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Taipei (dpa) - Taiwan's National Palace Museum (NPM), which holds the world's best collection of Chinese artifacts, will hold an exhibition in Austria in 2008, a museum official said on Thursday.
The agreement came after long negotiations to convince Vienna to promise to return the treasures to Taipei, instead of to Beijing - which claims sovereignty over Taiwan.
"It took us two years to get Austria to sign the Law of the Guarantee Return. NPM has sent its treasures abroad only a few times, and only after foreign countries sign a law promising to return the exhibits to Taiwan," Su Ching-feng, head of the museum's Public Relations Office, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Under an agreement reached between NPM and Austria's Cultural History Museum, the Austrians will hold an exhibition in Taipei from September to November next year, and NPM will hold an exhibition in Austria in 2008.
The Austrian exhibition will display artifacts from the period under the Habsburg rule (13th-19th century).
NPM's exhibition is planned in Vienna from February through April in 2008. It will feature more than 100 artifacts from the period of Emporer Chien Long during China's Ching Dynasty (1736-1796).
The Chinese Nationalist government took the best artifacts from the Palace Museum in Beijing and a museum in Nanjing - 650,000 pieces - and brought them to Taipei, when it lost the Chinese civil war in 1949.
China considers the artworks the heritage of China. Fearing that that China might seize the artifacts through its diplomatic ties with foreign countries, Taiwan has allowed NPM to send its treasures abroad only a few times.
More than 160 countries have diplomatic ties with China and only 25 countries recognize Taiwan.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
