Cultural connections gain fresh life

He says the museum benefits from the UAE's unique position at the crossroads of East and West and that the country maintains strong historical and contemporary links with China. This contributes to a strong relationship with China, he says.

"We share a known history of mutual trade and commerce dating back over a thousand years and indeed several of the displays in our permanent galleries look at cultural and artistic exchanges along the Silk Road, for example," Rabate says.

He says Chinese visitors have always been very important and the museum has a Mandarin-speaking guide on the staff. Before the pandemic, China was the top source of the museum's visitors, with Chinese making up 9.4 percent of them in 2019.

Rabate says the museum's next international exhibition will look at eight centuries of artistic and cultural exchanges between China and the Islamic world.

"I'm looking forward to how it will spotlight the many existing cultural and artistic exchanges between our home region and China," he says.

Xu He, the project leader of the International Liaison Office of Art Exhibitions China, says that in the years before the pandemic forced the closure of borders, the organization had brought an increasing number of art exhibits to audiences in countries involved in the BRI. In 2014, the exhibition Treasures of China was held in Tanzania and, in the following year, the center curated exhibitions on China's general history in Latvia, Lithuania and Cyprus.