The local cultural relic department recently hired professionals to use three-dimensional laser scanning techniques to restore relics at Fusheng Temple, a national key cultural relics protection unit at Shanxi’s Guangcun village.

The temple was built during 627-649 and preserves 23 Buddha sculptures of the Yuan and Ming dynasties. It was named a national key cultural relics protection unit by the State Council in 2001. The painted sculptures at the temple suffer discoloring, hollowing and scaling. The local culture relics department recently worked with the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage and used three-dimensional laser scanning technology, for the first time, to restore the painted sculptures.

“The technology is by far one of the most cutting-edge and fastest ways to preserve culture relics. It scanned missing parts of cultural relics in 3D, pieced them together and restored the original appearance of relics based on historical information,” said Wang Guojie, head of the cultural relics tourism bureau at Xinjiang county, 17 kilometers away from Guangcun.

“In addition to an all-around three-dimensional scan, we also need to conduct dedusting, cleaning and grouting and restore some incomplete sculptures based on the video image. The whole project is expected to be finished by the end of October,” said Yang Miao, assistant engineer at the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage.

Shanxi is a big province of cultural relics. It has 280,027 ancient architectures, more than 12,700 painted sculptures, and more than 24,000 square meters of murals, according to the third national cultural relics census data. “It’s the first time the three-dimensional technique has been used to restore ancient sculptures in Shanxi, and we hope we can accumulate more experience for future cultural relics protection,” said Wang Guojie.

Edited by Liu Yufen and Michael Thai