On the morning of April 25th, the General Assembly of the Alliance for Cultural Heritage in Asia was held in Xi’an, and President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the General Assembly, and the “Collaborative Research Center for Archaeologty of the Silk Roads”was officially inaugurated at the General Assembly with NWU as the implementation unit.
Li Qun, Vice Minister of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China and Director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, Xu Mingfei, Vice Governor of Shaanxi Province, Wang Fukang, Ambassador of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, Maksutov Arkinbek Askarovich, Minister of Culture, Information, Sports and Youth Policy of the Kyrgyz Republic, Davlatzoda Zulfiya Davlat, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Tajikistan, Duldeyev, Ambassador of Turkmenistan to China, and Bakhodir Abdikarimov, Director of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Republic of Uzbekistan, jointly inaugurated the Center.
The Collaborative Research Center for Archaeologty of the Silk Roads is one of the outcomes of the second meeting of the Foreign Ministers of China + Central Asia in 2021, which was established at the initiative of the Chinese side and built in cooperation with the five countries. Shaanxi Provincial Bureau of Cultural Heritage is the lead unit, Northwest University is the implementation unit, together collaboratively built with the support from the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, the Xi’an Institute of Cultural Heritage Protection and Archaeological Research, the International Council on Monuments and Sites Xi’an International Conservation Center (IICC-X) and other resources inside and outside the province, and the Silk Road countries. The Center is oriented to carry out archaeological cooperation, heritage conservation, cultural exchange and talent training along the Silk Road in Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia, and to build an open and shared platform for cooperative archaeological research and humanistic exchange between China and the countries along the Silk Road.
