Tech meets culture: China's digital renaissance of ancient heritage
Photo taken with a mobile phone on May 4, 2024 shows people enjoying a VR immersive exhibition called 'Wow! Sanxingdui' at a shopping mall in Chaoyang District, Beijing. – Xinhua photo
BEIJING (May 3): At the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, the over 600-year-old Unesco World Heritage Site, an animation played guards of honor marching in perfect unison across a projector screen, their movements in lockstep with the graceful melodies of ancient rituals.
'Through virtual and digital display, cultural relics have become 'alive,' enabling viewers to immerse in the lives of ancient people,' said Sun Xiaobing, deputy director of Art Exhibitions China.
In recent years, China has used science and technology to breathe new life into its cultural relics and heritage, enriching people's lives while also elevating the nation's cultural influence.
The newly revised cultural relics protection law, enacted in March, stipulates that technology, informatisation, digitalisation, and digital display should all play a bigger role in cultural relic protection.
Along with rising cultural fervor in recent years, exhibition formats are far beyond physical display and written introduction, said Li Li, deputy director of the China Academy of Cultural Heritage.
'Cutting-edge technologies like AI, VR and AR provide multidimensional methods for the preservation, utilisation and exhibition of relics,' said Li.
Photo taken on April 16, 2024 shows visitors viewing the exhibition 'Magnificence and Grandeur: Immersive Experience of Grotto Art' at the National Museum of China in Beijing. – Xinhua photo
In archaeology, the National Cultural Heritage Administration said it aims to improve multidisciplinary collaboration and advance technological level, emphasising genetic analysis, precision dating and other fields.
Zhang Zhiguo, deputy director of the National Centre for Archaeology, said technology has been widely adopted in submarine cultural heritage protection.
Archaeologists cover the surface of some fragile artifacts with carbon fiber and epoxy resin to reinforce them, so that they can be extracted from the underwater environment safely.
He added that relevant spectroscopy technologies can detect the compound composition of rust or adherents on artifacts, and types and contents of salt on both the exterior and interior of cultural relics, contributing to targeted restoration solutions.
'Technology permeates every phase of conservation,' said Zhang.
In cooperation with the China Academy of Sciences, the Palace Museum has developed special equipment for cultural relics conservation, incorporating technologies such as hyperspectral imaging and X-ray fluorescent spectroscopy.
'In the past, we only saw the surface of some cultural relics. Through X-ray scanning, we could observe their internal structure in the 3D digital model, precisely learn their abrasion and cracks, and eventually better understand their manufacturing process,' said Qu Liang, director of the Conservation Standards Department of the Palace Museum.
'We can acquire more detailed historical information on relics via new technologies without causing damage to them,' said Qu.
A staff member restores an ancient book at Tianjin Library in north China's Tianjin Municipality on April 22, 2024. – Xinhua photo
Tech giant ByteDance has cooperated with Peking University to digitalise ancient Chinese books with AI.
The project can identify handwritten old Chinese characters, add modern punctuation to ancient texts to help readers better understand them, and recognise and comprehend names of people, places and official positions.
'In the past, the collation of ancient books was manual work. Through AI, ancient texts are digitalised and their contents can be retrieved and interpreted into modern Chinese efficiently,' said Zhang Yu, president of Beijing ByteDance Foundation.
'Technologies such as AI can not only protect ancient books, but also make them more easily accessible to the public,' said Zhang.
In a cultural forum held earlier this month in Beijing, Irina Bokova, former director-general of Unesco, said: 'Technology opens new ways of conservation, preservation and monitoring of cultural heritage, and China emerges as a leader that has to share its experience with the world.' – Xinhua China cultural digital historical Xinhua
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