Number of Valuable Cultural Relics Reaches 1.66 Million in China

How many pieces of valuable cultural relics all over the country? After 10 years of surveying, staff at the State Administration of Cultural Heritage finally gave a preliminary answer: number of precious cultural relics housed in China has reached up to over 1.66 million pieces/sets by now.

State Administration of Cultural Heritage proclaimed that by the end of 2010, 31 provinces, autonomous regions and the municipalities directly under the Central Government had completed the work of collecting, reporting and submitting the information of the first-grade cultural relics and of cataloguing the second and third-grade valuable cultural relics housed in the national cultural relics institutes, generating a complete database of 1,660,275 pieces/sets of valuable cultural relics. Among which, 480,006 pieces/sets are ranked as first-grade items and 1,612,269 pieces/sets as second and third-grade ones. Meanwhile, more than 1.37 million pieces of data on the ordinary cultural relics had also been catalogued.

It is reported that “Program on Cultural Relics Survey and Database Establishment” was co-launched by Ministry of Finance and State Administration of Cultural Heritage in 2001. Currently, with the file compilation of national first-grade cultural relics and the establishment of tri-levels (namely, state, province and institute levels) database system based on such a thorough survey, treasures housed in the museums and other cultural relics institutes had been put in order.