A biennial gettogether of Asian and European movers and shakers gave a fledgling private institution just the start it needed

It will go down as one of the most pivotal meetings in recent history for private museums in China, one resulting in their demonstrating that it is not just state institutions with seemingly boundless wealth that can have great sway in the world of culture.

Enter more than 20 directors of museums from Asia and Europe, and talk soon turned to how the fine institutions they were associated with could help each other in advancing their causes and cultural exchange as well.

Shaanxi is well endowed with museums, and not surprisingly one early port of call for the visitors was the Xi'an Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts, a couple of kilometers down the road in Xi'an from the main conference center.

Compared with venerable state-funded museums such as Shaanxi History Museum, which is among the largest and most important museums in China and houses hundreds of thousands of cultural relics, the privately run Xi'an Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts is a much more modest affair and in fact had opened just 15 months before the 2013 forum.