Archives restore Mongolian 'paper brick' treasure
May 26, 2012, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE Minhang District Archives has restored a scroll of ancient paper, using modern technology. The treasure can now be kept for at least another century.
The scroll, written in Mongolian in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), is part of the archives stored in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. It had turned into what archivists called a "paper brick" because of flooding and years of stacking.
Inner Mongolian authorities managed to restore parts of the paper archives by carefully picking the paper sheets open with bamboo sticks, but much older ones were beyond their capability, according to Minhang archivists.
One of the scrolls was sent to Minhang.
"We have an expert who has been engaged in ancient file restoration for most of his life," said Lu Yulu, an official with the archives.
The scroll was too vulnerable for common methods of restoration, so Minhang decided to try a vacuum-freezing technique that has never been used on the Chinese mainland but has been successful in foreign archives.
Officials first wet the "paper brick" and then kept it at a temperature below zero degrees Celsius. As the water froze and its volume increased, every sheet of paper bore the same pressure. Then the water was removed by sublimation so that the paper sheets gently separated from each other.
The characters on the scroll were once again legible.
But that was not the end of the process. Officials found that the PH index of the scroll was acidic, which would shorten its life. After an operation of de-acidification, the PH of the scroll went to mildly alkaline.
The scroll has been returned to Inner Mongolia, but the bigger task lies ahead.
Archivists said there are at least 2,000 "paper bricks" in existence, recording the politics, economics and social history of past eras.
The scroll, written in Mongolian in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), is part of the archives stored in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. It had turned into what archivists called a "paper brick" because of flooding and years of stacking.
Inner Mongolian authorities managed to restore parts of the paper archives by carefully picking the paper sheets open with bamboo sticks, but much older ones were beyond their capability, according to Minhang archivists.
One of the scrolls was sent to Minhang.
"We have an expert who has been engaged in ancient file restoration for most of his life," said Lu Yulu, an official with the archives.
The scroll was too vulnerable for common methods of restoration, so Minhang decided to try a vacuum-freezing technique that has never been used on the Chinese mainland but has been successful in foreign archives.
Officials first wet the "paper brick" and then kept it at a temperature below zero degrees Celsius. As the water froze and its volume increased, every sheet of paper bore the same pressure. Then the water was removed by sublimation so that the paper sheets gently separated from each other.
The characters on the scroll were once again legible.
But that was not the end of the process. Officials found that the PH index of the scroll was acidic, which would shorten its life. After an operation of de-acidification, the PH of the scroll went to mildly alkaline.
The scroll has been returned to Inner Mongolia, but the bigger task lies ahead.
Archivists said there are at least 2,000 "paper bricks" in existence, recording the politics, economics and social history of past eras.
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