A museum displaying items of ancient relics about 25,000 years ago which were found in downtown Beijing will open to visitors on December 28.

The 400-square-meter museum is located in the Oriental Plaza of Wangfujing, a busy shopping area in the capital. It comprises 200 exhibits including stone hammers, bones of ox, deer, ostriches and fish, articles for everyday use in ancient China and other cultural relics, according to the Beijing Daily.

These pieces represent the most important archaeological findings in Beijing after the skull of Peking (Beijing) Man was discovered at Zhoukoudian in 1929. They are also the oldest cultural items discovered in a capital city anywhere in the world, the newspaper reported.

The first lot of the articles were found in 1996 accidentally by Yue Shengyang, a postgraduate student at Beijing University looking for fossils of ancient stone tools and bone fragments at the construction site of the Oriental Plaza, just less than a kilometer away from the Tian'anmen Square.

At the site, Chinese archeologists have since 1996 uncovered more than 2,000 fossils dating back 25,000 years.

( December 21, 2001)