The start of December saw Southern University of Science and Technology host the final meeting of the “Comprehensive Study of Turquoise Animal Faces Unearthed from the Panlongcheng Site.” The evaluation experts believe that the SUSTech team has done a high-quality job of working on the project.

The Panlongcheng Turquoise Animal Face was unearthed in 2013 from a Shang Dynasty tomb in Wuhan, Hubei Province. It is about 3300 years old and was originally made of about one thousand pieces of finely ground turquoise, inlaid with gold eyes and eyebrows. However, when it was unearthed, it was seriously damaged, and a little over half of the original pieces were recovered. It also lost its original appearance (Figure 1). It was hoped that SUSTech’s Cultural Heritage Laboratory would reconstruct the artifact by studying scientific preservation objects.

SUSTech is not the first institution to examine the relic. Two other scientific research labs have attempted and failed to recover the historical object. The SUSTech Cultural Heritage Laboratory of the Science and Technology Center used interdisciplinary techniques to study the processing techniques of turquoise and gold to analyze the original support of turquoise. They also observed the original appearance of the object in order to reconstruct it over a period of 8 months (Figure 2).

The judging panel includes experts from the Institute of Archaeology and Culture of Peking University, the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Hubei Provincial Museum and Wuhan University School of History. SUSTech associate professor Tang Bin of the Department of Biomedical Engineering conducted a full inspection of the research results and commented on them.

The experts particularly affirmed the research team’s original reconstruction plan of the Turquoise Animal Face. They believed that the reconstruction was very successful, providing the upcoming Panlongcheng Site Museum exhibition with a stunning exhibit.

The experts believe that during the implementation of the entire project, SUSTech will seamlessly link natural sciences with the humanities. SUSTech can build a model for protecting cultural relics in China. They recommended that the project’s research process and results should be compiled and published for peer reference.