On September 7, the project, Restoration of the Animal-shaped Turquoise Artifact of Shang Dynasty China, completed by the team led by Jigen TANG, Chair Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), won Tencent’s Top 20 Innovation and Technology Application Award of the Exploration Project of 2023.

The Exploration Project is issued by the Tencent SSV Digital Culture Lab, and instructed by the UNESCO Representative Office in Beijing, the China Cultural Relics Information Consulting Center, and the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage.

The award-winning projects were accessed by 27 scholars and experts, and judged on innovation, social value, and sustainability.

In 2013, a seriously damaged artifact originally made up of hundreds of turquoise pieces was unearthed from a tomb of a high-ranking Shang Dynasty nobleman at the Panlong City site in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Like many other turquoise artifacts of the Bronze Age in China, this artifact was broken into pieces. Archaeologists made great efforts of restoration but failed.

The Cultural Heritage Research Center at SUSTech started to research its original shape in 2018. Prof. TANG and his team examined the materials and the technique of making the artifact, studied thousands of animal images of Bronze Age pieces of the Shang dynasty, and finally reconstructed its original shape.

The restoration was assessed by a group of experts led by Professor Boqian LI of Peking University. All the experts agreed that the restoration work was successful. Experts commented that the SUSTech team offered not only a wonderful turquoise artifact, which is often discovered but never successfully reconstructed for the public, but also an important method of turquoise artifact restoration that could be commonly used by archaeologists.

This turquoise artifact restored by SUSTech has been on display in the exhibition at the Panlong City Museum in Wuhan. It has also been selected for display at the top ten exhibitions of Sichuan’s Provincial Museum. CCTV’s “National Treasure Files” and other news media outlets have also produced archive films based on this research.