MAPPING THE PAST
Diligent group of enthusiasts who seek out historical sites that are located off the beaten track publishes guides to the nation’s ancient treasures and monitor their upkeep, Wang Ru reports.
When Shao Shihai first started working following graduation from university as an information technology major in 2003, he would often take a bicycle to the suburbs of Nanjing, Jiangsu province, to relax. That was when he first encountered a stone bixie (a Chinese mythological animal that is believed to be able to keep evil at bay).
“I had visited the Xiaoling Mausoleum of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and saw magnificent royal sculptures, but the bixie seemed to be even bigger and more exquisite, and that left a deep impression on me,” says Shao.
He read the words inscribed on a tablet beside the sculpture, and learned that it dated back to the Southern Dynasty (420-589). After further research, he developed an interest in stone carvings of that period, and began planning trips to find them, along with other historical sites that are lesserknown to the public.
“Many remains of splendid ancient sculptures are scattered in the suburbs of Nanjing, although not many people paid attention to them in the past. They can really impress you with their scale, as well as their artistic and historical value,” says Shao.
In 2014, Shao and several friends who share the hobby of searching for ancient sites and cultural relics, formed a group and paid regular trips to key historical sites under protection of the government, mostly in Jiangsu. The group, who took the name Sinorelic, then developed an online information-sharing platform, labeling the sites they visited on a map, making it easier for subsequent visitors to locate.
Group members all admire Zhu Qi, an economist and historian who visited and recorded the location and condition of a large number of historical sites of Nanjing in the 1930s, making a great contribution to protecting the city’s ancient walls in the 1950s.
“Our original aspiration was to follow in the footsteps of Zhu, and record the current conditions and changes to historical sites in Nanjing,” says Wang Teng, a member of the group who joined in 2014, shortly after starting his job as a researcher at the Nanjing City Wall Management Office.
During the visits, they observe and record the condition of the sites and the cultural relics there, as well as the surrounding environment. If they notice that protection efforts are falling short, they report their findings to local cultural heritage administration.
“We bear in mind that we cannot do anything that might adversely affect the cultural relics, and we do not work for the government, so we can only pass on the information to the authorities instead of doing something ourselves,” explains Shao.
In 2014, when they stumbled across some people making illegal rubbings of an ancient stone carving, they tried to intervene and reported the perpetrators to the police. Shao was rewarded for his bravery by the Foundation for Justice and Courage of the Qixia district of Nanjing.
They also reported the condition of some ancestral temples, which they found to be dilapidated. Some of them were later renovated by the authorities.
Over the next several years, they visited many national, provincial, city and regional level sites in Jiangsu, collecting a large amount of information about them, and even discovering some that did not appear on the protection list.
“At first, visiting such sites was a simple hobby for me, but later, I discovered that many details we found during the process actually reflected the many sides of the city, especially at different stages of its history. It has helped me to gain a deeper understanding of the city,” says Wang.
For example, when he checked the part of the city’s walls situated near the Zijin Mountain, he found traces of the Battle of Nanjing that took place during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), and gained a new impression of the conflict.
While finding the government list of the sites is easy, finding the actual location of the sites is not. With the city’s rapid development, many older villages and towns may have been absorbed into the expanding urban area, so the locations online are not always accurate, notes Shao. He recalls that, once, he spent a whole day trying to find some sites, but came away empty-handed.
Wang points out that many stone carvings and tombs are hidden in the woods, adding further difficulty to their search.
That was when they decided to develop an online system, including a website, a mobile app and a WeChat mini program to share the information, and label locations of the sites on a map.
“We thought that we might be able to save people who have a similar hobby some time when they wanted to visit such places.
“We didn’t expect such a large number of people to use it, until so many people told us how much we had helped them. That made us realize our endeavors might be able to play a bigger role than we had imagined,” says Wang.
He was once told by an old man that by using the Sinorelic app, he had discovered that a neighboring building was once a mansion, built in the early 1900s — something he had never realized, despite living in the community for more than two decades.
“It inspires us to call on more people to pay attention to, and protect, the historical sites by their side, so that they can better know their cities,” says Wang.
The scale of Sinorelic has continued to grow, attracting people from all walks of life. More subgroups in other cities of China have formed to join the task of labeling historical sites on the map. So far, they have marked on the map all of the national-level protected sites in Jiangsu and many others around the country, and will continue to add more.
With the large amount of material they have collected over the years pertaining to the sites, they have just published a book, Finding Nanjing — The Guide Book of Major Historical Heritages in Nanjing, introducing more than 200 historical sites in the city.
It is the start of a collection, and the following ones about Beijing, Xi’an and Luoyang will soon be published.
“We hope the readers can develop an interest in cultural relics and historical sites, and gain a deeper understanding of the need to protect them,” says Wang, who is also the chief editor of the book.