The snowflake that came off a rock

The first frame of the promotional film for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics was a snowflake, and the deputy who tells the story says it drifted out of a painted cave at Dundebulak in Altay. On that rock, she says, people carved skiing and hunting scenes more than ten thousand years ago, and the site is cited as evidence for the origin of skiing.

The claim is hers — Zhuo Ya·Baheti, a curator at the Altay regional museum — and the essay keeps it attributed. What can be checked is the image and its travel: a small painted panel in a cave has become a national symbol, while the rock itself stays where it was.

In 2025, during the fourth national survey of cultural relics, she walked the six counties and one city of the prefecture, climbing scree slopes to re-check sets of rock-art data and recording position, condition and damage in video and photographs.

The physical problem is not neglect but weather: sunlight, pests and rain act on the rock, the painted patterns blur, and conventional consolidation is slow and difficult — sometimes it would mean reinforcing the geology of a whole slope.

Her proposal is digital: scan and restore the blurred panels as a record, for research and for visitors, and she has been talking to specialists and qualified technology companies. A scan keeps a copy; it does not stop the rain.

That limit is worth stating plainly, because it is also the honest argument for doing it now. Meanwhile the visitors have changed: people still come for Kanas and Koktokay, but more of them, she says, come to read the culture rather than only the view.