There is a deep-seated pattern in human society: we are making history and destroying it at the same time.
The burned-out Afang Palace, the bombed Bamiyan Buddha, the looted Palace of Versailles... How many miracles have been buried by human hands.
Unfortunately, nature is also speeding up this process: wind and sand erosion, rain erosion, sun exposure, causing the frescoes to wither, the walls to collapse, and even the Buddha statues to have black marks.
Last night, a global live broadcast of Tencent's activity day at the China Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo made people more deeply understand this cruel reality.
The lyrics say "The Great Wall will never fall", but in this live broadcast, the staff of the Great Wall Conservation Project told people the truth that is accurate to the percentage:
Among the existing Great Wall, only 8% can really be regarded as "not falling". The remaining 92% are either destroyed or even the ruins cannot be seen clearly.
The work of protecting the Great Wall is slow and arduous.
The Great Wall, for the Chinese nation,
What does it mean?
The history of the Great Wall is almost synchronized with the history of the Chinese nation.
The earliest record of the Great Wall dates back to the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. At that time, the northern states of Yan, Zhao, Wei, and Qin built the Great Wall of military significance in order to prevent the northern nomads from going south. After Qin Shi Huang swept through Liuhe, he connected the Great Wall of "fighting for each other" and formed the Great Wall of Ten Thousand Miles from Lintao in the west to Liaodong in the east.
What we see today, however, is another great wall further south. After the efforts of many dynasties such as Northern Wei, Northern Qi, Northern Zhou, Sui, Tang, and Ming, a Ming Great Wall stretching for more than 10,000 miles stretches from Jiayuguan in the west to Hushan in Liaoning in the east.
The length of the artificial wall of the Ming Great Wall is about 6259.6 kilometers, and only 8% of the well-preserved ones are currently well preserved, and 31% of them have disappeared (referring to the fact that the ground remains do not exist). Not to mention the rammed-earth walls that are older.
Xiaohongluo Mountain Pass Enemy Building in Huludao City, Liaoning Province, from photographer Lian Da | Tencent
The walls and bricks of many wild Great Walls are loose and on the verge of collapse.
If not protected, perhaps on some inadvertent day, these wild Great Walls will collapse and collapse in the barren mountains and wild grasses, and even affect the lives and lives of villagers.
Jixian County, Tianjin, from photographer Shang Heng | Tencent
Some have long since become ruins of broken walls and lost their heroic posture of crossing the heavens and the earth in the past.
The Great Wall is not only the strongest man-made fortification. Many of the great wall sites have gradually become important regional exchange centers, which have greatly promoted the economic exchanges in the border areas and the development and prosperity of various ethnic groups, and have become a cultural symbol flowing in the blood of Chinese civilization.
The call for the protection and restoration of the Great Wall has not stopped.
As early as the 1990s, the descendants of 800 guards in Xinguan Village, Pingding County, Yangquan City, spent 20 years repairing more than 6,000 meters of the damaged Great Wall. Later, under the organization of the local government, the Guguan Great Wall Scenic Area was built. The ancestors of these people moved here as early as the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, and the town guarded the border pass, which was passed down from generation to generation, and even "guarded" until the 21st century, which was passed down as a beautiful talk for a while.
Shanxi Guguan Great Wall | map worm
In 2016, the China Cultural Relics Conservation Foundation launched the "Protect the Great Wall, Add Me" public fundraising project to raise funds for the protection of the Great Wall. Tencent, together with the China Cultural Relics Conservation Foundation, cooperated with the School of Archaeology and Archaeology of Peking University and the Great Wall Research Team of Tianjin University, and donated 35 million yuan to support the repair of the Jiankou and Xifengkou Great Wall for five years.
Because of its long-term participation, Tencent went directly to the Great Wall in this live broadcast, showing everyone the underwater Great Wall and the restoration work of the Great Wall that has been silent for many years.
To repair the Great Wall, it is necessary to repair it on the basis of not damaging its original historical features, retain its unique "wild meat", and achieve the "minimum intervention" of cultural protection.
For example, all the old bricks that can continue to be used are "re-employed", try to continue to reinforce along the original slope, bends, and textures, which is really not possible, and then use new bricks.
Xifengkou Great Wall, new and old bricks appear on the wall at the same time| Tencent
The technique of repair follows the original traditional old craftsmanship.
For example, the pulp used to build the wall is not cement mortar, but a mortar made of white ash and water. Because the Great Wall is repaired with green bricks made by hand and mixed with white ash, its strength will grow in the later period and become stronger and stronger.
Given the complexity of the terrain in the Great Wall area, which is inaccessible to large machinery, the way it is restored has not changed in nature for thousands of years: relying on the shoulders of workers to transport stones to the Great Wall is time-consuming and laborious.
The 1,005-meter Section of the Great Wall in Xipanjiakou, Xifengkou, was repaired for 4 years, and the main body was finally repaired in 2021.
Monument restoration is an endless game of "peek-a-boo" between nature and nature. The end of a repair means the beginning of a new round of erosion.
With the advancement of science and technology, the paradigm of human protection of cultural heritage is quietly changing.
Digitization makes cultural relics truly eternal
There's one Notre Dame cathedral that never needs to be repaired, and that's 70T data hidden in a hard drive. Even if the Earth doesn't exist one day, it's still possible for other civilizations to recover it from that binary information.
Since 2011, Dr. Andrew Tallon, an art historian and historical modeler, has conducted a full range of measurements and research on Notre Dame, establishing its digital archive. Using drones and laser scanners, he recorded more than 1 billion data points down to pits and cracks in the walls. It generates a digital model of Notre Dame de Paris with an error of only 5 millimeters.
In November 2018, Dr. Tallon passed away. Fate always likes to joke with people, less than half a year later, in April 2019, Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly caught fire, the overall building was seriously damaged, and the wooden roof was completely burned. Hope for reconstruction lies in Dr. Tallon's hard drive — Notre Dame is expected to meet the world again before the opening of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
This work has also begun in China. In the live broadcast, taking the Great Wall and Dunhuang as examples, many digitizations are introduced as ways of "cultural relics protection".
"Document the Great Wall before it disappears" – the digitization of the Great Wall began as early as 2016.
Tencent's mapping team has been shooting 360-degree panoramic photographs of the Great Wall since 16 years. Digitization is not a simple photo, especially for the Great Wall, its digitization has at least two difficulties: on the one hand, the record is not clear, many wild Great Wall, only record "a few kilometers in a certain direction of a certain village", which requires a large number of historical materials, field investigation to confirm;
On the other hand, the digitization of the Great Wall is different from the digitization of Notre Dame cathedral in that the former is huge in scale and requires photographers to carry equipment deep into the field for shooting, which may take nearly a year for a short section of the Great Wall.
Digitizing Notre Dame De Paris, Dr. Talon spent nearly 5 years. If the Great Wall is loaded into the hard disk, the time and workload required are incalculable, after all, it takes only to measure the length of the Great Wall, and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage took a full 6 years.
But the job is worth it.
Compared with the tug-of-war with nature – erosion, restoration, erosion and restoration, digitalization can preserve the culture of the Great Wall.
The Great Wall belongs not only to China, as part of the cultural heritage of mankind, but also to all mankind.
Also on record are the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes.
Speaking of the Mogao Grottoes, we have to mention the controversial "Wang Daoshi". In 1900, he and his assistants discovered the Tibetan Scripture Cave of the Mogao Caves, which contains more than 50,000 cultural relics from the Sixteen Kingdoms to the Northern Song Dynasty. Later generations accused him of selling the scriptures to nearby villagers as spells to cause illness. More artifacts were sold to Western explorers, and the resulting losses were immeasurable.
Cultural relics scattered overseas may be recoverable, but the peeling murals are extremely difficult to repair. The Dunhuang Grottoes have more than 45,000 square meters of murals, and after decades of efforts, researchers have only successfully restored more than 5,000 square meters of them.
The fragility of the murals is far beyond people's imagination. Photography is forbidden in the Mogao Caves, which is not a fear of revealing any secrets, but the ultraviolet and infrared rays in the flash light lines, which will destroy the color of the cultural relics, causing fiber fractures and structural fractures.
It can be said that every time the mural is publicly displayed, it will cause more or less damage to it.
As early as 1993, the Dunhuang Research Institute launched the digital process. In 2017, Dunhuang Research Institute and Tencent reached a strategic cooperation, and in February 2020, the WeChat Mini Program "Yunyou Dunhuang" was launched. The public can enjoy Dunhuang's exquisite murals without leaving their homes, and more importantly, this way can not only protect the murals, but also enhance the user experience: if the scene can only be "viewed from a distance", then the digital exhibition can be placed in front of the eyes to "play".
Yunyou Dunhuang | Tencent
By the end of 2021, nearly 60 million people have participated in the creative interaction and online tour of Dunhuang on the "Cloud Tour Dunhuang" Mini Program.
That's nearly 20 times the number of offline tourists who have actually been able to reach Dunhuang's Mogao Caves in the past two years. Now, Dunhuang's cultural relics can be used on the Internet for the world to appreciate and study.
In May last year, Dunhuang decided to continue to digitize its cultural relics. Dunhuang Research Institute, together with the Asian Museum of Kyrgyzstan and Tencent in France, jointly launched the "Digital Scripture Cave" project. The project allows more people to enjoy the treasures of the Mogao Caves through digital channels, such as calligraphy, sculptures and scriptures.
Digital Scripture Cave | Tencent
In fact, Tencent relies on its advantages in digital technology and has done quite a few "cultural relics digitization" projects in recent years, such as the "Digital Forbidden City". In August last year, the "Digital Forbidden City" mini program was launched, and with this entrance, the public can visit the Forbidden City online, visit buildings, see exhibitions, and even see cultural relics.
The Digital Forbidden City | Tencent
The immersive experience of the Forbidden City based on digitalization | Tencent
In addition to permanently preserving existing cultural relics, digital technology can also restore cultural relics that have disappeared in history.
Microsoft "rebuilds" ancient Olympia | Microsoft's official website
In November 2021, the Greek government, together with tech giant Microsoft, digitally rebuilt ancient Olympia, Greece. The aim is to "transport visitors back in time, back to the ancient Olympic Games, and to explore ancient Olympia more than 2,000 years ago."
Digital technology reproduces ancient Olympia | Microsoft.com
Microsoft partnered with Iconem, a company specializing in 3D simulation of historical monuments, to take hundreds of thousands of photos using cameras and drones, and then modeled them using Microsoft AI, ultimately restoring 27 buildings from the ruins of ancient Olympia.
The above is just the tip of the iceberg for the application of digital technology.
The theme of this year's China Pavilion is "Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind – Innovation and Opportunity", which showcases the protection of cultural relics and digital inheritance, which can also be seen in the importance that the country attaches to cultural inheritance and protection. Tencent was invited to the China Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo to deeply demonstrate the application of digitalization in cultural protection, which is also a side that Tencent is rarely recognized by the public.
Digitalization will become
The last piece of the puzzle for cultural heritage protection?
The disappearance of cultural heritage is a problem for all of humanity. First of all, some precious cultural relics and monuments have caused irreversible losses under the erosion of nature and time, and even under man-made destruction; on the other hand, intangible cultural heritage is increasingly difficult to retrieve along with the passing away of the inheritors.
The way cultures are passed on has not changed: words, words of mouth, and generations.
Although such a model has been given some romantic overtones, it cannot hide its fragility. Today, digitalization is the last piece of the puzzle. It makes culture, artifacts more interesting, more "romantic" and, more importantly, safer to the point of becoming "eternal" in time.
Fortunately, our descendants do not have to do so. Digital technology allows Dunhuang murals to move and sing, so that ancient emperors have expressions, so that the cultural relics in the Forbidden City have become 360-degree real-life VR. The Getty Center in the United States records 1,500 old photographs of modern Chinese history, 2,274.5 terabytes of resources from the National Library of China, 75,000 manuscripts and 1.1 million volumes in the Vatican Library, and 570 da Vinci manuscripts from the British Library— which are artifacts and data, are now within reach.
After this live broadcast, we learned from Tencent's staff that in order to attract young people's interest in traditional culture, taking the Great Wall as an example, Tencent Charity Foundation and China Cultural Relics Conservation Foundation cooperated to launch the popular science picture book "Great Wall Painting"; WeChat and the China Cultural Protection Foundation jointly created the mini-game "Build the Great Wall Together"; even the mobile game "Glory of the King" also launched the "Great Wall Guardian" series of game heroes.
In the next three years, the Palace Museum plans to deepen cooperation with Tencent to complete the high-definition image collection of 100,000 cultural relics.
Digitization of the Forbidden City, digitization of the Great Wall, digitization of Dunhuang... That's the way Tencent and many Chinese tech companies are. Relying on the power of science and technology, in a unique way, precious cultural relics are permanently stored in "binary" numbers.
Resources
[1]https://news.microsoft.com/2021/11/10/hellenic-ministry-of-culture-and-sport-and-microsoft-partner-to-digitally-preserve-ancient-site-of-olympia/
[2]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ni8XJhymNQmt97qr-nPU5w
[3]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2YcszXVaVWdcGW8vlXakWQ
[4]https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-technology-aids-preserving-great-wall-china/
[5]https://www.tencent.com/zh-cn/articles/2100003.html
[6]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lck_wie5RcD-6V0Lk2XXgA