A street in the ancient city Pingyao which was bult in the Ming-Qing period and is now a site of the World Heritage.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, China has protected a huge number of cultural relics and achieved remarkable success. The special subsidies appropriated by the Central Government for the protection of cultural relics in more than 1,000 projects have reached about 700 million RMB yuan. As a result, a large number of cultural relics have been saved from destruction. Prominent successes in the maintenance and protection of historical sites are the Potala Palace (Lhasa, Tibet), the Kumbum Monastery (Huangzhong County, Qinghai Province), the Caves at Mount Sumeru (Guyuan County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region), the Kizil Thousand-Buddha Cave (Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region), the Longmen Grottoes (Luoyang City, Henan Province), the Yungang Caves (Datong City, Shanxi Province), the Goddess Hall (Taiyuan City, Shanxi Province), the Mountain Summer Resort (Chengde City, Hebei Province), the Thatched Cottage of Tang Poet Du Fu (Chengdu City, Sichuan Province), and the Tianyi Pavilion (Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province). In 1996, the State Council announced the fourth batch of national important cultural relics protection units, numbering 250 and bringing the total to 750. There are 99 national historical and cultural cities. In 1995, the UNESCO placed on the World Heritage List the Potala Palace in Tibet, the Mountain Summer Resort, together with its adjacent temples in Chengde City, Hebei Province, the Confucius Temple, the Confucius Family Mansion and the Confucius Woods in Qufu City, Shandong Province, and the ancient architectural complex on Mount Wudang in Hubei Province.

In March 2000, a large tomb of the Han Dynasty (2000 years ago) was discovered in Laoshan, Beijing. This the excavation site

The planned scientific excavation of cultural relics has laid a good foundation for the improvement of archeological theory and practice, and research into ancient Chinese history. Aeronautical, underwater and desert archeological studies have provided important historical information and data for economic construction, and new techniques of and approaches to the development of cultural relics protection.

In recent years, China has been taking an unprecedentedly active part in foreign exchanges and cooperation in terms of cultural relics. About 150 cultural relics exhibitions have been held in the U.S., Argentina, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Japan, Republic of Korea, Australia, and Singapore. The Exhibition of Tombs of Chinese Emperors held in the U.S., the Exhibition of Tibetan Treasures and the Exhibition of the Yellow River Civilization held in Italy, and the Exhibition of Laolan's Cultural Relics and the Exhibition of the Terracotta Legion of the First Qin Emperor held in Japan presented the splendors of the great ancient Chinese civilization to large and appreciative audience.