"I found myself short of the necessary expertise at work, especially when it came to items with profound cultural backgrounds," Li says.

That was when he decided to make further inroads into the field by pursuing a master's degree in cultural relics and museology at Inner Mongolia University in 2005, returning to the museum two years later.

Since then, his responsibilities have grown to cover exhibition arrangement, social education, and research and development of cultural and creative products.

Li has come to see the museum as a cultural reception hall, which houses the common spiritual wealth of humanity, and his colleagues and himself are their guardians.

"The first thing we have to do is impart the stories behind them, (including) the deeper culture and new archaeological findings, so they can be seen and understood by more people," Li says.

In the late 2000s, Li and his colleagues started to develop creative cultural items to promote the museum.