The forthcoming return of a rare bronze horse's head that had been looted from Beijing's Old Summer Palace represents the latest success in the decades-long effort to recover the country's lost cultural relics.

An artist's rendering of the water-clock fountain at the Haiyantang, Yuanmingyuan. 

Macau tycoon Stanley Ho yesterday paid a record US$8.9 million for the sculpture at an auction by Sotheby's auction house, and is to hand it back to China.

It is one of 12 bronze heads of zodiac animals that once sat around a water-clock fountain at the palace, Yuanmingyuan, which was destroyed by marauding British and French troops in 1860. Four others have been recovered.

China's efforts to recover its lost national relics have come a long way in recent years. The country continues to buy back stolen artifacts at overseas auctions.

The country's first breakthrough came with the return of 3,494 ancient Chinese artifacts about a decade ago.

In the summer of 1994, British police intercepted a large haul of cultural relics that they suspected were of Chinese origin. But the Chinese Embassy was not notified until the following February.

Upon receiving the information, embassy officials immediately forwarded it to the country's cultural relics bureau.

During two visits to London later that year, the bureau's experts confirmed that the relics, dating back from the New Stone Age to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty (1616-1911), had been looted from within Chinese borders.

However, the suspects did not face any legal threats because of restrictions on lawsuits involving crimes that occur outside the country.

It took the establishment of a special task force involving officials from various government departments to begin the relevant legal proceedings, and nearly three years to settle out of court with the suspects. In February 1998, more than 3,000 relics were transported back to Beijing.

The first case involving Sino-US cooperation in the field began in March 2000, when a guardian statue that had been looted from a Chinese tomb in 1994 appeared in an advertisement for an auction at Christie's, on consignment from M&C Gallery in Hong Kong.

The statue was seized by US Customs agents prior to the auction. Days later, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Mary Jo White brought a civil forfeiture suit under the Cultural Properties Implementation Act, which led to the sculpture's seizure.

A detailed examination by Chinese experts identified it to be an authentic artifact from the Five Dynasties (AD 907-960) tomb of Wang Chuzhi. Artifacts from this period are considered some of China's most valuable cultural relics.

Legal and diplomatic negotiations for its return continued until May 2001, when it finally came home to Beijing.

Because of the sheer volume of China's tangible cultural heritage, preservation efforts have faced many challenges.

Although global cultural property instruments, such as the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on stolen or illegally exported cultural objects, continue to be effective, freshly looted Chinese relics are still not uncommon on the international art market.

(China Daily September 21, 2007)