Sixty-year-old Du Weisheng races against time to rescue centuries-old tomes and scripts that have been damaged by water, moulding from improper storage and chewed on by rats.

BEIJING, CHINA (RECENT - APRIL 30, 2009) REUTERS -
Sixty-year-old Du Weisheng is a doctor of no ordinary
order.
His "patients" are at least a few hundred years old and can
not speak.
Du's only means of communication with his patients is by reading their
symptoms.
Du works as a researcher at the rare book division of China's National
Library in Beijing.
His job is to rescue old tomes and scripts that have been eaten by time
or chewed on by rats.
He calls himself a "book doctor".
As a young man, Du served in the Chinese army before deciding marching
wasn't for him.
He said there was no "noble" incentive for applying for a job
in a library when he decided to take a new direction in life - it was simply
to avoid the tough military exercises in the hot sun or heavy snow.
But his easy office job soon showed its true nature and Du realised he
was in for a race against time to rescue old documents that were falling
apart.
The book doctor says some of the books he fixes require extreme
concentration and patience.
He uses a special glue and rice paper that are of similar colour to
patch up thousands of visible or invisible holes on book pages with the help
of a magnifier.
However, this is only the easiest part of the doctor's job.
Many books have been soaked by flood waters for a long time and have
never properly dried.
Most of their pages are stuck together.
Many more older books simply fall into fragmentary pieces once
touched.
Du joined the rare book division of the National Library in 1974.
Since then, he has participated in restoring 161 volumes of the
600-year-old Yongle Encyclopedia, considered one of the most valuable
historical documents for Chinese history studies.
He also helped to rescue manuscripts from Dunhuang written between the
5th and 11th centuries.
But Du says erosion happens too fast and with a small staff of 19
people in the rare book division, it is impossible to fix all the books that
need to be rescued.
"Books we need to fix take up to a third of the collection in the
library, which is around 2 million books. A third of that makes it around
700,000 books. About 20 percent of the 700,000 books need urgent fixing, which
means more than 100,000 books are in very bad condition. We fix about 1,000
books per year and the best we can do is no more than 2,000. This means it's
going to take us a very, very long time before we can finish this task,"
he said.
During a career spanning 35 years, Du has fixed close to 5,000 ancient
books himself.
Apart from books that were partly destroyed by wars and improper
storage, he says the way paper used to be made in China is a big factor in the
erosion of ancient texts.
According to "Chinese Paper Making Skill", a book that Du and
his colleagues were given by the library as a reference book, Chinese rice
paper originated from the Tang Dynasty (618AD-907AD).
However, the use of tree trunks as raw material made it too expensive
for rice paper to be used as a common commodity, so people started using
bamboo as a replacement to make paper during the Song Dynasty
(960AD-1127AD).
Fast-growing bamboo may have provided people one thousand years ago
with cheap material to make affordable paper, but it is costing modern society
billions to protect and rescue.
Du said over a long stretch of time, rice paper made from bamboo gives
out a chemical called oxalic acid that eats away the paper.
The book doctor says he's not curing his "patients", but
simply prolonging their lives.
The solution for the future is to digitalise all the materials before
they are gone, he says, adding that it's no easy task.
"There are some problems with the development of modern technology
of book protection. This is a vast investment. It is, at this stage,
impossible to invest billions in the technology and equipment," Du
said.
But time and resources are running short. Du says there are less than
150 people fixing and rescuing the disappearing texts in the whole of
China.
Only three top universities in Beijing offer degrees in ancient book
fixing. Du believes many young Chinese are interested in the profession but
are scared away by the high requirements of the top universities.