On April 18 each year, people all over the world celebrate the International Day for Monuments and Sites (国际古迹遗址日). In China, young people are realizing the importance of their history and culture. Many are doing their best to protect Chinese cultural sites and try to promote (推广) them.
Finding new artifacts (文物)
Xu Danyang, a 29-year-old archaeologist (考古学家), found an amazing bronze statue (青铜像) at the Sanxingdui site in Sichuan. In 2021, he dug out this statue. In the beginning, his team thought it was a bird. But as they continued the digging, they had a surprise. It turned out (结果是) to be a statue of a man, about 16cm high. It shows a man kneeling with his head turned, and it surprises everyone who sees it.
Making maps for protection
Wu Yunjie who was born in the 1990s found a new way — by making a special map to show the best cultural sites in China. Wu is now famous on the Internet. He marked almost 10,000 places like old temples, towers, bridges and houses. Each site with colorful marks showed how special and important they are. As a kid, Wu loved going to a temple in his hometown in Ezhou, Hubei. However, it was pulled down years ago. He was sad and decided to record all the cultural sites in China.
He started to travel across the country. He visits places in person and adds them to his map, making sure we all remember them. Now, Wu asks for help from people online to make his map better and better. And he hopes to share this amazing map with everyone who respects (尊重)history and culture soon.
Making explanations (解释) fun
Zhang Bin is a 31-year-old tour guide at Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi'an, Shaanxi. He works to answer visitors' questions about the famous Terracotta Warriors and shares all of his knowledge about them. Zhang often uses the traditional Chinese performance art of xiangsheng to explain them. He is doing something meaningful for the site.
① He marks sites on his map. ② He visits places in person.
③ He asks for help online. ④ He answers visitors' questions.