"I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City" is aimed at the restoration craftsmen for the first time, who breathe with the cultural relics, share the same fate, and restore the cultural relics of the Forbidden City in a quiet, simple and persistent corner of the "cold palace".
This book focuses on the restoration experience of 12 Forbidden City restorers in the form of oral narration, the restoration process and experience, through clocks, framed paintings, lacquerware, bronze, and woodware, which are presented one by one.
There is no room for deception in skill, and there are no shortcuts in skill. A court clock is assembled layer by layer, and thousands of parts must be made from the bottom, each part is tightly fitted, and a mistake of one to two millimeters can lead to a final overall strike; A piece of bronze was broken into more than a hundred pieces without any rules, and one piece of the piece could not be put together in the wrong position; In the middle of the night on dog days, a lacquer farmer can only pick eight taels of lacquer in one night, "a hundred miles and a thousand knives and a pound of lacquer"; The fish maw glue used to repair the dragon chair of the Taihe Palace, the young men take turns to smash it all the time, and they can smash at most half a catty at the end of the day; A piece of wood carving must be hand-polished more than three times with a file wearing a toothpick to have a round and delicate sense of time; The restoration of ancient calligraphy and painting reveals the paper sometimes by finger rubbing, and a painting is revealed for a month or two, the process is boring, and you can only fight patience; The cycle of copying a painting starts from one year, and a copyist cannot come across a few very successful works in his lifetime...
Craftsman's experience: Watchmaker Wang Jin: Repairing a watch is a dialogue with the watchmakers of the past.
Bronze Master Wang Youliang: We have to repair the old as the old.
Shan Jiajiu of the framing studio: Sharpening the knife and scraping the paper is to sharpen your temperament.
Copyist Ju Jianwei: Interests are short-lived, but inheritance is eternal.
Shen Wei: The first rule is to keep loneliness.