Chinese archaeologists have successfully preserved the only surviving “golden armour”, rumoured to have been worn in battle by soldiers of the Tang Dynasty around 1,200 years ago.
It took nearly four years of work to reconstruct the gilded bronze armour, unearthed in fragments from a Xuewei site tomb in Qinghai province, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said.
The Tang period from 618 to 907AD saw China undergo rapid political, economic, military and cultural advancements. It’s now regarded as one of the golden eras in Chinese history.
The Tang Dynasty military attire is widely known from artefacts like murals, burial goods, inscriptions, and poetry. The “gold armour”, however, was known only from poetry until the first fragments were discovered in 2018.
Preservation and reconstruction of the fragments into full attire presented substantial challenges as they were decayed and incomplete, the archaeologists said.
The conservation project relied on advanced 3D scanning and microscopy technology as well as virtual and augmented reality techniques to reconstruct the fragments into the full attire.
“These technologies have provided solutions to the challenges of artefact degradation, allowing for more accurate restoration, interactive displays and global accessibility to cultural heritage,” the archaeologists involved in the conservation project explained in a study published last year.
The project also restored other severely damaged artefacts such as a lacquered horse armour with gold-edged decoration as well as a large bronze cauldron.
“We adopted a strategy of ‘disassembling the whole into parts and reassembling the parts into a whole’, conducting layered cleaning, extraction and protection while meticulously cataloguing each armour plate,” Guo Zhengchen, a conservationist involved with the project, told a press conference, according to the South China Morning Post.
The archaeologists said “this research contributes to heritage conservation discourse by highlighting digital methods as vital to preserving and understanding world history in contemporary society”.
The conservation project also highlighted the potential of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies to allow for interactive museum exhibitions.
“VR provides a 360-degree experience of the Tang military context, allowing users to virtually experience the environment in which these garments were worn,” the study said, “while AR enhances physical exhibitions by overlaying historical data and visual elements.”
