Repairing and preserving these figures has become the highest priority. Skilled workers search methodically through hundreds of thousands of fragments to find the right piece to complete each figure. They are lucky if they find one matching piece a day. Because of this, each statue takes several months to be repaired. Furthermore, when the first statues were exposed to the air for the first time in over two thousand years, the paint on them started peeling off or turning black. After extensive research to try and find ways to prevent this problem, scientists now use a chemical solution to protect the paintwork.