SHIJIAZHUANG - An official of North China's Hebei province was executed Friday for stealing and selling cultural relics, including many on the state protection list, a local court said.

Li Haitao, chief of the cultural relics protection authorities of the imperial garden in Chengde city of Hebei, was executed after China's Supreme People's Court approved the death penalty on a conviction of embezzlement, the Intermediate People's Court of Chengde said.

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By taking advantage of his post between 1993 and 2002, Li was convicted of stealing 259 cultural relics stored in the depository of the Eight Outer Temples, an imperial compound built on hillsides to the north and east of the three-century old Summer Mountain Resort.

Li, 50, replaced the relics with copies, inferior or incomplete objects and instigated subordinates to alter their archives.

Among the stolen items, which include a number of gold gilded Buddha statues, five were listed as state relics under first class protection, 56 were in the second grade and 58 in the third.

Li pocketed more than 3.2 million yuan ($482,240) and $72,000 after selling 152 stolen pieces.

Police have seized 202 relics and are still hunting for the other 57 items.

Li's four accomplices -- Wang Xiaoguang, Yan Feng, Zhang Huazhang and Chen Fengwei -- had been given jail terms of up to seven years with fines for buying and selling the relics.

Li's crimes went unnoticed until a Chinese expert found two royal cultural relics belonging to Beijing's Palace Museum at an auction in Hong Kong in 2002.

The expert reported his discovery to the state cultural heritage authorities, which prompted an investigation that found Chengde was the source of the relics.

Covering an area of 5.6 million square meters, the Summer Mountain Resort was Emperor Kangxi's and Emperor Qianlong's temporary imperial palace of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The mountain villa, the largest remaining classical imperial garden architecture in China, and the outlying temples were placed on the World Heritage list in 1994.