A stone tablet directs visitors to the museum. [Photo/Xinhua]

Before I became a museum staff member, I worked as a village official and was very interested in antiques in Ninghua county, about 100 kilometers away.

I well remember Oct 7, 1999, when a friend who worked at the Sanming Cultural Bureau called and invited me to take part in an officially organized monthlong dig on Wanshouyan Hill.

I accepted the invitation, which led to a two-decade career.

In the first week, we found tiles, coins, rusted iron locks, etched candleholders and relics of bluish-white porcelain in a hill cave. Tests showed that they all dated to the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

On Oct 12, when we dug down 1.68 meters, we made a surprising discovery－a 120-square-meter limestone-block floor dating back 40,000 years, an early example of human "interior design".

About 3 pm the next day, our spirits were boosted even further when we found a fossilized tooth, which a team member recognized as belonging to a mammalian animal species from about 10,000 years ago. Stone tools and animal bone fossils were found with it.

In November that year, a staff member from the Fujian Museum took 37 typical artifacts to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing for identification.

Eventually, experts confirmed that the artifacts came from the Paleolithic age, between 2 million and 10,000 years ago.

We team members were excited because the discoveries proved that humans had settled in our province tens of thousands of years ago.

We were also pleased that the fossils and relics protected the hills from Sanming Steel Group, which years before had bought the rights to mine ores for steel production.

In 2005, the Sanming government established a museum to preserve the relics. The museum houses about 3,000 relics that were found in the hills. I am responsible for taking care of them and filing them online.

Every day, I check the relics in the cave, including the limestoneblock floor, and protect them from being inundated by rain or water dripping through cracks into the cave.

I also ventilate and fix the temperatures in the storage rooms to stop the relics from going moldy or being worn away by moisture.

I am concerned about the shortage of research papers on these discoveries. More advanced research methods are needed to reveal more of their mysteries. For example, a sharp stone tool excavated in Wanshouyan is similar to some found in Taiwan, which may suggest cultural links between the two places.

The longer I work here, the more I understand the importance of protecting these relics. I must record, file and preserve these precious discoveries as clearly as possible before I retire because I am responsible to our descendants, who will conduct further research on these findings.

Wu Caitong, 56, a staff member at the Wanshouyan Cultural Heritage Museum, Sanming, Fujian province, spoke with Li Hongyang and Hu Meidong.