100 ancient villages catalogued for preservation

Staff is busy preserving and investigating ancient architecture at Hong village, Qinghua town, in Wuyuan county, Jiangxi province, July 30, 2014. [Photo/Xinhua]

A total of 100 ancient villages have been catalogued for preservation since the project, Chinese Traditional Villages Archive-Building and Surveys, started in June, according to China's Traditional Village Protection and Development Research Center.

The center briefed on the progress at a press conference at the Feng Jicai Research Institute of Arts and Literature of Tianjin University on Jan 20.

Among the 100 archived ancient villages, 90 of them come from the national lists of the first three groups of villages collected in China's traditional villages catalog which were accredited earlier, and the rest 10 are newly discovered by provinces with historical and cultural values, said Pu Jiao, deputy director of the center.

The project is not only a record of traditional villages, but also a basic survey of villages against a background where the current urbanization is speeding up and traditional villages in Chinese are increasingly dying.

Under the guidance of academic criteria of anthropology, folklore, and historical and heritage values, the survey and archive building is divided into eight major catalogues with 25 entries.

The survey will cover every single aspect of the villages, and the information must be detailed, authentic, and confirmed.

With a combination of texts and photos, the archive will record the diversity and original ecology of the traditional villages in a clear and comprehensive format.

Besides, the center also started a project of creating a database of Chinese traditional villages since last June, which will include all the latest progress of the investigations.

Feng Jicai, a famous Chinese writer and an initiator the project, said that traditional village is home to countless tangible and intangible cultural heritages of the Chinese nation, as well as the root and source of diversity of the Chinese civilization.

He added that the efforts of the past half year only marks the first step of a long march, because many experts think that more than 5,000 traditional villages should be investigated and archived.

The project of Chinese traditional villages is jointly organized and implemented by China Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art, Chinese photographers Society, Chinese Literature and Art Foundation, and China's Traditional Village Protection and Development Research Center.