The long road home for lost relics

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.