China News Agency, Luoyang, October 20th, title: A century of research history of Chinese cave temples: from "surviving" to "going out"

　　Author Kan Li Li Chaoqing

　　This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Longmen Grottoes being included in the World Heritage List.

　　In the history of research, it took more than 100 years for Chinese cave temples to "survive" to "go out".

　　"About 100 years ago, foreign scholars began to study Chinese cave temples." Zhang Zhuo, director of the Yungang Grottoes Research Institute, said in an interview with a reporter from China News Agency in Luoyang, Henan, where the Longmen Grottoes are located, on the 20th. In recent decades, Chinese scholars have been running. "Entry" to study and protect the cave temple, and start a foreign cooperation model.

　　Zhang Zhuo said that after the reform and opening up, through cooperation with overseas cultural protection institutions in the United States, Italy and other countries, China's Grottoes Temple has done a lot of protection projects.

"On the basis of traditional protection techniques, it incorporates worldwide protection concepts and new technological materials."

　　At this point, the Chinese Cave Temple really embarked on the road of self-protection.

　　But these are still not enough.

Li Zhirong, deputy dean of the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Zhejiang University, believes that the primary goal of the Cave Temple is to rescue in a race against time.

"The use of digital means to protect and restore the cave temples and other surface cultural relics is based on this goal."

　　According to Huang Jizhong, a researcher at the Institute of Basic Sciences for Cultural Heritage Protection of Shanghai University, the cave temple is the most difficult to protect under the influence of natural microorganisms and water diseases.

How to extend the life of cave temples and slow down the speed of weathering damage is still an important research proposition for immovable cultural relics such as cave temples.

　　Huang Jizhong said, “The protection of cave temples has its own merits. The protection of cave temples in China is mainly to build some protective cave eaves with wooden structures. This has a good protection effect on larger caves, and the preservation status is relatively good. It has also been obtained in related fields at home and abroad. Scholar’s ​​recognition."

　　In recent years, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China has successively launched key technology research projects for the protection of stone cultural relics such as the weathering disease evaluation system of the cave cultural relics and the research on protection technology. In particular, the introduction of digital virtual restoration technology has solved the management of microbial diseases in the cave temple. Difficult problem.

　　Jia Zhuofei, a professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University, said that the Longmen Grottoes had previously combined with Zhejiang University to restore a cultural relic, combining the body and head of the Buddha in a virtual space to present a complete Buddha image.

　　On the digital road to the study and protection of the cave temples, China is not virtually repairing one leg to walk.

Zhang Zhuo said, “It not only includes digital acquisition and storage, and the construction of archives, but also enters a higher-level 3D printing era based on 3D laser scanning.”

　　The Chinese cave temples "go out", Mogao Grottoes was the first "crab-eating" person, and the exhibition was launched overseas before other cave temples.

Zhang Zhuo explained that unlike Yungang and Longmen, the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes are small and dominated by flat, two-dimensional murals, which are relatively easy to copy.

　　“Yungang and Longmen are both high-relief sculptures, which cannot be made by traditional art.” Zhang Zhuo said, “but now, through 3D technology, a large-scale replication of caves has been achieved, which is the first in the world of large-scale cave replication. The Chinese have taken the first step, which was unimaginable before."

　　Zhang Zhuo said that with the blessing of digitalization and other technologies, the protection of Chinese cave temples is abandoning the “passive” of repairing which is broken, and moving towards preventive protection and refined restoration.

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