Hu had been working as an actress for 15 years before she was invited by her good friend Wang Yi, curator of the Jinsha Site Museum, to be a guide.

Hu had to learn from archaeologists excavating Jinsha, read their books and keep notes. The notes are faithfully recorded in 11 diaries.

At the beginning, Hu was not confident, but after learning the facts "I found myself falling in love with the relics and started interpreting them with love," Hu says. A piece of jade ware, she tells visitors, may seem like a lifeless object but has its temperature and mood.

"It is like having a dialogue with the ancient worker making the jade.

"It was unbelievably hard for him to devote his lifetime to making only one piece of artwork 3,000 years ago when there were no metal tools. Use your imagination, and the jade tells his story," Hu says.

Presenting the gold foil of the sunbird, Hu says: "Dear friends, the Shu Brocade with the pattern of the sunbird visited space onboard the Shenzhou VI, China's second manned space mission in 2005. The sunbird realized its dream of thousands of years to fly.

"As a person from Jinsha, I feel extremely proud," she says.

A woman in her 70s from Northeast China once embraced Hu and said tearfully: "Your presentation is so wonderful that I felt as if I had traveled back to remote antiquity."

Three years later when her son visited Chengdu on a business tour, the old woman told him to make sure he asked Hu to be his guide at the museum.

Hu already reached her retirement age four years ago, but museum officials did not want her to leave.

With a monthly pension of some 3,000 yuan ($476), Hu receives an additional 1,680 yuan each month from the museum as a retired guide who still works.

"We hope she can be China's first gray-haired guide and continue working here as long as she is physically fit," deputy curator Zhu Zhangyi says.

Hu has visited many parts of the Sichuan quake zone and has been invited to take charge of the training of young guides in museums in four quake-hit counties.

She is also in charge of training guides for the Nanjing Yun Brocade Museum in Jiangsu province and the Chengdu Shu Brocade and Embroidery Museum.

"I always tell young guides to use their hearts to feel, understand and fall in love with exhibits so that visitors may love and remember them, too," Hu says.

Contact the writer at huangzhiling@chinadaily.com.cn.