A wooden carving from the mainland to celebrate the 1997 handover was damaged by an intruder in the Museum of History yesterday.
The 2.73-metre-long deck of the 2,000-kilogram sculpture, called 'Bridge of Unity', was found on the floor of the main lobby of the museum in Tsim Sha Tsui East.
'Initial estimates showed that the damage was not serious. Only two 2.5cm-long parts of the delicate wooden carving were chipped off in the fall,' an Urban Services Department spokesman said.
'Our own staff will take one or two days to repair it and then it will be on display again.' The model bridge carving, which divides into three parts - base, pillars and the deck - is one of two gifts presented to the SAR to celebrate the handover displayed in the museum.
The intruder climbed into the four-storey museum in Chatham Road South after using a brick to break a ground floor window at 6.30am.
'He then went to the first floor and searched the cloakroom, where signs of ransacking were detected,' he said.