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Sea Silk Route display opens

ITS land counterpart may be more famous but the maritime Silk Route was greater in terms of commercial and cultural contact and length of service, a new exhibition reveals.

The maritime Silk Route began at Guangzhou and crossed the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean to reach the Mediterranean.

Mok Ying-fan, chairman of the Urban Council Museums Select Committee, said Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau had each played a specific role in the development of the maritime Silk Route.

'Guangzhou, the starting point of the maritime Silk Route, reached the peak of its development as a port in the Tang and Song dynasties,' he said. 'Except for a relatively short period, Guangzhou was the foremost Chinese port dealing with foreign trade and the only such port from 1757 to 1841.' The land Silk Route began at Chang'an (present-day Xian) and crossed desert, snow-covered mountains and steppes to reach Western Asia.

Mr Mok was speaking at the recent opening ceremony of a new exhibition entitled 'The Maritime Silk Route: 2000 years of trade on the South China Sea', which will be held until April 28.

The exhibition, which is jointly presented by the Hong Kong Museum of History, the Guangzhou Museum and the Guangdong Provincial Museum, is being held at the Urban Council's Hong Kong Museum of History in Kowloon Park.

Some of the rare finds displayed in the exhibition are collections from the Guangzhou Museum. They include relics excavated from the site of a Qing shipyard, ship models, lacquer flasks, pottery models of elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns, incense burners and a Roman blue glass bowl recovered from Han tombs.

Free lectures in Chinese will be conducted by experts in the field at 3 pm on Saturdays from January 29 to March 16 in the museum's lecture room.

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