At a forum held Tuesday in Beijing, they voiced their firm opposition to a joint statement issued on Dec. 19, 2002 by the curators of 18 museums in Europe and the United States, including the Palais Du Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

It was the first public refusal to return illegally-obtained artifacts to their original countries.

A Chinese non-government organization, which organized the forum, responded promptly with an open letter this January to the museums, saying that the rejection breached a pact by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and wronged the victim countries.

The organization, China's Lost Cultural Relics Recovery Program of the China Foundation for the Development of Folklore Culture, was founded on Oct. 18, 2002 and is the country's first civil group raising money to retrieve and rescue cultural relics.

With the oldest aged around 90 and the youngest about 70, the elderly scholars themselves are national treasures in terms of their invaluable knowledge on cultural artifacts. Their ranks include Wang Shixiang, Luo Zhewen, Zheng Xiaoxie, Su Bai, Xie Chensheng, Li Xueqin and Xu Pingfang.

"It's absolutely not ultra nationalism and, on the contrarily, we are just protecting our rights. Culture is the spirit of a nation and relics are the purveyors of culture," said Li Xueqin, director of the study center on ancient culture under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"Many other countries are facing similar situations, such as Egypt, India and Greece. We shall join hands with them in retrieving lost artifacts through the law instead of money, since money can only stimulate illegal relics dealing," said Wang Shixiang, who is nearly 90 years old.

The organization's incomplete figures show that no less than one million Chinese artifacts are currently kept in 200-plus museums in 47 countries worldwide and those being held in private hands are even more difficult to calculate.

(Xinhua News Agency January 22, 2003)