Visitors descend upon China's museums

Museums are surging in popularity in China on the back of TV shows and documentaries, recent important archaeological discoveries and museums themselves coming up with innovative approaches to how they exhibit.

According to data from travel booking site ctrip.com, museum ticket bookings during the first five months of this year grew 75 percent when compared to 2019 levels, Nanfang Daily reported.

Figures from the National Cultural Heritage Administration show that museums across the country held more than 29,000 exhibitions and over 225,000 educational activities in 2020, receiving 540 million visits.

The number of museums is also on the rise. As of the end of 2019, there were 5,535 registered museums nationwide, an increase of 181 over 2018, and the number has kept growing, Yangcheng Evening News reported.

One of the reasons behind the increased visits is a renewed interest in museums fueled by popular TV shows and documentaries on cultural heritage, such as National Treasure, Masters in the Forbidden City, Every Treasure Tells a Story and the dance performance Night Banquet in Palace of Tang Dynasty (618-907), a highlight of the 2021 Henan Spring Festival gala that went viral on social media.

A comment on a post about the dance on Sina Weibo goes, "I will definitely make time to visit the museum to see these beautiful treasures with my own eyes."

On March 20, archaeologists announced the discovery of over 500 relics at the Sanxingdui Ruins site in Guanghan, Sichuan province. On the weekend from March 20-21, bookings for the Sanxingdui Museum made on ctrip.com surged nearly 12 times compared to the previous weekend, Yangcheng Evening News reported.

Some other museums in Sichuan province, such as the Chengdu Museum, Jinsha Site Museum and Chengdu Wuhou Shrine Museum, also recorded increased visits thanks to the popularity of the Sanxingdui Museum.

Museums are reinventing themselves to build on the momentum and attract more visitors.

On May 18, which is International Museum Day, the Sanxingdui Museum launched a store on online shopping site Tmall to sell cultural and creative products. It announced that it would launch a "super new product" during the shopping festival on June 18－archaeological mystery boxes containing soil. The boxes come with shovels, hammers and glasses in order to deliver an "immersive excavation experience", Yangcheng Evening News reported.

Also on International Museum Day, Hunan Museum launched a live-action game titled Hunanese Gene Code, where the players follow the lead of a "professor X" on a journey inside the museum to find clues and solve mysteries, according to Nanfang Daily.

On May 15, the Archaeological Site Museum of Nanyue Palace, Guangzhou Metro and the Guangdong Arts & Crafts Museum launched a relics exhibition at Yuexiu Park Station on Guangzhou Metro Line 2 to allow people the opportunity to "experience history and culture on the go", Nanfang Daily reported.

Zou Qingling, CEO of online travel agency Lvmama, told Yangcheng Evening News that the increased popularity of museum tours is attributable to the progress made in integrating culture and tourism in recent years, and the influence of hot topics such as TV shows, performances and new archaeological discoveries.

"This shows that tourists are paying more attention to the cultural side of tourism," Zou added.