Staying true to reading

When he is not writing code, Huang keeps asking one fundamental question: What should technology actually do for people? "All technology ultimately serves the act of reading itself," he said. "It can never replace that."

With the rapid rise of large language models, demand for high-quality text corpora has surged. Overseas, some AI companies have reportedly purchased millions of printed books in bulk, scanned them and then shredded the originals. 

"Machines can efficiently compile documents, retrieve sources and generate explanatory notes. Real engagement with ancient texts, however, is far more than mechanical assembly of characters," Huang noted.

Both Huang and Zhao stressed that human beings sit at the heart of cultural inheritance. People absorb wisdom from old texts, draw on personal experience and scholarship to reflect, and produce new knowledge - an intellectual process no AI can fully replicate.

The Global Times learned that every digitization workflow at Tianyige follows strict closed-loop protocols: collection checkout logging, noncontact scanning, AI-powered quality checks, precise image stitching and compliant online publication. The full procedure minimizes physical wear on original artifacts.

"A book is, first and foremost, a cultural relic that carries a thousand-year legacy," Huang said. "Only secondarily is it a text to be read." That principle, he added, is shared by all guardians at Tianyige.

"Media change, technologies evolve, but the essence of reading has never changed," he stressed.

Today, drawing on its comprehensive digital collections, Tianyige hosts monthly exhibitions of rare texts and organizes family reading events where parents and children explore the classics together. For Huang and his colleagues, the most gratifying reward is watching more and more ordinary people develop a love for ancient reading and a deeper appreciation for the traditional Chinese culture.

In an era swept by artificial intelligence, Tianyige's guardians tend to fragile paper relics while leveraging modern technology, preserving the genuine power of reading. More than 450 years of scholarly heritage flows onward, passing between human fingertips and glowing digital screens.