Restorer's touch revives relics from Sichuan's glorious past

Watching Guo Hanzhong's hands, one finds them quite different from those of an average person — the muscles at the base of his thumbs are bulging.

They are the best proof of his decades-long use of tools in the restoration of cultural relics, says Xie Li, a colleague.

Guo, 57, a cultural relic restorer in the cultural relics protection and restoration center at the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan, Southwest China's Sichuan province, has participated in the restoration of over 6,000 artifacts from the Sanxingdui site in nearly 40 years. He was one of 10 people in China and the only one in Sichuan to be honored with the title of 2022 Great Country Craftsman.

Guo says that he became a cultural relic restorer by accident.

In 1984, when the archaeological team from the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute in Chengdu went to Guanghan for an archaeological dig at the Sanxingdui site, they rented houses to live in from Guo's family in today's Sanxingdui village.

"I was just 16 years old and used to splash around in the Yazi River and play with my friends," Guo says.

While helping the archaeological team with odd jobs every day, Guo developed an interest in cultural relic excavation. His intelligence impressed team members who then taught him how to restore pottery.

In the summer of 1986, Sanxingdui's No 1 and No 2 sacrificial pits were unearthed, yielding thousands of previously unseen artifacts. The excavation was followed by an urgent need for people to clean and restore the finds.

With his basic skills in pottery restoration, Guo joined the Sichuan provincial institute and began a nearly 40-year career in cultural relic restoration.

Under the mentorship of Yang Xiaowu, a master restorer, Guo began his career, which has led him to work with some of China's most important cultural treasures.

Standing 3.96 meters tall, the No 1 bronze divine tree is the treasure of the Sanxingdui Museum and is believed to be the world's largest single bronze artifact from its time period. Such is its importance, it was among the first batch of cultural relics in China that were prohibited from being taken abroad.

What is less known is that when the tree was unearthed from the sacrificial pit, it was a pile of over 200 bronze fragments mixed with mud.

The tree's trunk was broken into three pieces, its branches into eight segments, its base into four large fragments. The birds, fruits and ornamental hooks on the tree were scattered in the pit, Guo says.

During the restoration process, the greatest challenge Guo and his mentor Yang faced was not the severe damage to the tree, but the fact that not a single similar bronze artifact had ever been seen before.

The two classified the fragments one by one, analyzing their size, materials, colors and breaks to determine their original positions and attributes. They meticulously matched the fragments, using traditional soldering techniques combined with innovative riveting and casting methods.

It took them six years to piece the tree together.

"Every time I see a cultural relic regain its brilliance, I feel an immense sense of achievement as if I've given it a second life," Guo says.

He has contributed to the restoration of over 6,000 artifacts at the Sanxingdui Museum, including a bronze statue in a standing position that measures about 2.6 meters tall and weighs 180 kilograms.

The statue is believed to be about 3,100 years old and represents a king or a sorcerer from the Shu Kingdom, the name for Sichuan in ancient times.

Ran Fang contributed to the story.