An ancient bronze horse statue at Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou, Northwest China's Gansu Province Photo: VCG

China's National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) has recently issued a notice to launch a special nationwide campaign aimed at strengthening the safety management of cultural relics in state-owned museums. The initiative involves a comprehensive inventory check and risk inspection of all relics held by public museums across China. The campaign will see museums conduct item-by-item checks, thoroughly verifying the consistency between records and actual holdings, with the goal of establishing a standardized and regularized system for managing and auditing museum collections, according to an article published Wednesday on the NCHA's official WeChat account.

The campaign will focus on identifying and addressing potential safety hazards concerning cultural relics in museum collections, further enhancing preventive measures and improving emergency response capabilities to ensure their security. The NCHA calls on all local authorities and museums to take this campaign as an opportunity to improve collection management systems, strengthen security defenses, and raise the overall level of security management for cultural relics. At the same time, pilot work for the second national census on movable cultural relics will also be launched.

Since December 2025, the administration has thoroughly investigated management issues associated with museum collections that have attracted public concerns. It has issued notices on strengthening museum security work and standardizing the management of donated collections in state-owned museums, urging all levels of cultural heritage authorities and museums to reinforce basic management practices by regulating the categorization, registration, cataloging and storage procedures of collections; and by strictly implementing protocols for the acceptance and preservation of donated items, thereby ensuring their proper protection and usage.

In December 2025, the NCHA formed a dedicated working group to investigate issues related to museum collection management at the Nanjing Museum, after concerns arose regarding the whereabouts of certain items in its holdings.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, descendants of the late renowned collector Pang Laichen discovered that five out of 137 ancient paintings and calligraphy works - which their family donated to the Nanjing Museum in 1959 - could not be located. The Paper, a Shanghai-based outlet, reported that one of the "missing" pieces, "Spring in Jiangnan" by Ming Dynasty artist Qiu Ying, appeared in a preview exhibition at a Beijing auction house in May last year, with an estimated value of 88 million yuan ($12.5 million). The incident has drawn widespread public attention.

Global Times