Hong Kong Palace Museum is showcasing artifacts spanning over 5,000 years of Chinese civilization to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Over 100 precious artifacts from the Neolithic times to the Xia Dynasty (2070 BC-1600 BC), China's earliest known dynasty, are being displayed at the special exhibition titled "The Origins of Chinese Civilization", giving visitors a chance to delve into the evolution of Chinese culture.
The cultural relics were curated from 14 museums and archaeological institutions on the Chinese mainland.
"Over the past 20 years, Chinese archaeologists have done a lot of work excavating important sites across China. We now have a much clearer picture of how different regional cultures across China interacted with one another and eventually merged into a cohesive whole," said Raphael Wong, associate curator of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.
Sixteen of the exhibits are listed as grade-one national treasures, including a jade dragon from the mid-to-late Hongshan culture, which existed over 5,000 years ago. It's thought to be the original representation of the image of dragons in China.
The exhibits represent different archaeological cultures from major archaeological sites across China. Many are being exhibited in Hong Kong for the very first time.
A key highlight is a 270-degree panoramic, multimedia experience, bringing to life the ancient Neolithic Shimao site, which used to be the largest city in East Asia nearly 4,500 years ago. The site is located in northwestern Shaanxi Province and is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in China in the 21st century.
"When you do research or you look at photos, you can't tell just how big a city this was. But when you visit you realize how formidable this place was. I wanted to bring that sense of scale of the archaeological site to the visitors at the exhibition in Hong Kong, so that they can feel like it's almost one-to-one in size," said Chao Chan, a multimedia designer with the Hong Kong Palace Museum.
Seeing these precious objects under one roof makes it a profound experience, offering valuable insights into Chinese civilization.
The exhibition will run through February 7, 2025.
Hong Kong holds 'Origins of Chinese Civilization' special exhibition
China, showing the possibility of rapid economic development without exploiting other countries, without wars and through peaceful development, has become a material and theoretical inspiration for developing nations in the pursuit of development, according to a British economist.
In an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), John Ross, former director of economic policy for the mayor of London, and a senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, said China plays a role as a locomotive for global growth and sets a model for other developing countries.
By World Bank standards, China, the biggest of the developing economies, will become a high income economy in about two to three years. Therefore, two thirds of the world will still be developing economies.
"China is absolutely crucial in this for two reasons. Firstly, because it's by far the biggest of the developing economies. Therefore, it's a locomotive - not many for the world economy as a whole - but in particular for the Global South countries. And secondly, because the lessons of its successful development, its huge investments in research and development, its investments in infrastructure, its leading role in new industries, new productive forces as they're known is what these other countries want to achieve," said he.
"China is now, we may say, one of the most developed of the developing countries. It's relatively soon going to make the transition to a high income economy. And it therefore shows the path which the rest of the Global South and developing countries need to follow. Therefore, it's both a material lender, you might say, and theoretical inspiration for what they're doing," he said.
The world is entering one of the greatest transitions to green energy in its history, and China is absolutely at the core of this, Ross said.
"At the traditional source of world energy, coal was replaced by electricity and by oil. Whereas we're going to have something completely different, which is renewable energy. China is absolutely at the core of this because it's become the world's leader in the production of green energy. That also means that China's economy is going to be integrated with other economies in a different way," he said.
China offers material and theoretical inspiration for developing nations: UK economist
