Yuanmingyuan stone ball found safe under preservation

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Beijing’s Old Summer Palace says the missing stone ball inside one of the park’s guardian lions’ mouths is currently well preserved after investigation.

The response came a few days after a visitor spotted that one of the rolling stone balls in the sculpture’s mouth had disappeared.

Beijing Morning Post Photo

The lions are so meticulously carved that the two stone balls can roll freely in their mouths without falling out. However, the stone ball has shrank due to natural weathering, so park staff took the ball out and preserved it at the cultural relics storage place, according to Beijing Morning Post.

A cultural relics exhibition at the Old Summer Palace /Xinhua Photo

The palace, also known in Chinese as Yuanmingyuan, is renowned for its extensive collection of gardens, architecture, art and historical treasures.

Dubbed as "Garden of Gardens”, it was unfortunately devastated and burned after massive looting during the Second Opium War more than 150 years ago.

Xinhua Photo

Since mid 1990s, a total of three excavations have been conducted in the palace, with more than 50,000 pieces of relics discovered so far.

At the same time, UNESCO estimated that about 1.6 million Chinese relics were in the possession of 47 museums worldwide in 2006, among which one million are from the Old Summer Palace.

Chinese government and civic individuals have been working to bring the relics back home during the past few years, including purchase, donation and auction, with more than 80,000 pieces returned to the Old Summer Palace.

Yuanmingyuan in VR. /Xinhua Photo

With cutting-edge technology, virtual reality (VR) has also been introduced to restore the beauty of the park and make it easy access to the public earlier this year.

A project led by Tsinghua University has completed some 60 percent of digital restoration of the park's layout, based on more than 10,000 historical files, over 4,000 design charts and 2,000 digital architecture models.