The Palace Museum announced Tuesday it will stage a large-scale exhibition of its own collection of Tibetan Buddhist Relics from May 23 to August 15, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.
Wang Jiapeng, an expert on Tibetan Buddhism at the museum, disclosed that 70 percent of the exhibits are to be publicly showed for the first time.
The exhibits are only "the tip of an ice-berg," compared with the tens of thousands of Tibetan Buddhist relics gathered by the imperial palace during the past hundreds of years, according to the expert.
Wang noted that Tibetan relics are a unique part of the collection of the museum and involve many aspects of religion, imperial courts, fine arts and crafts, and calligraphy and paintings. The exhibits are very precious and of high quality, he stressed.
The exhibits were mostly left over or given by visitors from Tibet, Mongolia and foreign nations as tributes, which could serve as good evidence of the close and friendly relations between China 's central governments of different dynasties and the local rulers and religious leaders of Tibet, the expert said.
All the Tibetan relics have been well preserved in the Palace Museum for the past decades and experts regularly check their conditions, Wang said. The relics were scarcely exhibited in the past for various factors, he added.
(People's Daily 05/22/2001)
