Northwest China's Gansu Province has made considerable achievements in preserving cultural relics over the past five years.

With an area of 450,000 square kilometers, Gansu has a total of 13,603 historical sites, including four historical cities and 23 ruins under state-level protection, such as the Dunhuang Grottos and the Great Wall.

During the period, many localities paid great attention to relic protection and were very successful.

Construction workers have now completed 183 consolidating and waterproof maintenance projects on a numbers of key relic sites such as the Mogao Grottos and the Mati Temple.

At the same time, the province has adopted modern high-tech developments, involving computer science, X-ray and infranics, in the relic protection field.

The province's cultural protection staff now lead their counterparts across the country in the areas of curbing soil erosion and sand drifting, repairing grotto frescoes plagued by mold and protecting ancient tombs.

Moreover, local archaeologists are researching computer data to reveal the origins of the precious cultural relics.

The Research Institute of Dunhuang Arts has carried out a series of cooperation projects with foreign experts from Japan and the United States to store detailed information about the ancient grottoes in computers so that future generations all over the world will have the chance to enjoy the wonderful frescos from ancient times.

(People’s Daily 04/08/2001)