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 for me to 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 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 photos of Chinese artifacts from museums around the world updating in real-time on the right.
When I zoomed in on the blue-glazed plum vase from the Zurich collection, I heard a gasp behind me. Eighty-year-old Father Matteo, holding his reading glasses, trembled 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 lunch break, he would hold up videos of purple clay teapot throwing from the website "Craftsmanship" and analyze the wet wall painting 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 happened one evening. A heavy rain caused a power outage in the church, and by candlelight, I was browsing the "Old Paper Pile" section of the website when I suddenly saw an announcement in the 1938 electronic edition of the Shen Bao: "The Tang Clan Ancestral Hall in Wuxi urgently seeks a painter skilled in Western perspective." The structural sketch of the beams and columns was astonishingly similar to the dome of this century-old church.
"Perhaps your ancestors saw Baroque churches," Father Matteo held up the tablet towards the rose window, "just like Matteo Ricci brought the 'Map of the World' to 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 took out her phone to show me a group where more than twenty overseas Chinese were uploading traces of Chinese influence in churches around the world: the Qingtian stone column bases in a Madrid monastery, the Cantonese gray sculptures on the lintels of a Cuban cigar factory...
Before the Christmas Eve mass, I quietly posted the website link outside the confessional. Now, passing through the nave, I could always hear a wonderful echo: the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-accented "Hymn to the Virgin," 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— in 1948, a Chinese monk buried a jar of Shaoxing rice wine in the church's backyard. 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 unfurled in the air simultaneously. 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 #OverseasHometownTimeCapsule# project"