Unlocking Ancient & Modern 'Tech' of Jinci Temple

TAIYUAN, China, Sept. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A Report from Science and Technology Daily: 

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The Jinci Temple, China's oldest surviving royal ancestral temple that is a sprawling complex of 98 buildings housing 114 painted sculptures and 122 ancient trees, lies at the foot of Xuanweng Mountain, 25 kilometers southwest of provincial capital Taiyuan in north China's Shanxi province.

Twenty-nine of those trees are more than a thousand years old. One of them, a cypress planted during the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046 BCE-771 BCE), has stood for nearly 3,000 years. A spring called Nanlao, the "Never Aging Spring," has flowed for more than two millennia, though it stopped temporarily in the 1990s.

The Jinci Temple is often called a museum of ancient Chinese architecture. It is also something rarer: a living landscape where water, wood and stone have coexisted for millennia, and where the work of preservation is a conversation between the past and the present.

On a summer morning, Li Ruiling, a young guide at the Jinci Museum, waited at the entrance to welcome a visitor from Pakistan — Muhammad Waseem Rasheed, a doctoral student at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Rasheed is doing fieldwork in Shanxi for his research on ecosystem resilience.

He had come to the temple with a question: How has a place with such a profound history survived this long?

Li led Rasheed to the Information Network Department where Han Hongbin, the director, stood in front of a wall of monitors. The screens displayed real-time data from sensors embedded in the Saint Mother's Hall, the oldest and most important building at the temple. Temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter... every measurable factor that could damage wood, paint or clay is tracked around the clock.

The work began in 2015. That year, the Jinci Temple launched its first digital collection project, starting with the temple's three national treasure buildings: the Saint Mother's Hall, the Flying Bridge over Fish Pond and the Offering Hall. Using 3D laser scanners, the team surveyed every bracket, beam and roof curve. Each scan was linked to the China Geodetic Coordinate System 2000, creating a unified digital framework for the entire 121.4-hectare site.

Today, more than 80 percent of the temple's ancient buildings, murals, sculptures and trees have been digitally archived.

Han showed Rasheed a high-resolution 3D rendering of a Song Dynasty painted statue inside the hall, known as the "most beautiful attendant." The resolution was so fine that Rasheed could see the folds of her robe, the tilt of her head and the faint trace of a weathered smile.

The project was not just about creating images, Han explained. The digital archive preserves the original state of the relics as permanent data. If the statues suffer environmental damage over time, the digital versions will remain intact. "We started this work back in 2015," Han said. "For the three national treasure buildings — the Saint Mother's Hall, the Fish Pond Flying Bridge and the Offering Hall — we carried out the first phase of digital data collection."

In addition to documentation, the Jinci Temple has built a preventive protection system that watches over the physical buildings in real time. The sensor network in the Saint Mother's Hall covers the entire interior, tracking temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. If any metric exceeds its threshold, the system issues an alert. The team investigates and intervenes before visible damage occurs.

The museum has pioneered a three-in-one prevention model: monitoring and early warning, risk assessment and routine maintenance. There are daily, regular and specialized inspections for dynamic preservation with minimal intervention. The approach has been recognized by the National Cultural Heritage Administration of China as a model case for high-quality development in heritage conservation. The Jinci Temple is now the only national-level preventive cultural relic protection pilot in Shanxi.

Li then took Rasheed to meet Xie Qiang, the museum's deputy director. Xie oversees one of the Jinci Temple's most delicate projects: the restoration of the painted sculptures in the Saint Mother's Hall created during the Song Dynasty. The team began research-based protection work in 2021. The goal, Xie said, is to establish a systematic conservation methodology that can serve as a model for other ancient sites in Shanxi and beyond.

"We aim to summarize a set of effective protection methods and pathways for ancient painted sculptures," Xie explained. He emphasized two guiding principles: minimal intervention and maximum authenticity. "We preserve the original state of the relics as much as possible."

Environmental monitoring data is central to this work. If humidity changes, the team closely follows and investigates. If sulfur dioxide levels rise, they intervene. Xie described a shift in perservation thinking: "Our concept of cultural relics protection has moved from rescue protection to preventive protection, and from single-object protection to systematic protection of the surrounding environment."

He gave a practical example. In the Wang Qiong Temple, a hall dedicated to a famous official in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), sensors detected that indoor humidity was significantly higher than outdoors, a condition that could damage the painted sculptures and murals inside.

The team traced the problem to groundwater seepage from the surrounding drainage system. They modified the apron system, and the indoor climate returned to balance. "If the data shows significant changes," Xie said, "we must consider whether there is a risk to the safety of the relics. If it does pose a risk, we intervene to mitigate the harm."

Rasheed was quiet as they walked out. "In Pakistan,we also have ancient sites. They are thousands of years old, just like the Jinci Temple. But I have never seen anything like this digital system there," he said.

"Different countries have different conditions," Li said. "But they can learn from China's approaches and adopt the experience according to their own environment and goals."

SOURCE Science and Technology Daily