Zhang Fengying arrived at the archive at half past seven in the morning, which was earlier than she was required to be there, but the morning was when she did her best work, the light in the reading room falling from the high north-facing window with the flat evenness that made examination easy, the light without shadow and without the complication of direct sun. She had been coming at half past seven for thirty-one years and the habit was too deeply settled to change, though the archive itself had changed in many other ways in that time, the building expanded twice, the storage conditions improved, the computerised catalogue established and revised and now revised again, the staff grown from seven to twenty-four. The reading room itself had been the same room for thirty-one years and she found in its sameness a condition she valued, the familiar proportions and the smell of the room around her work like the frame of a painting that does not intrude on the painting but makes it visible.
She hung up her coat and put her bag in the locker and put on her white cotton work coat, which she wore instead of gloves for the preliminary handling, reserving the thin white cotton gloves for the maps themselves when she was working closely with their surfaces. She made tea in the small staff kitchen at the end of the corridor, a glass of Dragon Well tea with water that was not quite boiling, and carried the glass back to the reading room and set it on the shelf beside the work table and stood for a moment looking at the collection.
The collection had arrived from the municipal museum in Puyang eight weeks ago, in eight wooden boxes lined with acid-free tissue, each map and document individually wrapped in the tissue and separated by sheets of thin cotton batting, and it had taken her two weeks to unpack and assess the collection and identify its contents and arrange it in the controlled-environment storage room in the order she intended to catalogue it. The Puyang Municipal Museum had held the collection for forty years without cataloguing it adequately, the museum's records noting only that it was a collection of historical maps relating to the Yellow River and its tributaries, acquired from various private collections over the decades of the twentieth century, some of the individual items carrying provenance information and some not. The age range was broad, she had established in her preliminary assessment, from the earliest item, a silk fragment that she believed dated to the late Ming period, to the most recent, a set of printed maps from the early Republican era. Forty-one separate items in total, the largest being nearly two metres in length when unrolled and the smallest a folded sheet of paper no larger than her palm.