A gold star for effort

When archaeologists announced their latest discoveries at the Sanxingdui Ruins site in Guanghan, Sichuan province, earlier this year, a 25-year-old man in Shanghai came up with a bold idea－to re-create life-size replicas of some of the site's signature treasures by using old techniques.

As a full-time content creator for video-sharing site Bilibili, he has turned his ideas into a series called Kouguwenjin ("decoding the past").The two videos uploaded so far have racked up over 17 million views between them.

"Excited about the new discoveries, especially the remains of a gold mask, announced in March, the first video in the series sees me 'restore' the fragmented mask to its former, shining glory," Caiqian says, adding that he did not expect the video to be as popular and widely shared as it has been.

Without giving his real name, he prefers to be known by his online username, Caiqian, which refers to the modest estimation of one's talent.

Uploaded in April, the 12-minute video－which cost around 200,000 yuan ($30,982) to make－shows him hammering 500 grams of pure gold tens of thousands of times for 15 days to re-create the 3,000-year-old mask. The video was worth the money. It had been viewed more than 10 million times and garnered over 2 million likes so far.