Ancient relics, young voices: Cultural ties bridge China and the US

A year after the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D. C. returned two volumes of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts to China, Peng Liyuan, wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, visited the museum on Thursday accompanied by Melania Trump, wife of US President Donald Trump. The connection is no coincidence. It comes against the backdrop of growing China-US cooperation on the protection of cultural heritage. The two volumes of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts were unearthed in 1942 at the Zidanku site in Changsha, central China's Hunan Province. They were taken to the United States in 1946 amid the wartime turmoil, and remained overseas for nearly eight decades before the museum formally returned them to China in May 2025. The manuscripts, dating to the Warring States period more than 2,000 years ago, are among the earliest known silk texts from China.

During her visit to the museum, Peng expressed appreciation for the return of Chinese cultural relics by the US in recent years. She called for continued efforts to strengthen cooperation in cultural exchanges and cultural heritage protection and to deepen friendship between the two peoples. In September, one week before President Xi and his wife Peng's visit, the US returned 64 cultural relics, works of art and paleontological fossils to China. The items, repatriated in two batches, include Buddhist sculpture fragments, figurines and dinosaur fossils, which had been seized by US law enforcement agencies. Chinese and US authorities worked together to facilitate their return. At a handover ceremony for the returned artifacts, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said the latest return was a concrete step of implementing the important consensus reached by the two heads of state and building a constructive China-US…