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Clock repairman at Palace Museum keeps history in time
date:2016/04/15
As the TV documentary, Masters in the Forbidden City, becomes popular among audiences, the highly skilled and smart behind-the-scenes masters are becoming young girls' "idols". Wang Jin, 55, who has been repairing antique timepieces at Beijing's Palace Museum for 39 years, is one of them.
The repair process is quite complicated. Each timepiece first has to be photographed for the museum's records, and then a repair plan is formulated. Every piece has to be dismantled, cleaned, mended, assembled, adjusted and tested, until it functions properly. Then it goes to the warehouse for storage.
"The experience of repairing each clock is unique because you know only that it doesn't work, but you don't know why until you open it," says Wang.
Sometimes, after each repair, the timepiece still doesn't work, so Wang will dismantle all the parts and check again.
Wang is the third "generation" to repair clocks in the museum since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and Wang's techniques were listed as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2014.
Talking about inheritance, Wang says that he wants to try his best to help youngsters learn the technique overseas, as some foreign countries have special schools where students can learn timepiece repair, but China doesn't.
"Repairing needs the work of one generation after another, as the Palace Museum has more than 1,000 timepieces. Even one day when they have all been repaired, regular maintenance still requires much work", Wang says.
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