Spark curiosity to build the bridge

Every generation worries that the next is drifting away from classical culture.

The proposed remedies are consistently the same: teach more history, assign more classics, build more museums and preserve more heritage.

Yet, the anxiety never disappears.

Perhaps that is because we keep mistaking preservation for transmission. Culture survives not because it is protected, but because it is rediscovered. And for each generation, rediscovery begins not with obligation but with curiosity.

I learned this lesson in an unlikely place: a video game. As a child, I struggled through Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese historical epic that shaped generations of East Asian imagination. The novel is one of China's greatest literary achievements, but to a young reader it can feel forbidding.

Its language belongs to another era, the cast of characters is immense and the political intrigues demand patience that many children simply do not yet possess. I finished it because I thought I was supposed to.

Years later, I found myself playing a strategy game set in the Three Kingdoms period. For the first time, history became immersive rather than instructional. Instead of trying to remember alliances and famous battles, I was making decisions and fighting battles myself.

When the game ended, I did something no teacher had ever persuaded me to do: I began reading history voluntarily.

Soon I was searching historical records, comparing fact with fiction, reading Records of the Three Kingdoms, and eventually writing a song about Sun Shangxiang, a legendary figure of the era — sister of Sun Quan and wife of Liu Bei.

Only later did I discover that my story was not unique. Across Chinese social media, countless young people trace their fascination with the Three Kingdoms not to a classroom but to a game.

That should tell us something. For decades, educators have debated how to convince young people that classical culture matters. Many creators have quietly found an answer: they stopped trying to persuade and started making culture irresistible.

The medium is not the point. Curiosity is. This realization shaped my work when I began writing my first solo album, drawing inspiration from figures including Pu Songling, a Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) writer, the fourth-century calligrapher Wang Xizhi and the Venetian traveler Marco Polo.

Marco Polo fascinated me for a particular reason.

In China today, many children recognize his name before they know anything about the man who crossed Eurasia in the 13th century. They know him instead as a hero in a mobile game.

A fictional character can be the door to a real historical figure.

When I decided to write a song about Marco Polo, I did not want to summarize his travels.

History textbooks already do that well enough. Instead, I immersed myself in the details of his journey — his years in what is now Beijing, his visits to Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces in China, the vast distances he crossed, and the civilizations he encountered along the Silk Road.

Those discoveries reshaped my understanding of him.

So rather than retelling history, I embedded it inside a metaphor.

A worn pair of sheepskin boots carries the dust of Persian deserts. Silver coins bloom into lotus flowers. A scimitar leaves its trace on bamboo slips. These images do not explain history outright. Instead, they invite listeners to wonder about their origins.

Curiosity is more powerful than explanation because it nudges people to explore.

The lyric I value most says, "The greatest adventure is admitting you have never truly discovered."

It sounds paradoxical. Explorers are remembered for making discoveries.

But genuine discovery begins with abandoning certainty.

Marco Polo did not come to China merely to confirm what he already believed. He encountered a civilization larger, more sophisticated and more surprising than anything he had imagined. The real breakthrough was not geographical but intellectual. He recognized that his previous understanding had been incomplete.

That may be the most valuable lesson his journey offers.

Every society is vulnerable to inherited assumptions about places it has never seen. Every culture can get trapped in stories told by someone else. The only lasting antidote is curiosity — the willingness to look again, and to discover that reality is richer than imagination.

This is also why I hope more young people around the world will experience China for themselves. Not because they should travel out of obligation, and certainly not because a song tells them to.

The purpose of art is to inspire questions, not give instructions.

If a listener finishes my song about Marco Polo and decides to explore the Silk Road, to learn why a Venetian merchant traveled so far east, or simply to wonder what he actually found here seven centuries ago, then the song has already succeeded.

That is how classical culture survives. Not by demanding reverence, but by rewarding curiosity.

Creators often speak about preserving tradition, but preservation is only the beginning. Our responsibility is not to enshrine the past behind glass cases, but to make it resonate in the present — through film, games, music, animation, short videos or whatever form allows a new generation to encounter it as something living rather than distant.

The bridge matters more than the monument.

When I was a child, no bridge connected me to Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A game built one. Music allowed me to build another.

If my work inspires someone else to cross that bridge — to Pu Songling's strange spirits, to Wang Xizhi's calligraphy, to Marco Polo's long journey across Eurasia — then I have fulfilled what I believe every creator should aspire to.

Not simply preserve the past. But make someone eager to discover it.

The author is a Chinese singer, writer and actor.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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