Treasures Travel to Beijing

Te Papa is sending an exhibition of pounamu to China, where it expects a flurry of interest among museumgoers who haven’t seen how other cultures work with the precious stone. ‘Kura Pounamu: Treasured Stone of Aotearoa New Zealand’, on at Beijing’s National Museum of China through 1 February, is part of a celebration of four decades of diplomatic relations between the two nations. Next year it travels to the Liangzhu Museum in Hangzhou, Guangdong Museum in southern China, Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, and Shaanxi Museum in Xi’an. Chief executive of Te Papa Michael Houlihan said: “The more you understand about a culture, the better your relationship can be. It’s about how you use culture to build bridges of understanding between different societies.”