Short videos bring past to life

Wang started to try her hand at making videos to popularize archaeology in 2020. She says she was driven by her discovery that many people have mistaken ideas about the field, as well as her own lifelong interest and academic qualifications.

She once heard a mother give incorrect information to her young son about the "afterglow-style "Caifeng Mingqi seven-stringed guqin, an ancient Chinese zither, from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), part of the permanent collection of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum.

With a coating of vermilion lacquer, the long zither took its lyrical name from comparisons to the changing glow of the sunset and the cry of a mythological phoenix.

"The guqin is placed upright, and the mother tells him it's called a harp," she says.

"At that moment, I realized that many people visiting museums might be unaware of the historical backgrounds and uses of different cultural relics. That's why it's important to share the historical and cultural knowledge of each place with everyone," she adds.

Love of history has predisposed Wang to archaeology since childhood, when her parents would take her to local museums. Wang says she was fascinated to feel time and space overlapping at those locations.

She then studied cultural relics and museology at the Minzu University of China in Beijing from 2013-17 and went on to finish her doctorate in exhibition planning and public archaeology at Zhejiang University in Zhejiang province.

"Archaeology has different divisions. There is field archaeology and then artifact organization and research," Wang explains. "What we do is to show cultural relics and promote them among the public."

Through her videos, many young people have been exposed to relics that are important touchstones of Chinese culture.

"I am in the habit of visiting museums and viewing exhibitions on a weekly basis," Wang says, adding that she loves to connect with items from the past.

"Words are not required. You just need to feel, understand and restore them," she says.

She also has become a faculty member at Liaoning University, serving as a lecturer on courses related to museum studies.

"In the process of academic research and regular museum visits, I have discovered the wonderful joy of encountering millennia-old civilizations and the sense of accomplishment in revitalizing 'dusty' history," Wang says.