Chapter 283 First Meeting

At 1:30, the group arrived at the southeast corner of the Prince's Mansion.

The museum's collection research department is located here.

As they walked, Zhang Jindong said, "I've mentioned it a few times before. Several colleagues in the research department remember Professor Lin. Knowing that you're restoring porcelain at the museum today, they all said they wanted to come and see."

That's for sure.

There are at least seven or eight hundred pieces of broken artifacts in the Prince's Palace storeroom. It's impossible to let these precious cultural relics just sit there gathering dust indefinitely. A restoration plan was initiated long ago, but a suitable partner with sufficient expertise has yet to be found.

At first glance, it seems that Minister Zhang has hired a very skilled restorer, so we should at least come and observe.

As they talked, the two entered the gray building.

It's not tall, just two floors, and there aren't many departments. Although there isn't a dedicated porcelain research lab, there is a glass artifact (glass artifacts, such as snuff bottles) research lab. It has almost all the equipment needed for porcelain restoration.

Li Zhen and Xiao Yuzhu collected information, while the head of the equipment department led Zhao Boheng and Zhao Zhong'an to debug the equipment, and Lin Sicheng designed a repair plan.

Nearby, several staff members from the Education and Communication Department turned on their cameras, preparing to record simultaneously.

About ten minutes later, there was a commotion outside the door. Then, a lot of people came in.

There are men and women, and there are Chinese and young people.

Zhang Jindong introduced them one by one, and Lin Sicheng shook hands with each of them.

About ten minutes later, the preparations were complete.

Li Zhen turned her notebook around, which contained the organized specimen information, such as the composition of the body and glaze, the damaged areas, the volume of the damage, the glaze color spectrum, and the density of the body.

After a quick glance, Lin Sicheng began to explain: "In addition to the ladder-type purification: 1. Ultrasonic removal of organic pollutants, solvent: acetone + tetrahydrofuran, time: ten minutes."

"Second, 5% EDTA disodium salt solution, pH 8.0, ±0.5. Third, plasma flow to remove microbial film, power 100W..."

It wasn't specified who would do this and who would do that, but the four assistants remained calm and composed, their movements were skilled, and their teamwork was smooth.

The group of staff members found it particularly novel.

Minister Zhang said that they had invited an expert in ancient ceramics, and they thought that if he was not sixty or seventy, he should at least be forty or fifty.

Since it's ancient ceramic restoration, the most traditional methods must be used.

I never expected someone so young to be so skilled at using machines.

Putting aside other things, let's just talk about laser cleaning machines and plasma cleaning machines. Although both of these are domestically developed equipment, they have only been introduced into the field of cultural relic restoration in recent years.

In particular, the Palace Museum only tentatively introduced plasma cleaners two years ago. After a year of debugging and improvement, the manufacturer finally started customized production last year.

The equipment in the material handling room was only installed around May Day. The manufacturer and technicians had just completed their training and left last month.

But was that female assistant more skilled than the technicians at the salon?

As he pondered this, after the cleanup was completed, Lin Sicheng gave further instructions:

"Prepare, 1. A celadon-glazed covered jar, materials: willow-leaf-shaped nails, square-shouldered horse-shaped nails, and diamond-shaped hidden nails, with the nail feet all filed into a fish-scale pattern."

Prepare the coolant: tea oil and turpentine in a 1:3 ratio. Sturgeon swim bladder glue, 70%. Longquan bone meal, 5%. Drill bit diameter 0.6mm…

"II. Celadon bowl lid, materials: lacquer powder, Daoguang porcelain body powder, donkey hide glue melted over a low fire. Glue-to-lacquer ratio: 5:3:2. Glaze-to-lacquer ratio: lacquer 48% + silica sol 30% + chromium oxide green 15% + bone powder 7%. Gold leaf: 2 mm wide and long sections, 0.8 mm square pieces."

"III. Xianfeng famille rose plate, glue: sturgeon swim bladder glue melted over a low heat, 1% borneol, 2% dragon's blood powder, filtered through 200 mesh. Coloring: 3% copper flower + 97% quartz sand. Ivory micro tenon: 5×0.3mm."

"Fourth, the Guangxu blue and white porcelain cup... Never mind, I'll take this one!"

The group worked methodically, while the staff watched quietly.

As the saying goes, "one can understand many things by analogy." This is their line of work; although they don't specifically study porcelain, they understand the fundamentals.

For example, the nails and drill bits that Lin Sicheng had his assistants prepare indicate that he intended to use the nail-fixing technique to repair the blue-glazed covered jar.

It was also fitted with lacquer and cut with gold leaf, so it must have been repaired with kintsugi to restore the celadon bowl lid.

I know about donkey hide glue and sturgeon glue. Both of these were commonly used adhesives in the Qing Dynasty imperial workshops for the repair of porcelain.

This includes using porcelain powder from imperial porcelain fragments from the Daoguang era. It is known that porcelain from the same period had basically the same body material, which could reduce expansion stress.

But as the saying goes, "a trade is like a mountain," so the rest was a bit hard to understand.

For example, Chinese medicine was added to the glue. Another example is that one of the female assistants took a thin white stick and kept filing it, and then cut it into short pieces.

About half an hour later, all the materials were ready, and the repair officially began.

The first item is a Tongzhi-era covered jar with a blue glaze and the inscription "Changchun Tongqing".

This piece is relatively large and has a thick porcelain body, so Lin Sicheng used a simpler metal staple technique.

The process is also very simple: drilling, gluing, sealing, baking, and applying foil.

After a series of "whooshing" and "clanging" sounds, the lidded jar was sent into the electric kiln to bake after about an hour.

Lin Sicheng then began to work on a second item: a celadon-glazed bowl lid bearing the mark of Shendetang.

This piece is small and not as broken as the previous blue-glazed jar; it only has four cracks, but two pieces are missing from the middle. One piece is about the size of a thumbnail, and the other is about the size of a little fingernail.

Lin Sicheng plans to use the Kintsugi technique, which involves using lacquer to fill in the gaps, applying gold leaf to most of the glaze, and repairing small parts with glaze.

The gluing was done relatively quickly this time, with the main structure repaired in less than half an hour. However, the glazing took an hour: to prevent color differences, Lin Sicheng painted it twice and fired it twice.

The third piece is a Guangxu famille rose sunflower-shaped dish, which is only cracked in two. However, its shape is too open and its decoration is too complicated, making it unsuitable for either metal clamps or gold repair. The difficulty of its restoration is actually higher than that of the previous two pieces.

Lin Sicheng plans to use a "metalwork + mortise and tenon" repair technique.

This hasn't been discussed much before; the assistant couldn't help much, so Lin Sicheng had to do it all himself.

The three people stood quietly to the side watching, leaving only Li Zhen to hand over tools, glue, and other such items.

At first, everyone thought it would be the same restoration process as before, and the staff didn't pay much attention.

But when people saw Lin Sicheng using a needle drill to drill a hole in the middle of the broken section of the foot, they realized something was wrong.

Now that the hole has been drilled to this point, what's the next step in repairing it?

Afterwards, Lin Sicheng applied glue and stuffed several pieces of ivory, not much thicker than a hair, into the small hole. Only then did the museum staff realize that it was a mortise and tenon joint.

The research focuses on Qing Dynasty history, and most of the staff present here know that such restoration techniques did exist during the Qing Dynasty.

"Records of Works in the Imperial Household Department's Manufacturing Office": The method of repairing mortise and tenon joints in porcelain plates involves using ivory to fit fish bladders, and chiseling a rectangular hole three li deep...

Some also use nanmu wood.

In the sixth year of the Tongzhi reign (1867), the "Records of the Imperial Household Department" stated: "There were two chips on a porcelain plate. Liu San'er of the Imperial Workshop was ordered to make tenons from nanmu wood, glue them with fish glue, and fill the outside with official glaze, costing twelve taels of silver..."

I've only ever seen this in historical records; this is the first time I've seen it done in real life...