Taipei  - The curator of the Beijing Palace Museum arrived in Taiwan Sunday for a cultural exchange, highlighting China's battle to recover its ancient treasures seized by foreign countries.

Zheng Xinmiao, director of the Beijing Palace Museum, is leading a ten-member delegation to visit the National Palace Museum of Taipei, which holds 650,000 pieces of art brought to Taiwan by the Chinese Nationalist government when it lost the Chinese Civil War and fled to Taiwan to set up its government-in-exile in 1949.

Zheng said his visit is to promote exchanges with Taiwan's National Palace Museum, which were agreed upon when National Palace Museum Director Chou Kung-shin visited the Beijing Palace Museum last month.

"We are here to implement the agreements. The road for cooperation has been opened, but things may be difficult at the start," he said at the Taoyuan International Airport outside Taipei.

As part of the exchange, the Beijing Palace Museum has agreed to loan 29 artifacts to Taipei's National Palace Museum for an exhibition to be held in October.

Taiwan press reports said the exchange of visits could lead to the Beijing Palace Museum asking to borrow treasures from the Taipei National Palace Museum for exhibition in China.

But Taiwan declared it will not loan the artifacts to China until Beijing has signed the Law of Guaranteed Return and promises it will not seize the treasures after exhibition in China.

China sees Taiwan as its breakaway province and the artifacts held by the Taipei National Palace Museum as stolen from China, although Beijing has stopped talking about recovering the treasures as cross-strait ties have improved.

But China is actively seeking the return of ancient treasures looted from China by foreign invaders and adventurers, many of which are held by Western museums or art collectors.

In the latest dispute over looted Chinese relics, British auction house Christie's auctioned a bronze rabbit head and an ox head to mysterious bidders for 14 million euro
(17.7 million US dollars) each in Paris Wednesday, despite China's protest that the auction should be cancelled because the relics were looted from China.

The bronzes were among the 12 Chinese zodiac animals that spouted water to tell the time in a fountain in the Summer Palace near Beijing, which was ransacked and burnt down by British and French troops in 1860.

China insisted the two animal heads belong to China and should be returned. dpa