THE team shooting Chinese artifacts documentary “National Treasure” is in talks with potential British partners, including the British Museum and the BBC, the show’s executive producer revealed in London on Tuesday.

“National Treasure,” a 10-part series that features 27 significant cultural relics from nine major Chinese museums, has created quite a buzz on social media in China, generating 1.7 billion discussions on Weibo, a Chinese platform that is similar to Twitter, and 800 million views on the Internet.

Yu Lei, an executive producer with China Central Television’s Channel 3, which airs the documentary, said her team is in talks with potential British partners in hopes that the second season of the show will feature Chinese artifacts from collections in British museums or that they can authorize the show franchise to British production companies.

The second season of the show is in early preparations. The first season selected artifacts from the Palace Museum in Beijing, Shanghai Museum, Hunan Provincial Museum, Shaanxi History Museum and Liaoning Provincial Museum. The show drove up museum visits by 50 percent, according to CCTV.

Details of the potential British partnerships are not yet available because talks are still in early stages, Yu said.

Yu was speaking during a seminar at the British Museum to discuss possible forms of China-U.K. cultural cooperation.

Other highlights of the seminar included a review of Kew Garden’s restoration of the China-influenced Great Pagoda and an overview of the Oxford-based Ashmolean Museum’s Chinese art collections.

(China Daily)