XINHUA is the official news agency of the People's Republic of China

BEIJING (Aug. 11) XINHUA - The century-old Tibetan archives previously kept on materials of paper, wood, gold and even stone are being put onto microfilm for better protection.

About 140,000 words of historical records of four Tibetan clans and more than 300,000 drawings and pictures have been transferred to microfilm since the Tibetan archives project started in 1991, according to a "China Daily" report.

More than seven million yuan (843,000 US dollars) have been allocated by the government to fund the project in Lhasa, capital of Tibet Autonomous Region, it said.

Tibet has more than four million volumes of archives, which date to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), in more than ten languages, such as Chinese, English and Nepalese.

The Tibetan archives attracted world attention in 1994 when Tibetan archival experts introduced the records at an Asian-Pacific meeting for the preservation of "the memory of the world", a project initiated by the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (Unesco).

An international seminar to discuss the archives was organized by the Unesco the following year, at which the Tibetan archives were included into the "world memory" project.