【Cultural Tourism Observation, Focus on Museum Tour】
Walk into the museum to listen to historical stories, “get in touch” with cultural relics through immersive exhibitions, and bring home new and interesting cultural and creative products…… At present, excellent traditional culture is popular, more and more people regard museums as a must-go “check-in point”, the popularity of museum tours continues to rise, “for a museum, go to a city” has become a trend, and popular venues are often hard to find. Why did the once “cold” museum become a popular “check-in place”? How should museums catch the “heat” and let cultural relics enter people’s lives more vividly?
Young tourists are the main force of museum tours
Recently, Zhang Xue, a college student in Beijing, took a carefully prepared booklet and started her museum stamp “check-in” journey, and she was deeply impressed by the National Museum of China, the Beijing Art Museum, and the Beijing Museum of Ancient Architecture. “Each seal carries the most dazzling cultural elements of the museum, and each museum makes me gain a lot, and I can touch the history and feel the life of the ancients in the close contact with the cultural relics.” She said.
It has been said that to get to know a city, you have to visit its museums. At present, more and more young people like Zhang Xue are falling in love with museums, and they are “unlocking” museums in different cities by “checking in” offline and sharing experiences online, exploring the footprints of history and culture.
In the past two years, the “museum fever” has continued to heat up, especially during summer vacations and holidays, many popular museums are full of visitors and it is difficult to find a ticket. During this year’s Spring Festival, museums across the country received 7,358 visitors in 8 days.010,000 person-times, a year-on-year increase of 98.6%。
“Last year, more than 200 million tourists came to Nanjing, of which 34.48 million visited the city’s museums. The Nanjing Museum will receive nearly 3.7 million visitors in 2023, of which more than 70% are 10~39 years old. Song Yan, deputy director of the Nanjing Museum, introduced a set of data to reporters. It can also be seen from the data released by other museums across the country that young tourists have become the main force of “museum tours”. For example, the National Museum will receive a total of 675 visitors in 2023.70,000 people, of which 61 were under the age of 35.81%。
“Cultural museums and exhibitions, national style and national trends have become new trends, which reflects the current young people’s recognition and love for traditional culture, and also shows that museums are becoming more and more interesting through rich exhibits and diversified narrative methods.” Song Yan told reporters that in order to meet the diverse needs of tourists, the Nanjing Museum has developed and designed in recent years “Exploring the Six Dynasties”, “Archaeological Six Dynasties”, “Gathering Six Dynasties”, “Six Dynasties”, “Six Dynasties” and “Six Dynasties in the Classics” and other social education courses suitable for audiences of different ages, combining the exhibition of cultural relics in the collection with historical and cultural teaching, “We must continue to improve our service capabilities, provide higher quality cultural products for the audience in a richer form, and make the museum closer to public life.” ”
Various innovative elements make the museum more accessible to the people
Holographic projection technology allows “cultural relics” to be suspended in the cabinet, making them accessible to visitors; AR and VR experience devices reproduce ancient scenes, making people feel as if they have traveled through time and space…… With the rapid development of digital technology, museums have brought a more intuitive and immersive exhibition experience to the audience with a new way of exhibition.
Recently, the news of the opening of the new Yinxu Museum has attracted the attention of many cultural lovers. “On the opening day of the new museum, 5,000 visitors were received, and everyone generally reflected that the new museum was magnificent, exuding a thick cultural atmosphere from the outside to the inside.” Zhao Qingrong, Secretary of the General Party Branch and Executive Deputy Director of Yinxu Museum, told reporters, “The new museum not only has 4 special exhibitions, but also launches the ‘See Tianyi Merchants – Immersive Digital Experience Exhibition’, which displays the great achievements of the Shang Dynasty in politics, military, agriculture, handicrafts, writing, and Duyi construction, and combines cultural relics, documents, oracle bone records with digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and multimedia, so that the audience can feel the charm of Shang civilization more intuitively.” ”
At present, many museums have changed the image of “high coldness” in the past through various innovative elements, and quickly “got out of the circle” with a people-friendly route. For example, all kinds of cultural and creative products are full of creativity, such as the ugly and cute “Horse Riding Feiyan” doll in Gansu Provincial Museum, the “Bronze Mask” ice cream in Sanxingdui Museum, and the “Archaeological Blind Box” in Henan Museum. At the beginning of the Year of the Dragon, many museums have launched new dragon element cultural and creative products, which are also very popular with tourists. Some museums also offer highly interactive activities such as crafts, night tours, and explorations. In the Luoyang Museum, visitors can use chimes to compose music in the digital museum, and they can also learn about the history behind the cultural relics by experiencing “script killing”.
“We can also cooperate with film and television, games and other industries to jointly produce related works, so that the stories of cultural relics can enter the public eye in various forms, and integrate cultural relics into daily life through the research and development of cultural and creative products. In short, museum innovation is to make cultural relics and history no longer limited to diversified, intelligent and experiential means.In the closed display case, it has truly become a part of life that the public can reach and feel. Zhao Qingrong said.
Small and medium-sized museums will also have unexpected surprises
The popularity of museums has not decreased, and it has also brought difficulties to large museums to make reservations. Recently, Sun Yeli, Minister of Culture and Tourism, in response to the reporter’s question about the difficulty of making an appointment for the museum, mentioned that in addition to large museums in China, there are some small and medium-sized museums, which are rich and unique in content and are also very exciting.
“The recent cherry blossoms at Wuhan University have also brought a lot of visitors to our museum, especially on weekends, with an average of about 4,000 visitors per day, mostly parent-child tourists.” Yu Mutong, deputy head of the volunteer service team of Wanlin Art Museum of Wuhan University, said, “Here, visitors can enjoy all kinds of animal specimens, feel the beauty of nature, and also feel the unique style of cultural relics from different dynasties from the Qin to the Qing Dynasty.” Despite our small size, we are very popular with children. ”
According to the data released by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the total number of museums in China has reached 6,565. In addition to large museums, a large part of them are small and medium-sized museums located in various cities and towns, which are often unique, niche but novel and interesting, and have become an important option to meet the needs of tourists.
Song Yan believes that these museums should be based on their own collection characteristics and local historical and cultural heritage, one museum and one policy, design and produce exhibitions that the audience can understand, and can also appropriately increase high-quality service content according to actual conditions, such as reading space, leisure tea bar, etc., to create a museum at the door of the public, so that visiting the museum becomes a leisure, social and lifestyle lifestyle.
How to make these small and medium-sized museums that are not particularly popular also have a certain competitiveness? Experts believe that the most important thing is to make up for the shortcomings of services, improve the quality of hardware, highlight local characteristics, achieve differentiated development, effectively revitalize grassroots museum resources, and solve the status quo of “hot and cold” in various museums.
Liu Shuguang, chairman of the Chinese Museums Association, believes that although there is a big gap between small and medium-sized museums and comprehensive museums above the provincial level in terms of scale attributes, collection base, talent team, and comprehensive influence, they have unique advantages in evoking local memories and being close to people’s lives. Small and medium-sized museums have a variety of themes, which are an important window to witness the pluralistic and integrated pattern of Chinese civilization, the historical development, and the development of all walks of life, as well as an important starting point for realizing rural revitalization and developing characteristic cultural tourism industries.
(Reporter Lu Yuanzhen of this newspaper Fan Zixi) (Source: Guangming Daily)