A Chinese professor said that he could produce a picture of China's first emperor if given permission to excavate his mausoleum.
Zhao Chengwen, a professor with the Chinese Criminal Police Institute based in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning province, has developed a portrait-restoring system which applies high-tech three-dimensional animation, reported Beijing Morning Post on Thursday.
Zhao has succeeded in producing pictures of a Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) princess. He first took pictures of the mummy princess kept in east China's Jiangxi Provincial Museum. Then he processed the images with the portrait-restoring system and 20 minutes later obtained a picture of the princess at the age of 64, when she died, which is now on display in the provincial museum. Zhao continued working and produced two more pictures of the princess supposedly aged 20 and 40.
Zhao was confident that he could enable today's society to feel the power and prestige of Emperor Qinshihuang if his mausoleum was allowed to be excavated.
Emperor Qinshihuang, who died of illness in 210 B.C. at the age of 49, united China for the first time ever in history.
His mausoleum, about 30 kilometers to the east of Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi province, is the largest mausoleum in the world, occupying an area of 56.25 square kilometers. The terra-cotta warriors, buried with the Emperor as his garrison in the afterlife, were a major discovery.
Chinese archeologists have been arguing about whether the mausoleum should be fully excavated. Some worry that the situation inside the tomb is still not clear, and there are still technical problems that need to be settled to protect any silk, wooden and paper relics the mausoleum may contain.
The Mausoleum was included on the World Heritage List by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1987.
( February 08, 2002)
