Focus Interview丨How to awaken the precious cultural heritage that comes alive and becomes popular?
On a traditional festival like the Dragon Boat Festival, we eat rice dumplings, race dragon boats, and make sachets. These traditional customs have a history of thousands of years. Chinese civilization has a long history. How did our ancestors celebrate festivals and live? These have left many traces and are valuable cultural heritage. General Secretary Xi Jinping attaches great importance to the protection and inheritance of cultural heritage and requires comprehensive improvements in the protection and utilization of cultural relics and the protection and inheritance of cultural heritage. The "Focus Interview" column launched a series of programs "Live and Get Fired", focusing on the protection, inheritance and development of cultural heritage in museums and old streets and ancient villages.
During the Dragon Boat Festival, a study tour with the theme of "Dragon Boat Festival Customs" is being held in the Hanzhong Museum. In the bronze exhibition area of the museum, the teacher led the students to find the utensils used by ancient people for festivals thousands of years ago. After searching for the marks of traditional culture, under the leadership of several intangible cultural inheritors, the students began their own Dragon Boat Festival ceremony. Light the incense burner, make a mugwort bouquet, and finally put realgar on your forehead. Traveling through thousands of years, experiencing these customs that have been passed down since ancient times in the museum, students met the ancients on the Dragon Boat Festival.
Bordered by the Qinling Mountains in the north and the Bashan Mountain in the south, Hanzhong is the birthplace of the Han River and the birthplace of Han culture. Many cultural relics and monuments bear witness to the continuation of Chinese culture. In 2023, when General Secretary Xi Jinping visited the Hanzhong Museum, he pointed out: The museum must play its important role in protecting, inheriting, researching, and displaying human civilization, protect the Chinese cultural context, and make cultural relics come alive to expand the influence of Chinese culture.
In the past few years, every traditional Chinese festival, the Hanzhong Municipal Museum has held special activities, such as dragon hunting during the Spring Festival, riddles and pot throwing during the Lantern Festival, tea printing and dyeing during the Qingming Festival, and looking for traditional imprints on cultural relics.
On the weekend in June, as soon as the Shanxi Yuncheng Museum opened its doors, there was a long queue in the hall. At the front of the team, everyone received an exquisite little book that could be stamped with beautiful seals. There are 102 national key cultural relics protection units in 13 counties in Yuncheng. Collecting punch cards and stamps is a new hobby for many young people today when traveling. In the past two years, Yuncheng Museum has also launched its own cultural tourism seal, and many people have been attracted by these seals.
Beginning with the jaw fossils of great apes dating back 45 million years, the Yuncheng Museum's collection tells the history and heritage of the Chinese people on this land. When General Secretary Xi Jinping visited the Yuncheng Museum in 2023, he emphasized that the museum has many precious cultural relics and even "national treasures", which testify to my country's millions of years of human history, 10,000 years of cultural history, and more than 5,000 years of civilization.
How to comprehensively improve the protection and utilization of cultural relics and the protection and inheritance of cultural heritage? In the past two years, the museum has made many attempts. A QR code is added to provide auxiliary information, an AI voice device is added to provide explanations, and cultural relic data is collected, allowing the public to use 3D interactive images to view details at close range. However, for many on-site visitors, in order to understand the history and stories behind the exhibits, they prefer to have a dedicated person lead the tour.
In 2022, the number of visitors to the Yuncheng Museum in a year will be approximately 150,000, and this will increase to 400,000 in 2023. The original guides in the museum could not meet the needs of so many visitors, so a volunteer guide team became the target of many visitors.
How can visitors better understand the stories behind cultural relics? The museum will regularly organize docents to study and assess. Volunteers will also exchange explanations with each other, learn professional knowledge, and carefully craft each story.
In order to make better use of the cultural relics in the collection, the Yuncheng Museum not only replaces the cultural relics on display every once in a while, but also signs cooperation agreements with scientific research institutes in the past two years to learn about the latest archaeological research results. Recently, the museum is adjusting the Neolithic pottery exhibits and has invited students from the School of Archeology of Jilin University, a cooperative institution, to the museum. In the past few years, they have been conducting archaeological excavations in Yuncheng. At the Shicun site, they discovered silkworm chrysalis-shaped objects made of clay and stone at that time, proving that the Chinese had begun raising silkworms and reeling silk in the Neolithic Age. The results of their archaeological discoveries are on display in the museum.
Yuncheng Museum continues to explore the value of cultural relics and use more professional knowledge to meet the needs of more audiences to understand traditional culture; other museums are exploring the combination of exhibitions and modern technology to create an immersive visiting experience.
Yangzhou Grand Canal is the oldest section of China's Grand Canal. In recent years, General Secretary Xi Jinping has paid attention to the Grand Canal many times and pointed out: The Grand Canal culture is an important part of China's excellent traditional culture. Efforts must be made to protect, inherit and utilize the ancient Grand Canal to give it a new look of the times. In 2021, Yangzhou China Grand Canal Museum will be completed and opened. Like a large ship moored beside the ancient canal, everyone is invited to appreciate the charm of China's Grand Canal.
In the first exhibition hall, the audience walked into the 5D experience exhibition area and felt as if they were boarding a fast ship, starting from Hangzhou and heading north, passing through Suzhou, Changzhou, Yangzhou, passing Xuzhou Yaowan Ancient Sauce Garden, and arriving in Cangzhou. Sancha River and finally arrived in Beijing. The feeling of traveling thousands of miles in a day is unforgettable.
Wang Fangmuyan and her classmates are graduate students majoring in ancient literature at Yangzhou University. Their recent research topic is how to vividly inherit canal culture. In the China Grand Canal Museum, they found an ideal case for observation. In the replica sandship, they experienced the comfort and comfort of traveling on a luxury passenger ship on the Grand Canal. In the canal streets created in real scenes, they experienced the livelihood of the people along the Grand Canal.
On the basement floor of the museum, there is also a special exhibition hall, the Canal Mystery Exhibition. This is not so much an exhibition, but more like a secret room experience. This is what Wang Fangmuyan and her friends most want to experience this time in the museum. Each level in the secret room uses a combination of virtual images and actual models. While players explore, they can learn and master how the ancient Chinese used canals to communicate between the north and the south and activate the economy. After passing the level, each person's options for passing the level will be recorded and scored. The more comprehensive the knowledge, the higher the score.
Integrating culture into the scene and hiding knowledge behind the exhibits, the China Grand Canal Museum makes full use of the customs and customs along the canal and the science and technology related to the canal to present the rich culture and connotation carried by the Grand Canal. Since its opening in 2021 , every holiday is almost always booked in advance.
On June 8, Hunan Museum launched the Mawangdui Han Dynasty Culture Immersive Multimedia Exhibition. The audience can experience the Han Dynasty culture in virtual digital art and physical space, and have close contact with rare cultural relics.
At the Gansu Bamboo Slips Museum, primary school students rehearsed the stories recorded on the slips into a drama and put it on the museum's stage.
At the Yinxu Museum in Henan, the excavation site of the Chemakeng was moved to the exhibition hall, and the archaeological work was presented directly in front of the audience.
