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This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China's fast urbanization and booming tourism have threatened the preservation of ancient villages that have retained their local cultural heritage for generations.
China is home to 12,000 so called ancient villages according to a nation-wide survey of cultural heritage conducted one year ago.
These ancient villages account for 0.5 percent of the total number of villages in China. The ancient architectures in these villages represent the essence of Chinese culture and tradition.
Qian-dong-nan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture in southwest China's Gui-zhou Province is home to more than 200 such ancient settlements. But their ethnic traditions keep fading in the country's modernization drive.
Due to a lack of proper preservation, some of these ancient residences have been damaged by fires, resulting in huge losses to the local traditional architectural heritage.
Related Chinese ministries are carrying out more research into these ancient villages and a detailed protection plan will be work out in the next three or five years.
An Israeli researcher says she has identified a nearly 2,000-year old textile that may contain a mysterious blue dye described in the Bible, one of the few remnants of the ancient color ever found.
Naama Sukenik of Israel's Antiquities Authority says that recent examination of a small woolen textile discovered in the 1950s found that the textile was colored with a dye from the Murex trunculus, a snail researchers believe was the source of the Biblical blue.
Researchers and rabbis have long searched for the enigmatic color, called tekhelet in Hebrew. The Bible commands Jews to wear a blue fringe on their garments, but the dye was lost in antiquity.
