Two items of late San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other cultural relics will be donated to Chinese museums to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), a local cultural group said Monday.

Among the donations is a torch used by Lee during the 2008 Olympic Torch Relay, which will be donated to the Beijing Olympic Museum this year, Sihong Zhao, chief of the Readers' Team of Immigrants' Path to the Gold Mountain (RTIPGM), a San Francisco non-profit group dedicated to collecting cultural relics overseas for Chinese museums, told a press conference in downtown San Francisco.

The late mayor, who was then San Francisco City Administrator, joined the Olympic torch run on April 9, 2008, one day after the Olympic flame arrived in San Francisco from Paris.

San Francisco was the only North America stop for the Olympic torch relay, which ran from March 24 to Aug. 8, 2008, prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

The other memorabilia was a black coat of the San Francisco Giants, an iconic professional baseball team of the U.S. western city, which bears a golden-silk embroidered design of Lee's name in English.

It was a gift presented by the Giants team to Mayor Lee to honor its first title of the 2010 World Series championship of Major League Baseball in the United States since it moved to San Francisco in 1958, Zhao told Xinhua.

She said that the two items were collected from Anita Lee, wife of the late San Francisco mayor who died suddenly on Dec. 12, 2017, after nearly seven years in office as the first elected Chinese American mayor in the city's 160-year history.

Anita Lee, who was also present at Monday's press conference, said she has held dear the two items that have been kept safely in her home for many years.

"At one moment, some people asked me to auction them for funds that would help the vulnerable population in our society, but Zhao has tried to persuade me to donate them to a Chinese museum," she said.

"If the two collectibles are bought by some individuals, only the buyers will benefit, but if they are donated to a Chinese museum for permanent display, their value could be better delivered to serve the much broader interests of the general public," she explained.

"The donated torch used by Mayor Lee is highly valuable and of great significance, which not only extols the Olympic spirit, but also demonstrates the success of overseas Chinese around the world that was built upon their wisdom and intelligence," the Beijing Olympic Museum said in a letter of appreciation to the mayor's wife.

Along with the torch and the coat were a host of other collectibles including some stamps of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games and the international flag pin series, including the one with the Chinese national flag, which celebrated the 1988 Seoul Olympiad held in South Korea.

The donation was part of the RTIPGM's efforts to support enriching the collections of the Beijing Olympic Museum and greet the upcoming 24th Olympic Winter Games to be hosted by Beijing in 2022, Zhao said.

Apart from the Beijing Olympic Museum, other Chinese museums such as the National Museum of China in Beijing and the Overseas Chinese Museum in China's southeastern city of Xiamen will also receive a collection of other cultural relics, artifacts, literatures and documents with close connections with China.

Among them was a copy of the vinyl record album titled "Chee Lai (Rise)!" that contains Chinese songs, including the one that later became the national anthem of the PRC after 1949.

The song "Chee Lai!" was sung by American black singer Paul Robeson in rusty Chinese at an open air concert in New York in 1941.

The proceeds from the sale of the album were donated to the Chinese people in their heroic resistance war against Japanese aggressors during World War II.

Zhao said she will take more than 20 pieces of the donations and cultural relics to China next month.

Since 2006, the RTIPGM has collected and donated more than 5,000 pieces of cultural relics and various literatures and artifacts related to China and Chinese history to many museums and research institutes in China, she said.

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