Toppan Printing Co. has teamed up with the Palace Museum in Beijing's Forbidden City in an effort to digitize images of the museum's exhibits, according to organizers who unveiled the project at the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo.
Film director Masahiro Shinoda said he will examine how to best capture the immense number of artifacts at the museum, as the building is historically and architecturally significant on a number of levels.
The 500 million yen initiative is aimed at creating software to render three-dimensional images and is expected to result in the images being put online.
The Palace Museum is housed in the main buildings of the former imperial palaces of the Ming and Qing dynasties, known as the Forbidden City.
A collection of valuable Chinese relics is stored there.
The museum was designated by the State Council as one of China's foremost monuments for protection in 1961 and was named a UNESCO heritage site in 1987.