An oracle bone. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Public attention

At the national library, more efforts are being made to draw wider attention to the importance of the collection of artifacts.

Zhao reveals that the catalog of all the 35,000 or so oracle bones in the library will be published in several volumes, starting in 2019 in honor of the 120th anniversary of Wang's discovery.

"We need to get more people to pay attention to the oracle bones," he says. "We cannot let them lie unnoticed in some warehouse."

In 2012, the national library exhibited the oracle bones for the first time, and a permanent exhibition hall was set up to house them in 2015, with exhibits being rotated every few months.

Guan Qiang, deputy director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, vowed in December that protection and studies of oracle bone inscriptions will be strengthened to save it from becoming "a dying art ". "Experts from the fields of paleography, archaeology, education, history and archiving will cooperate more to categorize, decipher and display academic achievements in the field," Guan said.

"Information about the culture surrounding oracle bones needs to be better promoted to the general public, especially younger generations."

For Hu, the librarian, who is used to spending her days examining the past, she now has high hopes for the future as well.

"It's great to find that some characters from oracle bone inscriptions are being introduced into textbooks for kids," she says, speaking of her daughter in sixth grade.

"She's very interested in traditional Chinese culture. It's a good thing, right?"