At this year's Beijing Great Wall Cultural Festival, Malei from Mentougou District Cultural and Tourism Bureau was named "The Most Beautiful Cultural Relic Guardian in Beijing in 2022". In the unit, Ma Lei, a born in the 1980s, is considered a young cultural relics worker. Since 2009, Malei has participated in the third national cultural relics survey of , Great Wall data survey, and ancient village resource survey, and has accumulated valuable work experience.
's love for cultural relics comes from childhood memories. Malei's hometown is Fangshan District, Beijing. When he was a child, he accidentally encountered someone excavating underground in the entrance of the village. He learned that this was actually an Tang Dynasty ancient tomb, and his interest in cultural relics emerged. In the future, he even changed his hobby to work and career.
The mountainous area of Beijing is rich in cultural relics resources, among which the collection and sorting of stone carvings and cultural relics is a arduous and long-term work. Malei knows the importance of this basic work. Over the past ten years, he has persisted in field surveys, taking more than 20,000 photos of cultural relics, more than 400 steles, wrote more than 1,000 investigation records, and published more than 150 articles. In Malei's view, only by seizing every opportunity for field inspection and comprehensively recording inspection data can we lay the foundation for future research and utilization.
Mentougou District is mountainous and has a complex terrain. Taking the Great Wall as an example, some sites are located at dangerous locations, among which Zhaitang and Qingshui area are steep and cliffs. In Malei's memory, once he went to the top of the mountain with an altitude of more than 1,400 meters to print the monument. Halfway through, the sky suddenly became dark, with lightning and thunder, and heavy rain mixed with hail hitting the top of his head instantly, but there was nowhere to hide at the scene. Fortunately, he was not hit by lightning in the end.
Hard work pays off. After the unremitting efforts of Malei and his colleagues, they have completed the investigation of most of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall and the Great Wall resources in Mentougou District, providing important written records for the protection and utilization of the Great Wall, and found a large number of cultural relics that had not been recorded by previous generations.
In addition to field inspections, from 2012 to the present, Malei has served as the head of cultural relics repair projects in Mentougou District Cultural Management Office, supervising more than 80 repair projects such as national insurance, municipal insurance, and district insurance. Among them, some of the repair projects of Jietai Temple and Tanzhe Temple have been rated as excellent repair projects.
Malei said that there are many cultural relics and ancient buildings left in Mentougou District. These precious historical relics record the social style of a specific historical period, highlight the characteristics of the times, and are an unrenewable cultural heritage. However, with the passage of time and the influence of factors such as man-made nature, ancient buildings are inevitably damaged to varying degrees. In recent years, with the advancement of national policies and changes in social concepts, the protection of ancient buildings and cultural relics has attracted more and more attention. However, the repair of cultural relics has its complexity. If you neglect during the repair process, it may lead to damage to the cultural relics.
Taking the renovation project of the Guandi Temple in Dongxinfang as an example, Malei has consulted cultural relics and combined with the inscriptions to have questions about the repaired design drawings and requires the modification of the design drawings, the glazed components and roof structure on the top of the main hall are retained, the murals are preserved, and the traditional structure of the mountain gate is restored. Through close cooperation among all parties, the historical appearance of the Guandi Temple in Dongxinfang was presented to the public, fully reflecting the renovation concept of "protecting the authenticity and integrity of cultural relics".
text/Reporter Cui Yifei Photo provided by interviewee
