China Plans National Museum

China plans to build a massive national museum to house the country's treasure trove of cultural relics, the official newspaper People's Daily reported Saturday.

The Ministry of Culture plans to seek proposals from famous architects, both in and outside China, for a structure that would match the Louvre in stature, the report said.

Many of China's historic treasures were looted by foreigners over the ages or were taken by the Nationalists when they fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war to the communists in 1949.

The Palace Museum inside the Forbidden City, Beijing's former imperial palace, exhibits only one-tenth of its 930,000 relics at any given time, the report. It suffers from poor lighting, a lack of climate control and antiquated storage facilities.

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