Across China: The museum craftsmen giving history back its shine

To re-embed the tinsel missing from the bronzeware in his hands, Wang Chen has to hold his breath -- any sudden air flow could blow the hair-thin strips away. The work is so delicate that even footsteps nearby could provide a disastrous distraction.

Wang, 56, has got used to absolute stillness at work. For 37 years, he has plied his trade as a repairman of exhibits in the silent depths of the Henan Museum in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province.

As culture vultures observe International Museum Day on Wednesday, it is high time to recognize that the historic items on display in the world's museums have only regained their beauty thanks to the likes of Wang, who spends his days alone in a studio.

"I have no one to share my feelings with, either good or bad. I often find myself not uttering a single word for a whole day," he says. All he has to keep him company are the 140,000 artifacts in the Henan Museum.

So Wang's dialogue during the nine to five is not with colleagues but with the items he is working on. He says he "listens" to the pieces in his hands, discerning their age, how they were made, level of damage and original appearance. "Cultural relics can tell you a lot of information," according to the restorer.

Among the 2,000 items Wang has helped fix, the most difficult was "yunwentongjin," a table-like bronze for placing liquor vessels on. Dating back to the Spring and Autumn period (770 B.C.-476 B.C.), the antique was shattered into dozens of fractions when it was unearthed in the late 1970s, with many of its fine decorations detached or lost.

A team spent three years restoring the exquisite bronze, using dozens of techniques including face-lifting, carving, jointing and painting.

"We could not do the job based on our imagination. Every tiny detail we had to repair had to be based on evidence," Wang recalls.

Yunwentongjin was a particular milestone for Wang because the project reunited him professionally with his father, his mentor in the repair business.

Wang senior was apprentice to an antique repairman for the royal family in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and he was the obvious choice as the Henan Museum's first "cultural relics craftsman" in the 1950s. The retiree was rehired in 1981 to take charge of restoring yunwentongjin

"I learned a lot from my father, and since yunwentongjin, repairing any bronze has been a piece of cake," Wang says.

Apart from learning bronzeware techniques from his father, the younger Wang studied and became skillful in the restoration and duplication of gold and silverware, enamel items, earthenware, jades and glassware.

Though satisfying, his career has been a hard slog.

Loneliness, stress and decades of dealing with noxious glue and paint have harmed his health. Most of his hair and teeth are gone and he also suffers from neck problems. Sometimes, he smokes three packs of cigarettes a day to mitigate the physical and mental pain.

The job has not even been well paid. As with many positions in China, the salary is dependent on education levels, and Wang has no diploma. He gets a monthly salary of 5,000 yuan (767 U.S. dollars), less than the students assigned to him by the museum take home. They mostly have master's degrees.

Wang has thought about quitting more than once, but never wrote a resignation letter. "I felt uneasy when it occurred to me that the relics would never have been restored and seen by the world without my work," he says.

In his tool box, Wang keeps a little hammer carved with flowers. The 100-year-old tool, its handle worn with finger marks, was inherited from his father.

"My biggest wish is to find someone to pass the hammer on to, like my father did to me," he says. Endi