Soldiers with the Chengdu military command began on Friday to clear the rubbles and retrieve the historic documents and relics buried under the collapsed archives building of Beichuan County in southwest China's Sichuan Province.
![Soldiers in masks carry the archives and relics salvaged from the ruins of the archives building of quake-hit Beichuan County in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Friday, July 4, 2008. [Photo: Xinhua]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20080705/001109b42f7309d94e0602.jpg "Soldiers in masks carry the archives and relics salvaged from the ruins of the archives building of quake-hit Beichuan County in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Friday, July 4, 2008. [Photo: Xinhua]")
Soldiers in masks carry the archives and relics salvaged from the ruins of the archives building of quake-hit Beichuan County in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Friday, July 4, 2008.
The six-storey building, now reduced to ruins by the devastating May 12 earthquake, houses around 85,000 pieces of archives, which document the 1,700 years of history of the quake-ravaged county. Of the archives, 8,801 pieces are on the key national list.
The archives salvaged will be transferred to the archives of Mianyang City for classification and storage, China's central television CCTV reported.
The salvage operation, involving more than 300 soldiers, is expected to last three day. So far, over 4,000 archives have been cleared from the ruins, Xinhua news agency reported.
The archives and relics salvaged from the ruins of the archives building of quake-hit Beichuan County were put on a truck in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Friday, July 4, 2008.
![The archives and relics salvaged from the ruins of the archives building of quake-hit Beichuan County were put on a truck in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Friday, July 4, 2008. [Photo: Xinhua]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20080705/001109b42f7309d94e1c07.jpg "The archives and relics salvaged from the ruins of the archives building of quake-hit Beichuan County were put on a truck in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Friday, July 4, 2008. [Photo: Xinhua]")