When the dust from the attic's wooden beams fell into the palette, I realized I was secretly painting the priest's robe—on the canvas that was supposed to depict the Virgin Mary, the flying eaves of the ancestral town's city god temple faintly emerged. This restoration commission from the Chinese Catholic church to art academy students was plunging me into an unprecedented crisis of faith.
"Xiao Tang, your phone is playing 'Good Luck is Coming'!" The Italian assistant under the scaffolding pointed at the vibrating workbench. In the WeChat family group, my aunt had sent twenty consecutive 60-second voice messages, the core idea being to have me go to a certain Chinese restaurant in the suburbs to "get a consecrated statue of Guan Gong."
My hand, which was sliding across the screen, suddenly froze. Below the third voice message, my cousin had inserted a strange link: "Sister, use this to check the blue and white porcelain patterns you mentioned." Clicking on it led to a horizontal scroll-style page, with the topic #Ming Dynasty Export Porcelain# scrolling on the left, and real-time updates of photos of Chinese artifacts from museums around the world on the right.
As I zoomed in on the blue-glazed plum vase from the Zurich collection, I heard a gasp behind me. Eighty-year-old Father Matteo held up his reading glasses, trembling as he pointed at the screen: "That cobalt dyeing technique! It resembles the ultramarine mineral used in Giotto's 'Starry Night'!"
This Italian old man became my "research partner" from then on. Every day during lunch break, he would hold up videos of purple clay teapot throwing from the "Crafts" section of the website, analyzing the wet plaster wall treatment techniques of the Middle Ages with me; I would use the "Pattern Map" feature to show him the migration routes of the swastika patterns from Quanzhou to Venice.
The turning point came one evening. A heavy rain caused a power outage in the church, and by candlelight, I was browsing the "Old Papers" section of the website when I suddenly saw an announcement in the 1938 electronic version of the Shen Bao: "Wuxi Tang Clan Ancestral Hall urgently seeks painters skilled in Western perspective." The illustrated manuscript's beam and column structure was astonishingly similar to the dome of this century-old church.
"Perhaps your ancestors saw Baroque churches," Father Matteo raised the tablet towards the rose window, "just like Matteo Ricci brought the 'Map of the World' into Beijing."
The next day, I deliberately added an Eastern-style ridge beast in the corner of the mural. An aunt from Wenzhou who came to worship suddenly burst into tears: "This little dragon is exactly like the pixiu on the beams of my ancestral hall." She pulled out her phone to show me a group where twenty or so overseas Chinese were uploading traces of China in churches around the world: the Qingtian stone column bases in a Madrid monastery, the Cantonese gray sculptures on the lintel of a Cuban cigar factory...
Before the Christmas Eve mass, I quietly pasted the website link outside the confession room. Now, passing through the nave, I could always hear a wonderful echo: the "Hymn to the Virgin" in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang dialect, mixed with the Italian "Jasmine Flower," and the playful voices of young people teaching the priest to say "Jue Jue Zi."
Today at noon, Father Matteo suddenly discovered an old photo on the website—1948, a Chinese monk buried a jar of Shaoxing rice wine in the churchyard. We dug for half an hour with shovels but found an intact coarse pottery jar under the oak tree roots.
At the moment the seal broke, the aged wine aroma and fresh code simultaneously unfurled in the air. At the bottom of the jar lay a yellowed piece of paper, with two lines written alternately in brush and quill:
"The Holy Spirit and ancestors drink from this cup"
"@Global_ChinaHeritage has initiated the #OverseasChineseTimeCapsule# project"