http://www.bjreview.com MARCH 26, 2020 BEIJING REVIEW 45
CULTURE
Copyedited by Sudeshna Sarkar
Comments to zhaowei#bjreview.comvolvement in the digitalization of governance,
Ķ nance and retail.
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus
disease accelerated the launch of the smart
cultural tourism industry solution. The Cloud
Spring Tour, introduced on February 23, is one
of the smart solutions. It focuses on online
museum tours, starting with eight museums,
including the National Museum of China in
Beijing and the Suzhou Museum in Jiangsu
Province, east China, which was designed by
celebrated Chinese American architect I.M. Pei.
The virtual museum tours have welcomed 10
million visitors, eTuivalent to the ß ow of visitors
at the Louvre in France in one year.
In addition to the livestreaming, all the
online tours are recorded and saved on the
cloud server so that anyone who missed
them can still check them out anytime.
Besides being free of charge, the service also
enables visitors to vote, which collects valu-
able feedback for improving the service. The
data generated from the e-tours can also be
used for decision-making by the authorities,
analyzing industry trends and collecting pub-
lic opinion, which provides insight into the
public demand.
On March 1, away from Tibet, another
livestreaming took place in Suzhou. Cheng Yi,
Deputy Director of the Suzhou Museum, invited
artisans specializing in Su embroidery and kesi
to demonstrate the arts and their skills. Su em-
broidery is one of the oldest embroidery arts of
China, originating in Suzhou and passed down
from mothers to daughters for generations.
Kesi, literally meaning cutting silk, is a traditional
silk tapestry techniTue, where the skillful use of
different colored threads gives the impression
of cut threads being used in the pattern. Both
are major intangible cultural heritages from
Suzhou.
“It is rather challenging for us to do a live
show. In addition to understanding what would
interest online visitors, we have to also pay
attention to the interaction to deepen their
understanding of traditional culture,” said
Jiang Han, Deputy Director of the Cultural and
Creative Department of the museum.
The interest generated by the
livestreaming prompted a second e-tour
of the Suzhou Museum about a week later
with refinements. From three people, the
number of people involved in the project
jumped to eight, including a specialist whowrote the text. The result was gratifying with
1.25 million views and 1.15 million likes.
Now the museum is planning to expand the
livestream on Bilibili.com, a video website
popular with young people.Online meets offline
The Cloud Spring Tour has been designed so
that besides the online tours, people can also
buy tickets to actually visit the museum, sou-
venirs and books. Jiang thinks the museum’s
creative products are not blindly copied from
antiTues but serve a purpose by connecting the
art of the ancients with life today.
In the past two years, the sale of cultural
and creative products on Taobao and Tmall,
two online shopping platforms owned by
Alibaba, has tripled. The scale of museum-
owned stores has increased six times.
According to the platform’s experts, the
livestreamings generally can double the sales.
Also, at a time when tourism products and
services are facing greater competition due
to their homogenization, better utilization of
digital services will provide museums with core
competitiveness and help them survive in dif-
Ķ culties like the epidemic.
On March 9, the Potala Palace reappeared
in another livestreaming. This time, there was a
new tour guide, Dorje Phuntsok, resplendent in
his traditional Tibetan clothes. Having learned
from the problems faced during the Ķ rst effort,
this time the livestreaming was better with the
signal more stable and the image clearer be-
cause of the use of 5G. In addition, six experts
and scholars specializing in cultural relics joined
the live lineup to provide detailed explanations
for 800,000 viewers. QA tour guide livestreams at the foot
of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet
Autonomous Region in southwest
China, on March 1XIN
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