Guo Daiheng is unlikely to pack a fedora hat, leather flying jacket and 10-foot bullwhip when she embarks on a global expedition this month. But the unassuming history professor from Beijing's Tsinghua University will need to cram into her suitcase as much guile and determination as that possessed by fictional adventurer Indiana Jones if she is to find what she is seeking.
Guo is the first member of a 12-strong team to be sent by the mainland to the far corners of the world on a mission impossible: to track down the estimated 1.5 million antiquities looted by British and French armies before and during the 1860 sacking of the Yuanmingyuan, popularly known as the Old Summer Palace, in northern Beijing.
Armed with guidebooks and back copies of auction-house catalogues, the investigators will travel to more than 50 countries and trawl through scores of museums known to possess the silk, porcelain, jade, shrines, carvings and other ceremonial furniture and fittings that decorated the Qing dynasty imperial seat.
That will be the easy part.
Much harder will be tracking down the vast majority of antiquities housed in thousands of unknown and very private collections, big and small. Unlike those in the great museums of London, Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin and Rome, access to these treasure troves is rarely, if ever, granted. The only time these objects see the light of day is when secretive sellers and buyers dotted across the globe swap millions of dollars to own a piece of violent diplomatic history.
Guo's first stop will be the Library of Congress, in Washington, and then the Harvard University Library. Part of her research will involve studying photographs of the palace taken shortly after the site had been torched by the Anglo-French force.
The pictures, some of which have never been made public, capture 'the wild spirit of beauty which continues to dwell in that scene of desolation', according to a New York Times China correspondent who saw them in 1873, before they were squirrelled away. While this album is a modest find and unlikely to yield many clues, it is symbolic, representing the first small step on an epic journey for the mainland as it seeks to fully recover from the shame of foreign oppression.