More than 10 million Chinese cultural relics have been lost overseas, lots of which were stolen and illegally shipped out of China during the times of war before 1949. About 1.67 million pieces are housed no more than 200 museums in 47 countries, which accounts for 10 percent of all lost Chinese cultural relics, and the rest are in the hands of private collectors.

Most of these treasures are owned by museums or private collectors in the United States, Europe, Japan and Southeast Asian countries. There are more than 23, 000 pieces in the British Museum, most of which were stolen or bought for pennies more than 100 years ago.

The major method to recover these national treasures was to buy them back. In some cases, private collectors donated the relics to the government. Also the government can turn to official channels to demand the return of relics.

In 2003, a priceless bronze pig’s head dating from the Qing Dynasty was returned to its home in Beijing after it was removed by the Anglo-French Allied Army over 140 years ago. Macao entrepreneur (企业家) Stanley Ho donated 6 million yuan to buy it back from a US art collector and then donated it to the Poly Art Museum in Beijing.

Although buying-back is the most feasible way to recover the lost treasures, limited funding is always a big headache.

In recent years, the Chinese government has improved efforts to recover the precious cultural relics lost overseas. It has started a national project on the recovery of the treasures and has set up a database (数据库) collecting relevant information. It has signed several international agreements with many countries on this matter, and is also looking for international cooperation to recover the relics by working closely with several international organizations.

At one time, about 300 native languages were spoken on the Australian continent. Only about 90 of them are still spoken today.

European settlers arrived in Australia in the late 1700s. Experts say that colonization had a harmful effect on native languages. Now, only about 60 of them are considered “alive” and in daily use. As older members of tribes die, other languages are likely to pass away.

In the central Australian desert, only 20 people are fluent in Pertame, a language native to the area. But now, children are being taught its ancient words in hope that it won't die out.

Bradshaw and Swan are among the native elders working to keep Pertame alive. Swan has published language books on Pertame. She is one of the last remaining fluent speakers of the language and founder of the Pertame School, opened two years ago.

Bradshaw is a teacher at the school. Children at the school not only learn the language, they also cook traditional food and learn history. “Our old people have all passed away. There are only a few of us left to teach our kids how our old people used to live. ” said Bradshaw.

According to community leaders, for many years, they were forbidden to speak their native language. Bradshaw recalls one of her experiences as a child, “The teacher walked past saying, ‘Don’t speak that language at school.’ We promised ourselves we would talk it in secret to keep it going. People don’t understand how important it is for Aboriginal (土著人的) people.”

In some schools in northern Australia, students learn in both English and an Aboriginal language. Many communities speak what is called “Aboriginal English”. It keeps some structures of Standard English and includes words from Aboriginal languages.

“WHAT IS CIVILIZATION?” asked Kenneth Clark 50 years ago in the BBC series on the subject. “I don’t know, and I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it, and I’m looking at it now.” And he turned to gesture behind him, at the soaring Gothic towers and flying buttresses of Notre Dame（巴黎圣母院）.

It seems inhuman to care more about a building than about people. That the sight of Notre Dame going up in flames has attracted so much more attention than floods in southern Africa which killed over 1,000 arouses understandable feelings of guilt. Yet the widespread, intense grief at the sight of the cathedral’s collapsing tower is in fact profoundly human—and in a particularly 21st-century way.

It is not just the economy that is global today, it is culture too. People wander the world in search not just of jobs and security but also of beauty and history. Familiarity breeds affection. A building on whose sunny steps you have rested, in front of which you have taken a photo with your loved one, becomes a warm part of your memories and thus of yourself. That helps explain why China is in mourning—WeChat, young China’s principal means of talking to itself, has been throbbing with the story, and Xi Jinping, the country’s president, sent a message of condolence to Emmanuel Macron, his French counterpart—while India was largely indifferent. Tourism from India to the West is a trickle(细流) compared with the flood from China.

This visual age has endowed beauty with new power, and social media have turned great works of art into superstars. Only a few, though, have achieved this status. Just as there is only ever a handful of world-famous actors, so the pantheon（万神殿）of globally recognizable cultural symbols is tiny: the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid—and Notre Dame. Disaster, too, is visual. In the 24 hours after the fire started videos on social media of the burning cathedral were viewed nearly a quarter of a billion times.

Yet the emotions the sight aroused were less about the building itself than about what losing it might mean. Notre Dame is an expression of humanity at its collective best. Nobody could look up into that ceiling without wondering at the genius of the thousands of anonymous craftsmen who, over a century and a half, realized a vision so grand in its structural ambition and so delicate in its   detail. Its survival through 850 years of political turbulence—through war, revolution and Nazi occupation—binds the present to the past.

The fire also binds people to each other. The outpouring of emotion it has brought forth is proof that, despite the dark forces of division now abroad, we are all in it together. When nationalism is a rising threat, shared sadness makes borders suddenly irrelevant. When politics is polarized, a love of culture has the power to unite. When extremism divides Muslim from Christian and religious people from atheists, those of all faiths and none are mourning together. An building built for the glory of God also represents the unity of the human spirit.

And it will be rebuilt. The morning after the fire, the many Parisians who went to the cathedral to mourn its destruction found comfort instead. Although the spire is gone, the towers are still standing and it seems likely that the whole building can be reconstructed. The effort to rebuild it, like the fire, will bring people together. Within 24 hours, €600m ($677m) had been raised from businesses and rich people, and a rash of crowd funding campaigns started. A high-resolution laser scan of the building, carried out recently, should help.

It will never be the same, but that is as it should be. As Victor Hugo wrote in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, a three-volume love-letter to the cathedral: “Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art is often transformed as it is being made…Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.”