Relics Team Goes to Rescue of Past : Archeology: Chinese construction workers contact experts when artifacts are found. Some of what is uncovered is special, some is ordinary.

In the peak construction season, the telephone rings almost daily at the Beijing Cultural Relics Research Institute. A worker’s spade has revealed a pottery jar, a stone tablet, a tomb. Can an archeologist come?

Qi Quoqing was on hand in November when someone called from Mentougou, a western suburb. Workmen installing a cistern for a new school hit a brick wall.

It turned out to be one of the finds of the year in an artifact-rich city: a tomb dating to the Jin Dynasty, which ruled parts of northern China from 1115 to 1234.

“As an archeologist, I felt very happy to be able to excavate such a tomb,” said Qi, 30.

He spoke while crouching in the tomb’s low, arched entryway, which led to a round, domed room tall enough for a person to stand.

What makes the tomb special are its frescoes. Despite heavy water damage, images remain of a woman sitting at a table and servants standing by. Another figure, possibly her spouse, once sat across from the woman.

Her cheeks and lips are rouged, her expression serene. Qi said her hair and clothing followed the style of the Han Chinese, from whom the non-Chinese warriors who founded the Jin Dynasty learned the finer arts.

On other walls, bricks and paint outline the facades of houses that presumably were for use in the next life.

The tomb’s occupant had been cremated, a common practice at the time, and his ashes were in a jar on a low brick platform. Qi said cremation and the lack of any inscription made it impossible to identify the occupant.

“We estimate the person was wealthy but not an official, because officials always had a few words of inscription” on Jin tombs found previously, he said.

The government has promised to preserve the tomb, and Qi hopes it eventually can be opened to tourists.

Not all antiquities fare so well. Thieves are the first to reach many sites, and limited preservation funds and space make it necessary for archeologists to choose what will be saved.

Qi said the seven archeologists in his department, the institute’s version of an emergency response team for evacuating valuables in modernity’s way, are involved in nearly 200 digs a year.

When the call came about the Jin tomb, Qi had just finished examining a canoe from the same era that was discovered across town. He is studying another fresco-decorated tomb from the 14th Century that peasants stumbled upon.

Other institute departments handle longer, more complicated digs that unearth entire palaces or ancient villages.

Old tombs are found so often, Qi said, that those without special features are covered up again after the objects inside are removed.

If ancient ruins are in the path of a highway or at the site of a powerful ministry’s construction project, the ruins may lose out.

“If it’s important, we protect it; if it’s ordinary, we let it go,” said Zhao Fusheng, an institute official.

Where possible, he said, a compromise is reached so the new can be built around the old.

The city had just $57,700 in the budget last year for prying hundreds of pieces of its past out of the hard yellow soil, and only $577,000 for preservation.

Beijing is not even China’s richest relic hunting ground. That distinction goes to Xian--capital of China’s earliest dynasties--580 miles to the southwest, where the famous 2,000-year-old terra-cotta statues of warriors were found.

Most of what is dug up in Beijing gets numbered, tagged, put into a vast warehouse and taken out only rarely for study by experts. Museums are full, and Qi said many artifacts are not good enough for the museums.

“Most of what we find is very ordinary: pots and jars and stone tablets” whose only value is in adding a small piece to the historical puzzle, he said.

Construction workers who found tombs in the past usually removed gold or silver objects and destroyed the rest. Qi said one-third of all tombs excavated by archeologists in Beijing have been plundered.

He said cooperation from construction crews and peasants, those most likely to find ancient relics, has improved greatly in recent years.