From virtual tours to relics' rescue

Museums go 'on the cloud'

The COVID-19 outbreak compelled Chinese museums to close their doors almost overnight before Spring Festival in January. But it also triggered a trend in which venues have adopted new forms of digital exhibition and publicity amid the closures of their physical locations.

According to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, museums nationwide organized over 2,000 online exhibitions attracting over 5 billion views during Spring Festival alone.

Since late February, numerous museums ignited enthusiasm when they launched their first livestream tours. Many venues cooperated with online-shopping websites to promote their souvenirs during virtual tours.

For example, the first day-and-a-half livestream at the Palace Museum in April got over 100 million "clicks". In March, a one-hour live tour of the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan, the city hit hardest by COVID-19 in China, had 8 million views.

Chinese museums have gradually reopened since April. On May 18, the country's main annual celebration for International Museum Day was held in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, as was originally scheduled, but many online activities were also introduced.

Grand Canal revival

On July 1, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the National Cultural Heritage Administration jointly released a national guidance for the protection of cultural heritage sites related to the Grand Canal, the 3,200-kilometer-long, 2,500-year-old waterway connecting Beijing and Zhejiang province.

A comprehensive investigation of these sites will be launched to set up a national database on the canal.

More archaeological research along the canal will follow, and historical parks and museums will better display the waterway's significance.

Urban construction projects by the canal will also be strictly supervised to ensure relics' safety and to keep the landscape intact.

Separately, the Ministry of Water Resources announced a plan to reintroduce water in some dry sections of the canal through ecological restoration.

Hail the revolutionary spirit

China's second national-level county-specific list of conservation areas related to the revolutionary years was released on July 1. The publicity department of the CPC Central Committee, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism also drafted the list of revolutionary relics of memorial significance.

It involves 988 counties across 31 provincial-level administrative regions, grouped into 22 conservation areas, related to locations where the CPC fought against Japanese invaders, undertook the Long March and led other revolutionary activities.

And 13 provincial-level administrative regions have also set up specific departments in their local governments to bolster the protection of relatively recent sites that were key to the Chinese revolution.