The Palace Museum in Beijing held a memorial on Thursday for a villager who donated precious cultural relics to the museum.

He Gang, a villager from Shangshui county, Henan province, discovered 19 silver artifacts from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) in a buried jar he found while digging in his yard in 1985. The items are mainly vases and other containers believed to have been for daily use.

After turning down what villagers later described as a large bag of cash from antique dealers, He insisted on giving the artifacts to the country, officials said. He and two other villagers took a train to Beijing to give them to the Palace Museum.