For Shu Zhan, head of Tencent's Digital Culture Lab, conventional digitization could never fully explain a heritage site as vast and complex as Jingdezhen.
Its history stretches across centuries. Its archaeological remains are scattered across the city. Its knowledge survives not only in artifacts and documents but also in the memories of veteran artisans.
Artificial intelligence, he says, offers a way to connect those fragments into an experience people can participate in rather than simply observe.
Zeng envisions something more ambitious. Rather than serving merely as a guide, he hopes the AI-powered master potter will build shared memories with players over time. In that way, it becomes more than an explainer. It turns people who have never visited Jingdezhen into participants in a living industrial heritage site.
Tu shares that vision.
If players spend hours moving through several centuries of ceramic history — making difficult decisions, mastering techniques, and eventually creating objects guided by Jingdezhen's own aesthetic principles — they leave with something more valuable than facts.
"They've seen it. They've lived through it. They've created something within it," he says. "That kind of identification isn't taught. It's experienced."
If players remember only one thing after putting down the game, Tu hopes it is this: Jingdezhen is not simply a place preserved from the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties. It is a living civilization that people can still experience, participate in, and help carry forward.
Contact the writer at baishuhao@chinadaily.com.cn
