Masters of the Forbidden City

Not always a battle of academics, restoration work is also filled with jokes and laughter

At 8 am in Beijing's Forbidden City, Wang Youliang pushes open the seven securely fastened gates to his workplace. As each door opens, he lets out a loud cry. Rumor has it that ghosts wander the Forbidden City at night. The truth is, the cry is to scare away the animals inside the doors. Several running figures flash by while two feral cats squat at the door to Wang's office. He puts some cat food on the ground, and the cats gobble it voraciously.

Wang is a master in bronze ware restoration. After five years of research and four months of shooting, the three-episode documentary Masters in Forbidden City leads the public into the courtyards of "西三所" (xī sān suǒ), where antique restoration in the Palace Museum is done.

Xi San Suo used to be the "cold palace" of the Forbidden City. Concubines marginalized in cruel palace conflicts were sent here as if it were a jail. To this day, a bit of that frigidity remains; objects waiting to be restored are sealed in the storage room, covered in dirt and mildew as they have been for hundreds, even thousands, of years. The difference is, unlike the concubines who fell from favor, they will be resurrected.

Contrary to the stereotypes, the restoration work is not always a cerebral battle of academics, but is rather filled with jokes, laughter and the sounds of a family. When Min Junrong is carefully working on Qianlong Emperor's royal bookcase, he scolds his colleague for chopping down the fig tree he planted outside the office.

A group of staff members from the office of Wooden Articles stretch a bed sheet, one person shaking the branches of an apricot tree with a rain of plump apricots rushing toward them.

In the office of painting and calligraphy restoration, Yang Zihua plucks at his guitar, humming an old song, Persistence, his eyes still fixed at the huge portrait of Emperor Qianlong's mother that has to be fixed within a few months. He turns his head toward the camera: "Persistence should be the theme song of our work."

The high walls of the Forbidden City make Xi San Suo a silent world in isolation, out of step with the outside world. All textile restoration experts are women, but they are strictly prohibited from wearing make-up or perfume, or doing their nails — the chemicals can do deadly damage to the brittle textiles.

Recently, the Palace Museum constructed its northern district far from downtown Beijing to accommodate large antiques. As the shuttle bus takes these masters away from the Forbidden City, they joke that they know each person's specialty by their hands. Experts in bronze wares have rust in their nails, experts in lacquer ware have lacquer, painting and calligraphy experts have starch, woodworkers have fish glue (an ancient glue for wooden pieces). These signs cannot be washed away as they work from day to day; their hands witness their daily conversations with these treasures of old souls.

Here, the time passes slowly. For most of the masters, their craftsmanship is a lifelong career, and Xi San Suo is their home. They plant trees, vegetables, flowers and raise birds. As Min waters his lacquer tree after work, he says casually that he will be ready to reap lacquer in several years. Restoring ancient objects requires ancient techniques, and to reap natural lacquer of good quality, Min needs to go into the countryside with farmers every once in a while. They climb the wild mountains for five hours before the sunrise, and usually one night of work produces only 250 grams of lacquer.

It takes Wang Jin and his student Qi Haonan — the only two people repairing timepieces in the Palace Museum — eight months to fully restore the gigantic pair of clocks from Emperor Qianlong. Qing emperors were all fanatics about clocks, and when foreign missionaries came to China, they presented the most intricate and splendid timepieces in the world as tributes to the emperors.

After eight months of endless (often repeated, as weather affects the functioning of these exquisite timepieces) adjustments, Wang Jin winds up the clocks and these objects that have been silent for centuries come to life in miniature - water flowing, people moving, dogs barking, swans turning their heads, chickens waving their wings. It's truly an awe-inspiring moment, and you will understand that it's not an exaggeration or a metaphor when these masters say, "these antiques have lives".

Many people believe that the value of these masters' works is in the conservation of cultural relics. Qu Feng, a master in restoring wooden works, thinks this is an oversimplified judgment. Ancient Chinese people thought that jade contained all the virtues of 君子 (jūn zǐ, a righteous man of noble characters). In fact, jade is just a piece of stone, but they endowed common objects with characters and reflected themselves in them. When an artisan made a chair, he demanded from this chair the character of a man, and thus infused himself as a part of the chair's life. Centuries later, when the restoration masters are giving a second life to these objects, they also infuse themselves as an integral part.

A 10th century wooden Buddha regrows its missing finger and broken lips, its body refurbished. This Buddha stepped from the "cold palace" into the world. Qu Feng and two other masters who have been with this Buddha for months stand still on the steps and fix their eyes on it. Qu Feng turns away. "How dare you tie up a Buddha?" Everyone laughs, and the Buddha disappears from the door, ready to take its place in the display window.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese