Keeping the fires burning

Inside Shougang Park's No 3 Blast Furnace, a digital film named Salute to Steel is playing, projecting bright and roaring flames onto the furnace core, which has not burned for more than a decade.

In 2010, after more than 90 years of continuous operation, Shougang's steelmaking came to a halt. The sprawling industrial complex on the western edge of Beijing was relocated to neighboring Hebei province.

But people today are not leaving it idle. They are using artificial intelligence to reconstruct historical footage, projection mapping to turn the furnace walls into screens, and immersive surround sound to transform visitors from spectators into witnesses of a lost industrial age.

On April 15, three days before the International Day for Monuments and Sites, a group of heritage experts, retired steelworkers, and academics gathered at the RE Blast Furnace No 3 Digital Museum. The event, organized by the digital heritage committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites China, was timed to this year's global theme "Living Heritage".

Its purpose was to examine how digital technologies might support the active preservation and intergenerational transmission of industrial heritage — and to ask what it truly means for a heritage site to be "alive".

"Living heritage is not about the physical objects you can touch and measure. It is about the ongoing relationship between people and those objects," says Song Xinchao, chairman of ICOMOS China.

"Break that relationship, and the heritage dies, even if the building still stands, even if the furnace has not been torn down."

Over the course of its long history, China has witnessed many classic cases of living heritage — sites that never died because they were never abandoned by the people who used them.

Song urges relevant parties to draw inspiration from Dujiangyan in Southwest China's Sichuan province, an irrigation system built during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) that tamed the Minjiang River without a dam. Its designer, Li Bing, used the natural landscape to divert water, remove sediment, and control flooding. More than 2,000 years later, Dujiangyan still waters the fields of the provincial capital Chengdu.

"It has never been a ruin or a museum piece," Song notes. "It has simply worked, continuously, for over two millennia. That is living heritage."

He also considers the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, in Northwest China's Gansu province, a classic model. They are best known as a treasure house of Buddhist art — thousands of murals and sculptures carved into a cliff face along the ancient Silk Road.

But the grottoes are not only to be viewed from behind a rope, he elaborates.

Every year on the eighth day of the fourth month in the Chinese lunisolar calendar, local residents enter the caves to pray, a tradition dating back more than 1,000 years.

"The Dunhuang Academy, which manages the site, charges only a symbolic five-yuan (74 cents) admission on that day — not because it cannot charge more, but because the relationship between the caves and the surrounding community is itself a piece of heritage worth protecting," Song says.

The ritual keeps the caves alive in a way that climate control and security cameras never could, he adds.

In addition to war and the natural decay that threaten these heritages, Song warns that overcommercialization risks turning culture into a disposable product, and sealing heritage behind glass turns it into a museum specimen. Both approaches, he believes, can break the chain between people and place.

At Shougang Park, efforts have been underway to keep those heritage bonds alive. At the mid-April event, three retired employees donated personal items to root the place more deeply in its own history.

Zhang Shijun, in his 70s, walked up to the front and center of the themed day event, holding a few old French newspapers that he had kept for 38 years. He entered Shougang in 1980 after finishing metallurgical machinery and electrical engineering studies in college. In his younger days at work, he won just about every award a young employee could win.

"I can't document the past 100 years — I wasn't born yet," Zhang says with a smile. "But I can document 50 years."

The newspapers reported on a Shougang team that was sent to the northern French city of Calais in 1988 on a mission to dismantle an entire steel plant and ship the equipment back to China for reassembly. The timeline was pressing, and the 45 men of the team worked around the clock.

The coverage emphasized their exceptional efficiency, technical expertise, and strong work ethic, noting that they dismantled thousands of tons of equipment in months for immediate reassembly in China. The French report also framed Shougang's actions as evidence of China's impending economic rise.

By then, they could not have known that by 1994, Shougang would produce 8.24 million tons of steel annually, ranking it first in China, Zhang says with pride. Although the French newspapers are no longer in his hands, he says it gives him great comfort to see them enter the museum's collection.

Zhang's bond with Shougang is personal, forged over decades inside the plant. But today, Shougang's bond with its former employees has expanded to the public.

Shougang Park received over 13 million visitors in 2024, an 8 percent increase from the previous year.

But average spending per visitor was below the citywide average, and the park's service area is limited, considering daily visitors reached 150,000 during the 2022 Winter Olympics, according to Fu Fan, a professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Fu has conducted extensive research in the park area.

He notes that the official strategy blends culture, commerce, sports, tourism, technology, and science education, but says there are always ways to improve the visitor experience.

Fu suggests further tapping into the site's history, architecture, and nostalgia to develop a vessel — something that can be consumed, experienced, and shared — so the public and the industrial site can build a closer relationship.

Bu Xiting, a professor at the Communication University of China, offers a way forward, which he calls "cultural reproduction".

He points to the Tate Modern in London, a power plant built in the mid-20th century and now a world-famous museum that deliberately preserved its industrial space.

The lesson for Shougang, he says, is clear: "Instead of waiting 20 years for it to become waste, why not treat it today as an industrial design and an artistic statement?"

He emphasizes immersive experiences that invite visitors to step inside and take it all in.

"The space must wrap around them. The narrative must invite participation. The experience must engage all the senses: hearing, smell, touch, temperature," he says.

Besides envisioning Shougang as a new stage for cultural consumption, an incubator for technological innovation, and a laboratory for the digital economy, Bu says the key is to turn distant collective memory into personal experience — something that can be touched and felt.

At Shougang Park, the furnace no longer burns, but the event's participants concur that something else is burning now.

"The difficulty of preserving living heritage is that it depends on people — on oral transmission, on hand-me-down stories," Song says.

"But that is also its value. It is not a museum specimen. It is life still unfolding."