A bronze rabbit head and rat head made for the Zodiac fountain of the Emperor Qianlong's Summer Palace in China are displayed during the exhibition of the private art collection of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge at the Grand Palais in Paris February 21, 2009. [File Photo: Xinhua]

A team from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing is in the United States on a half-month-long visit to record the cultural relics that were looted from Yuanmingyuan more than 150 years ago, the Beijing News reports.

The team's visit to the States, which bagan on Sunday, is the first leg of its global relics searching tour project that has recently been launched. The tour aims to collect various relics documents and photos related to the Old Summer Palace. It also is investigating the cultural relics preserved in every large museum overseas, although not planning to seek their return during the team's visits.

The team is composed of eight members, including experts from Tsinghua University and the CCTV program "National Treasures."

During their American tour, members of the team are conducting their investigation at nine places, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Freer Gallery of Art, Harvard University Library and Metropolitan Museum of Art and contacting some private collectors. So far, the team has already obtained some documents about the relics, although they have not specified what they are.

The newspaper report cited some officials as saying that experts had lost track of some of the Yuanmingyuan artifacts after the palace was burned by British and French troops during the Second Opium War.

Although large number of Yuanmingyuan relics had been preserved overseas, experts still cannot precisely determine how many items of relics the Old Summer Palace actually housed as the list of artifacts stored in Yuanmingyuan was burned in the fire at the time.

Currently, there is no complete list that records how many relics still exist or where they are now.

(CRI November 30, 2009)