Source: CCTV.com

05-06-2009 09:44

A specialist in the Chinese capital is working on restoring ancient images of a different kind -- words, not pictures. Sixty-year-old Du Weisheng works as a researcher at the rare book division of China's National Library in Beijing. Over the years, he's been racing against time to rescue ancient tomes and scripts that have been damaged by water, moulding from improper storage and chewed on by rats.

Du Weisheng is in a race against time to rescue old documents that are falling apart.

The book doctor says some of the books he fixes require extreme concentration and patience.

A specialist in the Chinese capital is working on restoring ancient images of a different kind -- words, not pictures

He uses a special glue and rice paper that are of similar colour to patch up thousands of visible or invisible holes on book pages with the help of a magnifier.

However, this is the easiest part of his job.

Many books have been soaked by flood waters for a long time and have never properly dried.

Most of their pages are stuck together.

Many more older books simply fall into fragmentary pieces once touched.

Du says erosion happens too fast and with a small staff of 19 people in the rare book division, it is impossible to fix all the books that need to be rescued.

Du Weisheng said, "Books we need to fix take up to a third of the collection in the library, which is around 2 million books. A third of that makes it around 700,000 books. About 20 percent of the 700,000 books need urgent fixing, which means more than 100,000 books are in very bad condition. We fix about 1,000 books per year and the best we can do is no more than 2,000. This means it's going to take us a very, very long time before we can finish this task".

During a career spanning 35 years, Du has fixed close to 5,000 ancient books himself.

Du says that the solution for the future is to digitalise all the materials before they are gone.

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Editor:Zhao Yanchen