“I visited the entire Forbidden City in Beijing from my home in the US”(1727031)

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“A photo gallery of the Exibition” – My Own Photography – licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

“I hope that one day in the future I can go to Beijing to see the Forbidden City.” This is from an interview in the Tianya community with a New Zealander of Chinese descent, who was asked by the interviewer regarding his birthday wishes in 2011. It’s fascinating to  look back on how people thought about the future. With the continuous development of digital technology, virtual museums, which were regarded as a ridiculous idea, were designed and became a reality one day.

Museums embody the civilisation of a country and are an essential part of cultural transmission. Next, let’s take a look at how the Forbidden City 2021 Cloud exhibition meets the needs of audiences at all ages, from domestic ones to foreign ones, to enhance the cultural economy in this special period.

Applications

AR & VR

Some data…

On the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the Forbidden City, the Palace held an exhibition on the theme of ‘Ruyi’. The exhibition features 5 units with nearly 2,000 different Ruyi. On site, the Forbidden City Museum has developed four kinds of applications, so that elderly visitors who cannot read the text introduction and children who cannot understand the introduction can use different applications to visit the exhibition. In addition, people at home and abroad can visit over 1.86 million collections for free through the digital heritage library. This year, the Palace’s virtual museum system added VR capabilities, with a full 360-degree view providing an immersive experience for visitors, in a desperate attempt to bridge the gap between online usage and offline usage.

On social media, the Forbidden City Museum actively posted event descriptions and live images of it, gaining a large number of followers (10.16 million on Weibo, a popular social media platform in China, and an average of over 10 million readers of WeChat posts…). It increases audience interaction and facilitate communication through discussions and prize draws.

Likewise, souvenirs are essential parts of the exhibition. The Forbidden City has set up an online shop on China’s largest shopping platform and has gained 7.34 million followers, posting over a hundred cultural and creative products on it, with sales of over 100 million.

“The Forbidden City” by Wang  is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Some voices….

For this particular exhibition, I spoke to two representatives who expressed different views.

Ban, a Chinese student who lives in the US now

“Digital technology is widely used in museums and plays an important role in enhancing the expressive power of displays, and enriching the visitor experience. It also enhances information dissemination and communication, and increases the vividness, interest, participation and interactivity of displays. It provides a good interactive virtual experience for traditional museums as well as a convenient way to preserve the complete information of cultural relics.”

Shao, a corporate communications executive in China

“Firstly, the decline of museums is related to the development of electronic media. People can download images of objects and related materials from the internet, thereby reducing the number of museum visits. Secondly, there is a tendency for museum exhibitions to misuse new technologies regardless of the occasion and conditions. Thirdly, some digital media exhibitions do not have a clear exhibition purpose, which results in the visitors’ loss of interests in some of exhibitions.”

It is clear to see that neither side denies the significant contribution of digital technology to museums, but the challenge that museums still face is how to make better use of digital technology in the future. So what are your thoughts on this? Think about the technologies of ten years from now and dare to write about them in the comments!

“The Forbidden” by the Museum is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

All images and media in this blog are used under fair usage for educational purposes.

Is Beijing a creative city?

This was my first time encountering the idea of branding a city:

During my internship at Ogilvy, an advertising agency, one day I was told that my boss was going on a business trip to Xi’an. His client was different this time—it was the city’s government rather than a corporation. He will be taking over a project for repacking and promoting Xi’an as an ideal tourist attraction.

Sounds fascinating, isn’t it? This triggered my thoughts on whether Beijing, my hometown can be classified as one of the creative cities.

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  “The Great Wall at Badaling_5” by BeautyOfChina is licensed under CC PDM 1.0 

You might ask, what is a ‘CREATIVE CITY’? According to David Throsby, a creative city is:

‘An urban complex where cultural activities of various sorts are an integral component of the city’s economic and social functioning. Such cities tend to be built upon a strong social and cultural infrastructure; to have relatively high concentrations of creative employment; and to be attractive to inward investment because of their well-established arts and cultural facilities’ (2010: 139)

What makes Beijing creative and unique?

1. Capital of China

Beijing too often represents a highly symbolic image of political power. Being TOO political can impede Beijing’s process of becoming a creative city, as sometimes the restricting media access hinders creative entrepreneur (Hartley et al, 2013). But think about it in the other way: as the capital city of China, Beijing has drawn a lot of attention to the policymakers. Beijing city government allocates 5 billion per year for the development of CCI and there have been emphases on developing ‘soft power’ since the 1990s (Ren and Sun, 2012:507). Such cultural policies are able to attract the ‘creative class’ and make Beijing more competitive than others (Hartley et al, 2013).

2. The Cultural Capital

Beijing locals are like New Yorkers—we both have developed a strong sense of belonging to the city. What makes ‘Beijingers’ proud of the most is our profound culture: The city has 7 UNESCO world heritage sites, and some have witnessed Beijing’s change since the Qin Dynasty. PS: The Great Wall of China is rated as one of the world’s most ‘instagrammed’ tourists attractions, why not come take your photo and show off to your friends?

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  The Forbidden City, Image by Christine Hua

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  The Bird Nest, Image by Christine Hua

UNESCO creative city network classified Beijing as ‘the creative city of design’, and you will know why when you visit! From the ancient emperor’s spectacular Forbidden City to the modern Olympic Bird Nest, the intelligence inputs in architectures has been throughout history.

This art also lies in the ordinary citizen’s life—if you travel within the third ring-road (Beijing’s unique urban planning), you have the chance to witness Beijing’s traditional housing style Siheyuans and Hutongs. Urban Beijing still values these architectures, so does the tourists!

Besides, Beijing has all the cultural local assets you need, one of the key criteria to become a creative city as Florida characterised—47 public libraries, more than 170 museums and more than 300 theatres, including the National Centre for the Performing Arts (also beautifully designed!), giving more than 12,000 performances every year.

3. Diversity

Beijing has a diverse population. It is the magnet that attracts people from other provinces for job opportunities, thus the population is highly fluid—only half is local. This also makes Beijing the ultimate food paradise: you can always find the most authentic cuisines from Sichuan, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Hong Kong…but also the top Michelin restaurants.

Image by Hendrik Terbeck
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Also, it has just started to grow into a global city—More and more foreigners are interested in Chinese culture and the miracle of Chinese economic development, and you can see a lot of study abroad students In the Chinese Universities. Chinese education is not bad at all!

There are only things you can’t imagine, but nothing Beijing can’t make it happen. COME AND VISIT THIS AMAZING PLACE!  

Reference:

Hartley, J., Potts, J., Cunningham, S., Flew, T., Keane, M., and Banks, J. (2013). Key Concepts in Creative Industries. London: Sage.

Throsby, D. (2010). The Economics of Cultural Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ren, X. and Sun, M., (2012). Artistic urbanization: creative industries and creative control in Beijing. International journal of urban and regional research, 36(3), pp.504-521.