The 2022 Maritime Silk Road Culture and Travel Expo opens in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province Nov 18. [Photo/WeChat account: nbfb0574]

The 2022 Maritime Silk Road Culture and Travel Expo opened in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province Nov 18.

The expo, which ran till Nov 21, featured businesses from countries along the Maritime Silk Road, including Italy, Turkey, Indonesia and Thailand, as well as domestic cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hangzhou, that showcased a myriad of cultural and tourism products online.

A forum was held after the opening ceremony and guests got to explore ways of creatively transforming and developing cultural heritage and contemporary intellectual manufacturing.

An integral part the expo, an exhibition featuring 40-plus exquisite artworks crafted by French century-old brands, including Cristal & Bronze, Odiot and J.L Coquet, was launched on the 40th floor of the K11 Atelier, a landmark building in downtown Ningbo, on Nov 17. The exhibition will end on Nov 23.

A dialogue attended by curators of Italy's Laurentian Medici Library and the Malatesta Novello Library as well as Tianyi Pavilion, all of which are listed among the oldest existing libraries in the world, was staged an Nov 18.

The Sino-German Chess Invitational Tournament and the fourth National (Ningbo) Comprehensive Materials Painting Biennial was also held during the expo period.

Since its inception in 2016, the Maritime Silk Road Culture and Travel Expo has garnered over 1.4 million offline visitors as well as more than 110 million online views.

Around 4,200 enterprises from more than 40 countries and regions worldwide have participated in the exhibition, resulting in over 2 billion yuan ($285.7 million) in turnover.