Museum visits hit record high over China's May Day holiday

BEIJING - During the five-day May Day holiday, museums across China recorded more than 60.49 million visits, setting a new record and marking a 17 percent increase year-on-year.

For many travelers, cultural sites have become must-see destinations during holiday.

At the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi'an, the capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province and a famed ancient Chinese capital, a tourist surnamed Zhou and her family from central China's Henan province were already in line for entry at 4 am one morning of the holiday.

"It took us three days of attempts on our phones just to get tickets," she said. "No matter how crowded it is, we had to come and see the treasures of our ancestors."

To accommodate the surge in visitors, the museum increased its daily ticket supply by 15,000, bringing its total holiday capacity to 80,000, and it extended its opening hours into the evening.

Throngs of culture and history enthusiasts like Zhou and her family flocked to heritage-rich provinces such as Shaanxi, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, each of which drew over 4.5 million visitors during the holiday from May 1 to 5, according to the National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA).

The NCHA said that over the past decade, the number of museums in China has continued to grow, rising at an average of more than 200 per year.

Luo Wenli, deputy head of the NCHA, in April said that China had a total of 6,833 museums by the end of 2023, and information on 108 million state-owned movable cultural relics had been digitized with the development of smart museums and cultural relics databases.

Increasing numbers of Chinese museums have been attracting visitors with their digitization of cultural relics and application of new technologies.

In Wuhan, the capital of Central China's Hubei province, the Hubei Provincial Museum launched a special VR show ahead of the May Day holiday, enabling visitors to interact closely with the Bianzhong -- meaning "bells" -- of Marquis Yi of Zeng, which are known as the world's first "sound-producing music textbook."

The VR show, "Journey Through the Bronze Age," uses original sound samples from the Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng. With VR headsets, visitors can reach out to strike both the centers and sides of the bells to hear sounds that echo over 2,000 years of Chinese history.

According to Wang Shiyong, chief director of the show, the project includes more than 30,000 digital assets, with dozens of cultural relics from the museum virtually reconstructed with near-reality precision.

In addition to museums, national archaeological parks have also emerged as a major attraction during the past May Day holiday, registering over 3.31 million visits across 55 parks in the five days, data from the NCHA showed.

Visits to these parks rose 2.3 percent compared with the same period last year, with 11 parks each receiving more than 100,000 visits, the administration said.

During the May Day holiday, the Taosi National Archaeological Site Park in North China's Shanxi province officially opened to the public.

The park features several exhibition areas -- including a site museum that opened in November last year, a palace complex, an observation platform and an astronomy pavilion -- and aims to reproduce the Taosi relics site, which is the site of a Neolithic settlement in the Yellow River basin dating back about 4,500 to 3,900 years.

Wandering through the park, visitors can imagine the lives of their ancestors as they pass by the remains of a storage room, kitchen and icehouse, experience the ancient method of observing the sun from the observation platform, and touch digital devices in the astronomy pavilion to take a virtual journey through the vast cosmos.

"What impressed me most was the observation platform, which vividly illustrated the origins of the 24 solar terms," said Zhang Shiyue, referring to a time knowledge system developed by Chinese people through the observation of the sun's periodic movements. Zhang had traveled thousands of kilometers from China's southwestern Yunnan province to visit Taosi.

"This trip has deepened my respect and love for the Chinese civilization," Zhang said.