The State Archives and Records Administration on May 25 held a ceremony to announce the completion of a project on preserving Nguyen Dynasty woodblocks (moc ban), a UNESCO-recognised documentary heritage item, at the National Archives Centre IV in the Central Highland province of Lam Dong.

The project, funded by the United States Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP), started in July 2020 with a funding of over 88,000 USD, preserving 500 degraded plates of woodblock at the National Archives Centre IV.

After the AFCP grant was approved in July 2020, a technical team studied and assessed the damage level of the degraded woodblocks. From January to the end of August 2021, the team carried out conservation treatment of the decayed woodblocks using techniques used in developed countries like Japan, the Republic of Korea and France.

A total of 34,555 plates of woodblocks engraved with Chinese characters are kept at the National Archives Centre IV. The content of the Nguyen Dynasty woodblocks is rich and diverse, reflecting all aspects of Vietnamese society in the Nguyen Dynasty. They were used to print books in Vietnam during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

At the ceremony, US Ambassador to Vietnam Marc Knapper said cultural heritage conservation is only one among many fields of cooperation between the two countries. According to him, the US has funded 16 projects in this field in Vietnam since 2001 with a total value of over 1.2 million USD./.