TWENTY residents out of 247 candidates were lucky enough to be enrolled in a training course on ancient book restoration skills organized by Shenzhen Library. It is the first time that such a training course has been opened to the general public in Guangdong Province, the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily reported.

“Many people might think that restoring ancient books is a rare and unpopular skill that they will seldom use, so our previous training courses were only for professionals,” said Zhang Sen, director of the Reference Department of Shenzhen Library, “but according to some feedback we collected from the knowledge-promoting activities, we’ve learned that many Shenzhen residents are actually very interested in learning the skill.”

Statistics show that most of the over 200 people who applied for the training course had bachelor’s degrees or above, and their average age was 33 years old, close to Shenzhen’s 37 years.

A woman, surnamed Wang, was one of the people to be enrolled. She said that although she knew nothing about restoring ancient books, the skill fascinated her very much.

Shenzhen Library has restored 297 kinds and over 3,000 volumes of ancient books from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

“Restoring books from ancient China was one of the major measures to preserve books in Chinese history and is a unique tradition,” said Zhang. The purpose of organizing the training course was to teach society more about this traditional skill. The first training course, taking place on weekends from June to October, will be free of charge, said Zhang.

Experts in ancient book restoration from a provincial-level center for book restoration and Shenzhen Library will lecture at the course. The students will be taught both the theory and practical skills behind restoring ancient books.

(Zhang Qian)