Restoring History

Text by Zhou Pingying & Lyu Donghui Photos by Liu Zhongcan

What would you do if you are faced with a damaged and dogeared book in front of you? Skim through it mindlessly or just throw it away?

It is quite common for people to opt for these options,since they neither have the desire of repairing the book nor the extra energy and professional skills to restore it.However,for the working staff in archives,it is a must for them to restore cultural relics such as books,letters,and documents that record part of a history.

Yang Lin,a staff member at the

Hubei Archive,told us that files should be carefully examined,classified,and sorted before repairing.She continued,“When dealing with the files from the Republic Period,which are full of tranditional Chinese characters,our staff have to extract key information from the original versions to make it easier to sort out.”

毛筆、噴壺、棕刷等都是修復師手中的專業工具 Writing brushes,spray bottles,and paint brushes are professional tools employed in repairing.

使用熨燙工藝修復 Restoring files by ironing

檔案修補完成的原件分類存檔 Classifying and storing the restored files

The preliminary procedures include a preparatory examination,written documentation,and photo taking before repairing a page,which involves 20 stages,such as unsticking,cleaning,disinfecting,and partitioning the pages.

The most common items in our daily life,such as writing brushes,spray bottles,tweezers,bamboo sticks,and the like can be professional repairing tools.“The long history of the book and the high frequency of its reading may have lead to wormholes on the left of a page and mildew on the edge of the pages,” said Wang Li,a member of the repairing staff.She skillfully tore a piece of Xuan paper (a kind of traditional Chines epaper for brush calligraphy and brush painting),pastediton the defected land lease from the Republic Period and then removed the unnecessary paper with a tweezer.“It is too even and unnatural if repaired with scissors,and it is not so easy to protect the good part further,” said Yu Chunxia,another repairing staff member.She repaires thousands of files each year,and she told us that it required 6 months to learn the basic repairing skills such as preparing replacement pulp,making a large paper board to stretch and dry the pages,and repairing paper mountings.They practice the skills not on original antique books but on used newspapers.Once their skills are perfected,they move on to actual documents.

Yang Lin,a staff member in the Hubei Archive,first discovered a repair method of ironing the paper with a towel on it.She realized that it was much quicker to iron,rather than softening the paper with a steamer,especially for those semi-torn and stuck pages.

In the Hubei Archive,old damaged records and tapes can also be restored.Each year,over 100,000 files are restored and about 10 thousand simulated files are made there .(Translation: Zhao Mengchen)