Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has signed agreements with Chinese institutions as it works to digitise and promote its Gandharan collections, a provincial heritage official said.

Fawad Khan, an assistant director at the province's Directorate General of Archaeology and Museums, called looking after its heritage sites "a big job" and "a big headache" in an interview with China Economic Net (CEN) on the sidelines of the ninth Silk Road (Dunhuang) International Culture Expo.

By his account, the directorate runs 15 museums and looks after thousands of sites, with about 10,000 Gandharan sculptures at the Peshawar Museum alone.

He named looting and antiquities smuggling among the province's main problems, and pointed to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Chinese government on the issue.

At national level, the two governments signed an agreement in 2022 on preventing theft, clandestine excavation and illicit trade in cultural property, followed by another on heritage cooperation in October 2025.

The directorate has also signed MOUs with Chinese institutions, Khan added, and is working on digitising museum collections and producing digital catalogues.

According to a March 2025 announcement on its website, it established a digital heritage partnership with Tsinghua University, using 3D scanning and digital modelling.

Fazal ur Rahman, executive director of the Pakistan Council on China, described heritage work as one strand of cooperation under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

China has "more advanced technology than Pakistan" in preservation and "definitely can help Pakistan in promoting and preserving our national heritage in a better way", he said.

Exhibitions have brought Gandharan art to Chinese audiences. A show of 203 artefacts, 173 of them on loan from Pakistan, opened at the Palace Museum in Beijing in March 2023 and later travelled to museums in Gansu and Shenzhen.

The directorate plans more at museums in different parts of China, Khan added.

It has also worked with Germany's Ruhr University Bochum on digitally cataloguing Gandharan sculptures in the Dir Museum, he noted, while an Italian archaeological mission has worked in the province for many years.

Khan traced the link between the two sides back thousands of years, with Buddhism, trade and culture moving along the Silk Road and Gandharan art influencing Dunhuang, Kucha and the Kizil Caves.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP) — Pak-China