The challenge of restoring the wood base had finally been overcome. Shen Le took a brief breath, then turned his attention to the next problem:
Dehydrating and setting waterlogged lacquerware.
This stage was even more perilous than restoring the wood base. In many lacquerware pieces, the wood base—or the ramie-cloth base—had essentially decayed away entirely, leaving only the waterlogged lacquer film, sustained by the moisture within it.
If it remained submerged indefinitely, not only could it not be restored or displayed, but eventually even the lacquer film itself would fail to hold up.
Yet if it was dehydrated, the moment the moisture vanished too quickly—or even a little unevenly—the fragile lacquer film would crack, curl, and peel away.
In earlier lacquerware restoration efforts, countless millennia-old treasures had instantly turned into heaps of unidentifiable fragments because restorers used the wrong methods or lacked sufficient understanding—
Shen Le knew he could make countless attempts with practice materials, but when it came to the lacquer box itself, not a single failure was permissible.
So he plunged headfirst into the library, frantically looking through books and papers:
Lacquerware was a cultural treasure of ancient China. The library held mountains upon mountains of monographs and papers, with an endless stream of methods.
Fortunately, the specialized works provided broad, systematic discussions. Summed up, there were several major categories:
Natural slow dehydration, vacuum drying, solvent exchange immersion, and permeation reinforcement.
After reviewing the materials, Shen Le first ruled out natural slow dehydration—or rather, placed it at the very bottom of his list.
This method pursued slowness to the utmost degree. Through desiccators, plastic film, high-humidity environments, burying media such as damp sand and vermiculite, even silica gel and other materials, it gradually removed moisture from artifacts.
Because the dehydration process often lasted more than a year, and