Tencent to help restore museum

A deal was reached in Beijing on Friday to use Chinese digital technology in the restoration of the fire-damaged National Museum of Brazil.

According to the deal, Tencent — a major Chinese internet company — will also provide technical support for the Rio Janeiro-based institution by jointly establishing an online museum and using artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies to assist in the conservation of damaged cultural relics.

On Sept 2, the 200-year-old National Museum of Brazil, one of the largest natural history and anthropology museums in the Americas, was gutted by an inferno. It was estimated that 90 percent of the 20 million artifacts were destroyed.

“Fortunately, many precious cultural relics were salvaged from the ashes,” Alexander W.A. Kellner, director of the museum, said at the Brazilian embassy in Beijing on Friday. “When Luzia was restored two weeks ago, we all burst into tears.”

Luzia Woman was the name given to a female skeleton dating back almost 12,000 years. The remains, one of the most important collections in the museum, were once thought to have been destroyed in the fire, but were identified in the debris later.

“Many more relics await restoration,” Kellner continued. “And a lot of work needs to be done for follow-up education programs. Chinese technical support can offer us great assistance in the process.”

Ye Jun, vice-president of Tencent’s mobile browsing products, said the current digitized content of the Brazilian museum will be used to construct the online database. The online museum will be released through its QQ web browser to offer netizens a digital guide to the museum.

Kellner said that reconstruction of the museum will begin next year after all surviving cultural relics are salvaged from the debris, which may take four to five months. “We’ll have new exhibition halls in the new museum. I have confidence that it can be re-opened in three years.”

Tencent will also open an online platform on Dec 15 for Chinese tourists who had been to Rio and visited the museum to upload their pictures or video clips, which are relevant to the cultural relics there.