German Minister of State at the Foreign Office Cornelia Pieper (centre) talks as Christian-Ludwig Weber-Lortsch, German Ambassador to Myanmar (left) and Klaus-Dieter Lehmann , president of the German Goethe Institute look on during a press conference yesterday.
DPA/Yangon
Germany is hoping to return an 18th-century gold sheet letter to Myanmar as part of improving cultural ties with the once-pariah state, a German minister said yesterday.
“We have done everything we can to hand over the golden letter,” said Cornelia Pieper, Minister of State with Germany’s Foreign Office.
But the fate of the artefact, which has been stored in the Leibniz library in the northern city of Hanover for more than 250 years, is ultimately out of Berlin’s hands, she said.
“It depends on the Hanover state government and the Leibniz library.”
The letter was written by Myanmar’s King Alaungphaya in 1756 to Britain’s King George II, offering respectful greetings and trade cooperation in ornate language, deciphered in 2010.
The king promptly sent the engraved gold sheet, measuring 55 by 12 centimetres and inlaid with 24 rubies, to the royal library in his home city of Hanover, unanswered.
Pieper said that she hoped the letter, or a copy, would be handed over to the museum under construction in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital since 2005, before it was finished.
The minister was in Myanmar to boost cultural ties with the country that was under military rule from 1962 to 2010.
Germany and Myanmar signed an agreement on Monday to exchange culture and art and to re-open a Goethe Institute in Yangon.
Germany closed its Yangon branch of the state-sponsored cultural embassy in 1965, due to uncertainty following the coup of military strongman General Ne Win in 1962.
The new branch would open in 2014, “not later than March,” the organisation’s president Klaus-Dieter Lehmann said.