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A group of Chinese scientists travel to Russia in October to begin a Sino-Russian project repairing of cultural relics belonging to the Xixia Kingdom (1038-1227) of ancient China.

Group leader Chen Yuning, dean of the Ningxia University, said that five Chinese archeologists would join their Russian peers to work out a detailed plan on the repair of 1,500 relics collected by the Institute of Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Saint Petersburg.

The program was to be completed within three years and its budget of 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million) would be covered by China, Chen said.

According to their agreement, Chinese scientists would be solely responsible to the repair work and be granted full access to the Russian collection. As a reward, China would get a whole set of replica for free. In addition, related research reports must be published in both Chinese and Russian.

"The project would provide valuable materials for Chinese scientists to straighten out the long lost history of Xixia Kingdom," said doctor Du Jianlu of the Xixia Kingdom Research Center of the Ningxia University in Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

Established by the Dangxiang ethnic group, part of the Qiang nationality, in the eastern section of the ancient Silk Road, the feudal kingdom's territory overlaps with today's Ningxia Hui and parts of Gansu, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia. The Xixia characters, created in the 11th century and based on traditional Chinese characters, fell into disuse with the downfall of the kingdom and Dangxiang

Interest in the society was sparked in 1908, when Russian explorers stumbled across a tomb site belonging to the kingdom. Using 40 camels, they shipped their findings to Russia. Statistics revealed that about 80 percent of the world's Xixia cultural relics are stored in Russia now; only 10 percent remain in China.