JMW Turner's sublime Calais Sands, has been dispatched, along with around 80 other artworks from Bury and 18 other north-west galleries, on a money-spinning six-city tour of China.

The venture was put together by Bury Art Museum manager Tony Trehy, who saw that art collected by industrial barons across the North West of England could be a big draw overseas.

He corralled other galleries to put their "greatest hits" together and head east. "Put it this way," Mr Trehy says. "It's sufficiently lucrative that people have stopped talking about cutting us."

The exhibition is titled Toward Modernity: Three Centuries of British Art. As well as the Turner, it includes works by Constable, Lowry, Henry Moore and Lucian Freud, culled from collections in Chester, Carlisle, Salford and Stalybridge.

Chinese galleries pay to host the exhibition, which Mr Trehy is now hoping to take to other countries, and which could provide the template for further themed exhibitions. "Assuming we can do it on a regular basis, it becomes a significant new source of funding for museums," he says.