China attaches importance to the collection and protection of cultural relics and materials including those relating to the period of Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, Minister of Culture Sun Jiazheng said Thursday in Beijing.

At a press conference of the Information Office of the State Council, Sun said a host of data and records relating to the Cultural Revolution have been lost and spread all over the world.

In reply to a question from foreign media, Sun said the National Museum, the National Library and other museums in China have collected a wealth of cultural relics and materials relating to the Cultural Revolution, which will be conducive to further researches on this period of history, Sun acknowledged.

This month marks the 40 anniversary of the launch of the tumultuous ten-year Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China.

The Cultural Revolution, a political storm, unprecedented in scale and scope, broke out in 1966, when China had just fulfilled the tasks of readjusting the national economy and set in motion the Third Five-Year Plan for National Economic Development.

This so called "revolution," wrongly launched by the top leader, and made use of by two counter revolutionary cliques, turned out to be an internal turmoil that caused calamities to the Communist Party of China, the state and the people.

It disrupted the country's socialist construction, and made new China suffer the greatest setbacks and losses ever since its founding in 1949.

Some Chinese scholars including Ba Jin, one of the most famous writers in China who passed away in 2005, proposed to set up a museum featuring the Cultural Revolution.

All Chinese have the responsibility of letting the descendants remember the lesson in the 10 years' calamity by showing what happened at that time, Ba had said when receiving interview by Chinese media.

Fan Jianchuan, a private collector in southwest China's Sichuan Province, has collected more than 300,000 cultural relics relating to Cultural Revolution, including 8,000 porcelains, 100,000 badges featuring the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong, some 20,000 picture posters and a large number of articles for daily use during that period.

Source: Xinhua