The seminar invitees will include Zheng --inmiao, director of the Palace Museum in Beijing, and curators of London's British Museum, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and France's Palace of Versailles, Orsay Museum and Louvre, Chou said in an interview with CNA Monday.

Chou proposed the plan after reaching several cooperation agreements with Zheng during meetings in China and Taiwan in recent weeks.

The planned exhibition will display treasures from the Yongzheng period while the symposium will focus on topics related to the Qing Dynasty emperor. Most of the exhibits will be from the NPM, with others coming on loan from Beijing's Palace Museum, Chou said.

She stressed that according to the agreements, cooperation between the museums would be conducted without discussion of legal issues and designation, which is controversial because the Taipei museum bears the word "national" in its name.

Under the principles, there is ample room for museums in both Taiwan and China to conduct more substantial exchanges, Chou said, noting that she reached an eight-point consensus with the Shanghai Museum on closer cooperation during her recent historic visit to the museum.

The new era of cooperation may also enhance the NPM's contacts with prominent museums around the world, which have to some degree been hindered in the past by political factors.

Chou said museum directors from around the globe have told her that they believe cooperation between museums in Taiwan and China will help facilitate the NPM's exchanges with important foreign museums.

Touching on the October exhibition, Chou said the Beijing and Shanghai museums will loan the NPM 37 and two pieces, respectively, for the exhibition, which will display 180 items in all.

To cope with the size of the show, the museum plans to borrow additional showrooms from nonprofit organizations, Chou said.

Other agreements reached with the Beijing museum included setting up service centers at the two museums to sell each other's souvenirs and exchanging personnel.

The NPM will dispatch Chen Tung-ho, a research fellow in the museum's preservation and maintenance department, to the Beijing museum in June for three months to study the Beijing museum's experience in identifying and dealing with tens of millions of old ceramic fragments.