Tibetannet

A lama from Jokhang Monastery checks a digitally categorized fresco on a combination screen.[Photo by Wang Kaihao/ China Daily]

Night falls. Waves of pilgrims gradually begin leaving Jokhang Monastery in the old part of Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region.

Then, Luo Wenhua leads his team to begin another night's work－shooting pictures of glittering Buddha niches in this monastery, one of the holiest places for Tibetans.

Every evening, until midnight, is the only time they get to work on building one of country's most advanced 3-D high-definition image database of cultural relics.

Luo, a researcher from the Palace Museum in Beijing, moved to Lhasa in 2013 for this program to help Jokhang Monastery digitally categorize its thangka－Tibetan paintings on cotton or silk applique－statues and frescoes.

"The photographs of every statue, for example, are taken from 10 different angles," says Luo.

"If epigraphs are discovered, more pictures are taken.

"Sections of the photographed frescoes can be magnified to more than a person's height in the database."

The sacred names (in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Mandarin) of the relics and other information are recorded. About 85 percent of 5,051 statues in the monastery have been covered so far, and the oldest can be dated back to the Tubo era (7th to 9th century), the predecessor of today's Tibet, according to Luo.

In total 1,439 pieces of thangka have been found.

Jokhang Monastery was founded during the reign of Songtsen Gampo, the first ruler of Tubo, and its construction continued until the early 20th century.

Speaking of the relics, Luo says: "It's uncommon for a monastery to have a specific cultural relics warehouse like Jokhang. However, the inventory needs to be done in a better way because the details in the previous one were often vague."

"Now that we are recording details we can fill some of the voids in the records in Jokhang."

Luo says the digitization of the frescoes should be completed by 2017, and the project will then be expanded to cover the ancient architecture.

The database will be in three languages－Mandarin, Tibetan and English－to facilitate access by overseas scholars.

He hopes that the material they are collecting can be used to develop something like the Palace Museum's digital exhibitions so that full use can be made of the database, but the proposal is dependent on the monastery's administrators.

Potala Palace, another sanctuary in Lhasa built in AD 637, is also making an attempt to use digital technology to better preserve its relics.

The Jokhang Monastery and the Potala Palace were added to the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list in 2000 and 1994 respectively.

Speaking of the relics in the palace, Kunga Tashi, deputy director of administration office of the Potala Palace, says: "Though the palace is a reservoir of cultural brilliance, we are not very sure how many cultural relics we have.

"We have our lists on paper but we often face problems in estimating the age of the relics."

In 2012, when the State Administration of Cultural Heritage launched a nationwide survey of the country's cultural relics, the palace got a chance to cross-check the stored treasures using their lists.

About 60,000 ancient books or files, and 40,000 items including thangka, Buddha statues and porcelain articles have been found.

As for the condition of the treasures, Kunga Tashi says: "As the climate in Tibet is drier than many other parts in China, it means most of the relics are still in good condition and not affected by oxidation."

Speaking of the progress of the Potala Palace digital project, Pempa Lobsang, deputy chief of the cultural relics custody department at the palace, says he and 22 colleagues are busy taking photographs and checking the collections, and adds that he expects the work will be completed by the end of the year.

"But now we have to deal with the damage to many items, especially textiles," he says.

The challenge for the palace now is to create capacity to repair the damaged relics.

Tibet's first laboratory to conserve cultural relics was founded in 2001 at the Tibet Museum.

In 2014, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage allocated 14.8 million yuan ($2.2 million) to the museum to upgrade its lab, with a special focus on the restoration of thangka.

The lab then also began a series of training programs with its counterparts at the Shanghai Museum, the Capital Museum in Beijing and the China Silk Museum in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province.

And the training programs have begun to bear fruit, says Dadron, deputy director of the Tibet Museum.

"With local expertise being nurtured, we are now not only restoring our own collections, but are also helping to take care of items at other institutions and monasteries.

"We are also building the criteria for the restoration and custody of relics from the entire autonomous region," she says.

"The museum can thus become the flagship of an online network to guide comprehensive protection," she adds.