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The sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, on display at the British Museum in London.Credit...Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

China has its own longstanding grievances with cultural relics and artworks that were lost when colonial powers dominated China, and Mr. Xi has described himself as a proud defender of his country’s heritage, often referring to its 5,000 years of civilization.

With nationalism on the rise at home, China has stepped up calls in recent years to repatriate its ancient artifacts, even sending teams of researchers to overseas museums to catalog the more than one million Chinese antiquities it estimates are on display abroad.

Over the years, China has successfully wielded its growing economic might to recover a number of artifacts said to have been looted from the Old Summer Palace. Notably, several bronze animal heads are now back in the country after being bought or recovered from their foreign owners by the state-owned China Poly Group Corporation.

On Wednesday, China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration announced that another bronze animal head had been recovered and would be displayed alongside the other repatriated relics in an exhibition at the National Museum of China.

For many Chinese, such artifacts are reminders of what the Chinese Communist Party still calls the country’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western powers.

These similarities in their history provided a unifying narrative for Chinese and Greek leaders during Mr. Xi’s visit.

In welcoming Mr. Xi, Prime Minister Kiriakos Mitsotakis said that the Greek and Chinese people are “carriers of great ancient civilizations that sealed the course of humanity.”

Mr. Xi, in an article in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini preceding his visit, wrote: “Confucius and Socrates are two masks that cover the same face: the brightest face of human logic,” borrowing a line from the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis.

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Mr. Pavlopoulos and Mr. Xi at the Acropolis Museum in Athens on Tuesday.Credit...Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

But it is the two countries’ economic ties that have brought them closer in recent years, and Mr. Xi’s visit made clear that Chinese investment was there for the long term.

In 2016, COSCO, the Chinese state-owned shipping group, bought more than half of Piraeus, Greece’s biggest port, turning it into the busiest port in the Mediterranean, according to the port.

On Tuesday Mr. Xi, Mr. Mitsotakis, and the chairman of COSCO and the Piraeus Port Authority oversaw a deal between the port authority and the European Investment Bank, which agreed on a 20-year, 140-million-euro loan for Piraeus’s expansion and upgrade.

Greece’s new center-right government under Mr. Mitsotakis welcomed the Chinese investment as well as China’s huge export market for its agricultural goods, according to experts.

China, in return, experts say, is keen to deepen its influence in NATO and the European Union, of which Greece is part.

“Greece is the one country in ‘old Europe’ that is most open to Chinese investments,” Steve Tsang, the director of the School of Oriental African Studies China Institute, said in an email on Wednesday.

“In a world that is becoming more uncomfortable with Xi’s policy in asserting China, Greece seems like a reassuring, welcoming place for Xi to visit and show his domestic audience how much he is loved by a European country with the oldest civilization,” he said.

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