射雕英雄传

Inside Asia’s oldest private library, guarding ancient scrolls in the age of AI_我的网站

豪杰春香

一 |

Visitors view ancient documents at Tianyige Museum. Photo: Courtesy of Tianyige Museum
Huang Gang is in his fifties. Every day, he sits before a computer screen at Tianyige Museum (Tianyige), flipping through ancient books - digitally.
As director of the information technology department at Tianyige Museum in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang Province, home to Asia's oldest surviving private library and one of the world's three oldest remaining family-run libraries, his job title may seem far removed from old books. Yet his work centers on them: converting brittle, thread-bound antique volumes into searchable, zoomable digital files accessible on screen.
For years, Tianyige has carried out digitization in batches guided by its mission: rescue-oriented preservation, scholarly organization and public-oriented outreach. Its teams have scanned more than 3.4 million pages of ancient texts. The institution rolled out its Ancient‑Book Digital Service Platform back in 2009. By 2025, the platform had drawn over 4.6 million total visits.
To outsiders, this might look like a headlong rush into digitization. For Huang and his colleagues, it is delicate work balanced between fast‑evolving artificial intelligence models and the reverence owed to fragile paper relics. "Technology is a tool, ancient books are artifacts, and reading is the ultimate purpose," Huang told the Global Times.
Huang Gang, director of the information technology department of Tianyige Museum, works on the digitization of ancient books. Photo: Courtesy of Tianyige Museum

Huang Gang, director of the information technology department of Tianyige Museum, works on the digitization of ancient books. Photo: Courtesy of Tianyige Museum
Beyond tech boundaries
Deep in the storage vaults of Tianyige, tens of thousands of ancient volumes rest in silence. Some pages are curled and fragile; others bear faded script -the accumulated marks of centuries. Vulnerable to aging, wear and external damage, these precious paper relics can hardly sustain long-term repeated manual consultation, making digital preservation an indispensable way to inherit ancient book resources.
Huang's daily work involves leading his team in the digitization of the library's entire collection of ancient books, paintings and cultural relics, bringing rare treasures out of the shadows and into public view.
AI now serves as a core auxiliary tool for ancient-book digitization and research. Huang's group initially built character-recognition frameworks based on optical-character-recognition technology. By cross-checking outputs across different models, ancient Chinese characters, damaged script and blurry handwriting.
According to Zhejiang Daily, by August 2025, the Tianyige's digital platform had added over 3,700 new digitized book sets, lifting its total digital holdings past 20,000 volumes.
Digitization is never a purely technical exercise; in-depth scholarly expertise in ancient texts remains indispensable. Huang frequently collaborates with Zhao Xuteng, a museum librarian specializing in classical literature. Zhao is responsible for selecting which volumes to digitize, evaluating editions, studying content, and identifying works of significant academic or public value. While one team focuses on the technical execution, another digs deep into the textual substance, ensuring that cold digital capture remains faithful to the historical and bibliographic logic of the originals.
A staff member of Tianyige Museum view digital resources of ancient documens in the museum's ancient?book reading room, on August 18, 2026. Photo: Lin Xiaoyi/GT

A staff member of Tianyige Museum view digital resources of ancient documens in the museum's ancient?book reading room, on August 18, 2026. Photo: Lin Xiaoyi/GT

A staff member of Tianyige Museum view digital resources of ancient documents in the museum's ancient book reading room, on August 18, 2026. Photo: Lin Xiaoyi/GT
Staying true to reading
When he is not writing code, Huang keeps asking one fundamental question: What should technology actually do for people? "All technology ultimately serves the act of reading itself," he said. "It can never replace that."
With the rapid rise of large language models, demand for high-quality text corpora has surged. Overseas, some AI companies have reportedly purchased millions of printed books in bulk, scanned them and then shredded the originals.
"Machines can efficiently compile documents, retrieve sources and generate explanatory notes. Real engagement with ancient texts, however, is far more than mechanical assembly of characters," Huang noted.
Both Huang and Zhao stressed that human beings sit at the heart of cultural inheritance. People absorb wisdom from old texts, draw on personal experience and scholarship to reflect, and produce new knowledge - an intellectual process no AI can fully replicate.
The Global Times learned that every digitization workflow at Tianyige follows strict closed-loop protocols: collection checkout logging, noncontact scanning, AI-powered quality checks, precise image stitching and compliant online publication. The full procedure minimizes physical wear on original artifacts.
"A book is, first and foremost, a cultural relic that carries a thousand-year legacy," Huang said. "Only secondarily is it a text to be read." That principle, he added, is shared by all guardians at Tianyige.
"Media change, technologies evolve, but the essence of reading has never changed," he stressed.
Today, drawing on its comprehensive digital collections, Tianyige hosts monthly exhibitions of rare texts and organizes family reading events where parents and children explore the classics together. For Huang and his colleagues, the most gratifying reward is watching more and more ordinary people develop a love for ancient reading and a deeper appreciation for the traditional Chinese culture.
In an era swept by artificial intelligence, Tianyige's guardians tend to fragile paper relics while leveraging modern technology, preserving the genuine power of reading. More than 450 years of scholarly heritage flows onward, passing between human fingertips and glowing digital screens.
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二 | 注：本文作者KevinHovdestad是暴雪娱乐的编辑。许多人似乎认为引入资金和增加观众数量可以达到同样的效果，但我在谈到竞争时经常重复一句话：“越大未必越好”。与往年类似，竞争行业在2018年也在不断扩大，但如果这还不够的话？诚然，增长是件好事。

三 | 如果你是一个电子爱好者，你会觉得电子行业在过去的一年里取得了连续的胜利。2018年已成为各方面具有里程碑意义的一年，竞争行业得到了支持：新老游戏玩家越来越多，竞争奖金也比以往任何时候都好。大型比赛门票在世界各地的比赛大厅里销售一空。电子商务的行业价值增加到9亿美元左右。乔丹和歌手德雷克都投资于竞争性组织。据估计，到2021年，这个数字可能会上升到17亿美元。

四 | 当谈到电子竞争时，我们必须提到福特尼，这是一个大热门。大部分讨论集中在训练技能和忍者（泰勒布莱文），但游戏公司Epic Games也发表声明说，它将投资1亿美元的资金支持。这一前所未有的投资水平也证明了史诗游戏在竞争激烈的行业中看到了游戏的价值。然而，竞争性行业能否以有意义的或可持续的方式实现增长尚未得到证实。尽管投资和赞助蜂拥而至，但回报无法填满估值。当然，史诗游戏是可以负担得起的。他们将把9位数的游戏变成Fortnite游戏，去年该游戏获得了30亿美元的利润。几乎不可能通过活动和现场直播来收回成本。但问题是，尽管游戏取得了成功，但开发商将只在举办活动、准备奖杯和大奖支票上花费他们预算的一小部分。

五 | 竞争本身不是偿付能力，所以依靠竞争来获取工资是不稳定的。因为电子工业的事业转瞬即逝，所以经常受到批评。以风暴英雄为例。该队去年被解雇，今年的比赛也被取消了。这不是第一种情况，当然也不是最后一种情况。

六 | 安全问题的增长并不是解决方案。2018年，电工无法加入工会保护自己，电力行业也没有一家公司能够保证公平对待竞争对手。

七 | 去年8月，佛罗里达州杰克逊维尔娱乐中心的悲剧对业内许多人敲响了警钟。保护球员和球迷的安全绝对是最低要求。我们正处在如何竞争的关键时期。把电子竞技当作工作似乎是一个循序渐进的现实，但本质上，电子竞技产业只是一个想在成人晚宴上吃饭的孩子。无论是瞄准核心集团，还是微增收入，都不能促进竞争性行业的发展。这个行业需要创造一个相应的氛围。创造多样性的场景是不够的，也要让人们接受这种多样性。从今年开始，竞争行业需要面对越来越成熟的受众。球迷需要抵制有害信息，并敦促球员、球队、组织者、开发商和公司承担责任。如果我们希望竞争性行业蓬勃发展，不仅要考虑生存问题，还要应对这些长期挑战。