The city of Datong, Shanxi province is now providing a virtual tour of its famous Yungang Grottoes on its official website, at baike.baidu.com/museum/yungang, allowing would-be visitors to do a self-guided tour of the entire site.

The website was designed by the Yungang Grottoes Research Institute, recently, to establish digital tourist attractions, with multi-lingual pages and detailed information about the grottoes.

The museum at Yungang also has movie screens and other multimedia devices that give visitors a lifelike experience.

The institute has been working on digitization at its Yungang digital center, dealing with the problem of digitizing statues, and has cooperated with universities and other research institutes to come up with three-dimensional laser scanning technology, geographic information technology, and other precision mapping technology to keep historical and other information and photos permanently.

The institute has digitally captured a one-kilometer-long image of the Yungang Grottoes and other grottoes with the laser technology and has created a digital archive with extreme accuracy, which can help with academic research and preservation.

Edited by Roger Bradshaw