Cutting-edge technology helps Dunhuang cultural relics lost overseas create a new path for "return"

China News Service, Dunhuang, November 3 (Reporter Yan Jiao) The International Academic Seminar and Results Release Event on Dunhuang Studies was held on the 3rd in Dunhuang City, Gansu Province. According to Guo Qinglin, director of the Dunhuang Academy, in the past year, the academy has shared digital resources of lost overseas Dunhuang cultural relics with seven institutions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia and other countries, and acquired 1,180 digital resources of cultural relics.

Zhang Xiantang, a research librarian at the Dunhuang Academy, said in an interview with a reporter from China News Service that day that with the empowerment of science and technology, the Dunhuang cultural relics digitization project, which has been intensively cultivated for more than 30 years, relies on cutting-edge technologies such as multi-spectral photography, infrared imaging, and ultraviolet fluorescence imaging. Faded lines, diffuse writing, faded patterns, and facial features of characters that were previously invisible to the naked eye can be clearly restored, and a large amount of mural information that has been "obscured" by time has been revealed.

"Digitalization can not only preserve the ontological information of Dunhuang cultural heritage, but also deeply empower Dunhuang studies and promote academic exchanges and cooperation between Chinese and foreign scholars." Zhang Xiantang said that as the Dunhuang cultural relics digitization project system becomes increasingly mature, it will effectively promote the digital "reunion" and global sharing of Dunhuang cultural relics lost overseas.

On the same day, at the Dunhuang Academy's "Model" and "Highland" construction achievements exhibition, the latest results of the digital restoration project of Dunhuang cultural relics lost overseas were also released simultaneously. Replicas of the Tang Dynasty "Statue of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva" from the Yingzang Collection, the "Picture of the Practicing Heavenly King" from the Five Dynasties, as well as the Tang Dynasty "Susana Sutra with Preface" from the Tang Dynasty, and the Tang Dynasty's "Newly Revised Materia Medica" were unveiled. The Dunhuang cultural relics lost overseas were "returned" to their homeland.

For more than a hundred years, due to historical reasons, a large number of Dunhuang documents, murals, scriptures, and painted sculptures have been scattered in more than 30 collection institutions in more than ten countries around the world. Limited by various factors, it is difficult for physical cultural relics to return, but digital technology has opened up a new path for diasporic cultural relics to "go home".

In recent years, in addition to breakthroughs in digital research, the protection of Dunhuang cultural relics has also continued to improve quality and efficiency. In the past year, the Dunhuang Research Institute completed the restoration of 146 grotto painted sculptures and treated 1,992 square meters of mural damage, effectively mitigating weathering, alkali, fading and other disease problems of cultural relics.