Planning the Protection and Digital Construction of Mount Tai Stone Inscriptions

Abstract

The protection of cultural heritage has been a topic of major interest to countries around the world and the institutions they charge with safeguarding their history. With the advent of the Information Age, the use of digital models to reconstruct and archive cultural artifacts is an important means for protecting the veracity and integrity of these cultural heritages, and ensuring that they can be displayed and protected effectively [1–3]. Mount Tai, which is located in the central part of China’s Shandong Province, was one of the world’s first listed natural and cultural heritages, and one of its most ancient places of religious and cultural significance (Figure 1). The cliff stone carvings of Mount Tai are its most important and distinctive cultural heritages, and are located across the official scenic area of Mount Tai, covering a region of more than 140 km2. These stone carvings are exposed to the natural environment, and as such have been damaged to varying degrees by many factors, including solar radiation and erosion from rain, wind, and sand. In 2017, the “Research and Demonstration of the Digital Protection Standard System of Cultural Relics and Essential Criteria”, a Chinese national science and technology project initiated during the country’s 12th Five-Year Plan, passed its initial inspection and began providing a standard and basis for the digital imaging and reconstruction of cultural heritage artifacts and relics. The theory and practice of the digital reconstruction of cultural heritage provides theoretical support and reference value for studying the digital protection of cultural heritage [4,5]. Digitization has been widely applied to the protection of cultural relics, partly resulting from the fact that issues of space management and safety monitoring of immovable cultural relics remain difficult problems that have yet to be solved. 3D laser scanning technology can be used to maintain the status quo of cultural relics exactly, authentically, and completely, providing true and detailed scientific data for future maintenance, restoration, and academic research work [6–9]. This technology has been applied to the construction and protection of records regarding immovable cultural relics. The first local Chinese standards for the digitization of stone cultural relics were the Technical Regulations for the Digital Acquisition of the Cultural Relics in Cave Temples via 3D Laser Scanning and the Technical Regulations for 3D Digital Acquisition of Cultural Relics in Cave Temples for Close-range Photogrammetry [10], which were released by Shanxi Province in 2019. At present, the number of digital studies on the Mount Tai stone inscriptions remains few. In 2009, Liu and Wang [11] used 3Dmax software to perform research and practice of 3D modeling of individual Mount Tai stone inscriptions, but the overall digital construction of Mount Tai stone inscriptions was not started yet. In the context of China’s national big data cultural system construction, it is of great significance to learn to comprehensively utilize multiple spatial information technologies to study issues of digitally protecting and managing the Mount Tai stone inscriptions, to expand methods of heritage protection, and innovate cultural communication modes to build a digital protection system for the Mount Tai stone inscriptions.