BEIJING, March 8 (Xinhua) -- The Linyi Tianze Wood Culture Museum, a folk museum in Linyi, a prefecture-level city in east China's Shandong Province, has become a spreader of the world's wood culture as it houses nearly 600 wood specimens from 46 countries and regions.
Photo shows people visit the Linyi Tianze Wood Culture Museum in Linyi, east China's Shandong Province.
There are wood fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago, more than 100 kinds of ancient wood from thousands of years ago with great scientific research value, and precious wood from all over the world in the museum.
The curator of the museum Jiang Kaifeng is a native of Linyi who has spent most of his life visiting timber producing areas in South America, North America, Asia and Africa to collect rare wood specimens and ancient wooden furniture.
At present, the museum has a collection of more than 50,000 pieces of wood specimens, and has become a well-known local base for the dissemination of the world's wood culture.
Wood specimens are important carriers for popularizing wood culture, and their values lie not only in the wood age, scarcity, shape and structure, but also in the role as material evidences to trace human activities and climate and geological changes hundreds of millions of years ago and for scientific research on the unearthed areas, said Jiang.
The museum also displays over 230 ancient beds from around China during the Ming and Qing dynasties, as well as nearly 26,000 pieces (sets) of wood carving boards from the Ming dynasty to the modern times, which bear the essence of the Chinese folk culture and wood carving craft.
The functions of the museum are education, research and collection, noted Jiang Kaifeng, saying that the museum has set up a cultural innovation and education center to invite inheritors of intangible cultural heritage and renowned wood carvers to study and redevelop the furniture, wood carvings and wood ornaments collected in the museum, and launched a series of extended products, so as to better promote the world's wood culture.
(Edited by Gu Shanshan with Xinhua Silk Road, gushanshan.1987@163.com)
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