A team of about 150 restorers fuses scientific analysis and traditional techniques to clean, patch up and otherwise revive the more than 1.8 million relics in the collection of Beijing’s Forbidden City
It’s highly technical work in what looks more like a lab than a museum: A fragment of a glazed roof tile from Beijing’s Forbidden City is analyzed in a state-of-the-art X-ray diffraction machine that produces images, which are then projected onto computer screens.
The fragment being examined has a dark area on its surface that restorers want to understand. Their objective is to better preserve the artifacts at the sprawling imperial palace, the former home of China’s emperors and its seat of power for hundreds of years.
“We want to learn what the black material is », said Kang Baoqiang, one of the restorers at the complex, today a museum that attracts tourists from all over the world. “Whether it’s atmospheric sediment or the result of substantial change from within.
