XINHUA

Christine Howald, deputy director of the Central Archive and provenance researcher for the Asia collections at the National Museums in Berlin, and a leader of the project, said that before provenance research began, German museums' records of these objects were very simple: just a name, a date and a one-sentence description.

"Only through joint provenance research can the stories behind them be told, such as where they came from and who collected them," she said.

Howald and Yuan discussed topics related to the return of cultural relics with more than 100 experts and scholars from around the world at last week's forum, Shared Aspiration: Promoting Return of Lost Relics to Countries of Origin, a sub-forum of the Liangzhu Forum held in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province.

The two-day sub-forum was also titled Asia and the Pacific Regional Dialogue on New Forms of Agreements and Cooperation for Return and Restitution of Cultural Property, centering on core issues such as good practices and innovative cooperation paths for the repatriation of cultural property, policy progress, mechanism building and source transparency.

Koji Mizoguchi, former president of the World Archaeological Congress, said that in the process of returning cultural relics, the hardest thing is the passage of time. After cultural relics leave their places of origin, they pass through many hands. Tracing their excavation sites and outflow process all the way back is extremely difficult.

"You must verify every transfer with great patience, and find out exactly where it was produced and unearthed, and how it left its homeland. The whole provenance process is an arduous journey," he said.

Part of the Zidanku silk manuscripts at the Hunan Museum. XUE YUGE/XINHUA

Klaas Stutje, a senior researcher from the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in the Netherlands, cited his team's provenance work on the return to Indonesia of fossils of ancient human remains gathered by a Dutch collector. The work involved extensive field investigations and repeated cross-checking of residents' oral accounts.

"During provenance investigations, the visits, exchanges, training and seminars that grow out of them are good opportunities to build trust between the two sides. Even if the relics are not returned to their countries of origin immediately, it means the two sides have first established a relationship of trust, laying a foundation for future return," Stutje explained.

Regional dialogues on the repatriation of cultural property have been held in Central America, Africa and Europe, and this dialogue was one of the first of its kind held in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rao Quan, director of the National Cultural Heritage Administration, said in a keynote speech at the forum that promoting the return of lost cultural relics has become a shared global mission. As one of the countries that have suffered from the most serious loss of cultural relics in history, China is also a supporter, participant and builder of international cooperation on the return and restitution of cultural property.

According to research by Duan Yong, director of the Center for Research on Chinese Cultural Relics Abroad at Shanghai University, a huge number of illegally lost cultural relics remain overseas. Citing his own research on China as an example, he said that public institutions and private collections overseas hold about 15 million cultural relics of Chinese origin, of which about 1.5 million were illegally taken.

Participants in the Liangzhu Forum's sub-forum on Shared Aspiration: Promoting Return of Lost Relics to Countries of Origin visit the Liangzhu Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on Oct 18. CHINA DAILY

Over the past two decades, China has joined international conventions related to combating trafficking in cultural relics and promoting the return of artifacts. China has also signed bilateral agreements and memorandums of understanding with more than 20 countries, including Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom, to jointly curb smuggling, track the illicit trade in cultural relics and streamline repatriation procedures.

James Ratcliffe, general counsel and director of recoveries at the Art Loss Register, a private database of stolen art, antiques and collectibles, said that their database receives more than 500,000 queries each year, many of them from art dealers conducting provenance background checks before selling artworks.

"As the Asia-Pacific region's economy grows more prosperous, I think there may be more and more cases of cultural relic return in the future. The return of cultural property has become an international issue. It requires closer international cooperation, database sharing, and the formulation and use of common global regulations," he said.

The return of cultural relics is not the end, but a new starting point for cultural heritage cooperation. The National Cultural Heritage Administration introduced the case of Sino-US cooperation in returning the second and third volumes of the Zidanku Warring States Period (475-221 BC) silk manuscripts from Changsha in Hunan province.

The forum's case-sharing sessions gather experts and scholars on Oct 19 to discuss issues related to the repatriation of cultural relics. CHINA DAILY

In May 2025, the second and third volumes of the Zidanku Warring States silk manuscripts returned by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art arrived in Beijing and came home to China.

The silk manuscripts are the earliest ever discovered in China and the first of their kind in the sense of classical texts. They were unearthed in 1942 from a looted Chu tomb at Zidanku in Changsha, Hunan, and were taken overseas in 1946.

Not long ago, the Hunan Museum and the Smithsonian signed a memorandum of understanding. Under it, cooperation on silk manuscript conservation and research, Chu culture research and integrated exhibitions is being carried out.

"Bringing lost cultural relics back home is an echo of history, a call of civilization, and a responsibility entrusted to us by our times," said Rao.

He said that China is willing to work with the international community, including Asia-Pacific countries, to promote cooperation through dialogue and practice consensus through action, injecting new momentum into promoting exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations and building a community with a shared future for humanity.