The rich detail on China's ancient architecture is becoming a lost art.

It's easy to find colorful painting on the beams, pillars, lintels and ceilings of ancient Chinese architecture, especially in imperial palaces. The life of Wang Zhongjie, a 79-year-old Beijing native, is intertwined with these rich strokes of gold, blue and red.

He is the master craftsman among his sketching pencils and vivid paints.

Sitting in his small bedroom with a century-old bed, a bookcase full of materials on painting and a shabby desk, the gray-haired senior spends his days repeatedly drawing various patterns for his art. It's been his life for years, even now when he struggles with an atrophic kidney. Unlike young people, who have grown accustomed to doing artwork on the computer, Wang continues to create every pattern by hand on paper.

Wang calls himself a surgeon of color painting. In his friends' words, he takes the work so seriously that he makes it into a science - painting with detailed statistics based on his fieldwork.

From craftsman to designer to appraiser, Wang has devoted more than 60 years to repairing color painting on Chinese ancient architecture.

After primary school, poverty forced Wang to give up his studies. He became a craftsman, drawing and repairing color paintings at the age of 13, using skills that had been passed down from his grandfather to his father and then to him.

In 1956, the Institute of China Antique and Culture Heritage recruited Wang to take up research work on color painting across China.