The box cover that serves as evidence of the Zidanku silk manuscripts' circulation in the United States is presented at a handover ceremony in Qingdao, Shandong province, on June 20.[Photo/China Daily]

For eight decades, scholars follow the journey of the relics through the US, Wang Ru reports in Qingdao, Shandong.

In 1942, a long-sealed tomb from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) in the Zidanku (literally "bullet storehouse") area on the outskirts of Changsha, Hunan province, was plundered by grave robbers who stole the earliest silk manuscripts ever found in China.

Eight decades later, they are still the only known silk manuscripts of the Chu state from the Warring States Period excavated in China.

Not long after they were unearthed, they were collected by Cai Jixiang (1898-1979), a local dealer in antiques and amateur historian who studied them. In 1946, John Hadley Cox (1913-2005), an American teacher at Yali High School in Changsha, is said to have cheated Cai and illicitly took the silk manuscripts to the United States.

The artifacts then passed through many hands in the US and were finally housed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. At the same time, Cai attempted to retrieve them but never succeeded.