Case Study

The Palace Museum, Bejing. Digital Cultural Heritage Research and Immersive Curation

Zheng Xia, Professor at the College of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University, China

Background

The Palace Museum, established in 1420, is one of the world’s largest and most complete surviving complexes of ancient wooden structures. It is also China’s largest museum of ancient Chinese art and culture. Housing over 1.95 million precious cultural relics, it carries the historical lineage of five thousand years of Chinese civilisation. As a major public institution in the cultural sector, the Palace Museum is tasked not only with the mission of cultural relic preservation and research but also faces significant economic and social pressure to enhance public cultural services and revitalise cultural assets in the new era. Its digital transformation represents a strategic exploration driven by technology to revolutionise cultural production and consumption models.

The Palace Museum faces multiple structural contradictions during its digital transformation, hindering the full release of its cultural resources’ value:

  • Contradiction between Preservation and Utilisation: A vast number of relics made from organic materials, such as paintings, calligraphy, and textiles, are highly sensitive to light, temperature, and humidity, making them unsuitable for long-term display. This results in a very low exhibition rate and underutilisation of cultural resources.
  • Barriers to Research Resource Sharing: Physical research is constrained by time, space, and security factors. The lack of systematic integration of cultural relic data creates information silos, impeding the depth and breadth of academic research.
  • Imbalance between Content and Form: An excessive pursuit of technological sensory stimulation can overshadow cultural depth. When technological displays are weakly connected to the relics themselves and their historical context, exhibitions risk being superficial. Excessive or inappropriate immersive experiences may lead to public misunderstanding of cultural heritage. Some exhibitions involve high investment and novel technology but offer relatively hollow interpretation, possibly due to a lack of professional curatorial staff.
  • Limited Visitor Experience and Capacity: Traditional display methods struggle to meet the interactive experience demands of contemporary audiences, especially younger generations. Furthermore, physical space limits visitor capacity, leading to overcrowding during peak tourist seasons, which affects viewing quality and safety.

Approaches

The strategic goals of the Palace Museum can be summarised as:

  • Transforming Cultural Relics into Capital: Converting physical relics into digital assets, providing production factors for the innovative use of cultural resources.
  • Digitising Research Paradigms: Building a digital twin research environment, shifting cultural relic research from experience-driven to data-driven.
  • Immersive Cultural Experiences: Creating highly participatory and emotionally engaging cultural consumption experiences to enhance the effectiveness of cultural dissemination.

The implementation path follows the progressive logic of Data Foundation – Display Innovation – Value Co-creation, utilising cutting-edge technology to revitalise cultural relic assets. The aim is to transition preservation from preventive to predictive, expand research from physical contact to digital twin, and elevate the visitor experience from viewing to immersion and participation.

Resources

Rethinking Heritage Futures, Online Workshop “Utilising New Technologies in the Management of Cultural Heritage”, 30 April 2025, Nottingham Trent University (NTU), Communication University of China (CUC).

Video Presentation by Prof Zheng Xia, Professor College of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University, China.

Approches

1. Systematic Digitalisation of Cultural Relics: Building a Cultural Digital Base

The Palace Museum adopts a long-term approach to building the digital infrastructure for cultural relic research, providing foundational support for value innovation:

  • Large-Scale Digital Capture: Over more than 20 years, the Palace Museum has completed the digital capture of data for over 1 million cultural relics, surpassing 50% of its total holdings. It plans to digitise all 1.95 million relics within the next 10-20 years, establishing a complete digital twin system.
  • Open Digital Resource Platform: The Digital Cultural Relics Library, officially launched in 2019, has become a vital online window for the public to engage with relics. By 2025, it had released 100,000 high-definition relic images, with page views exceeding 33 million, making it the most popular digital product on the Palace Museum’s website.
  • Specialised Digital Projects: The Palace Museum’s Famous Paintings database, with images reaching tens of billions of pixels, offers a more detailed viewing experience than being on-site. The Panoramic Palace Museum enables virtual tours across time and space, allowing users to appreciate the Forbidden City in different weather conditions and seasons.

2. Immersive Curation: Innovative Expression of Cultural Narratives

The Palace Museum uses immersive technologies to reconstruct exhibition narratives, creating a series of captivating cultural experience scenarios:

  • Pattern-Themed Immersive Exhibition: The Patterns as Conveyors of Meaning immersive digital experience exhibition, jointly held by the Palace Museum and the Hong Kong Palace Museum, extracts traditional patterns from Palace architecture, ceramics, textiles, etc. Combining digital innovation technologies, it created 7 experiential spaces. Visitors can feel the vitality of resplendent patterns through light, shadow, and interaction, and even design their own unique fish and bird patterns, giving traditional motifs a new life.
  • AI Art Reimagining History: The Palace Museum Trilogy AI Art Exhibition used AI technology to achieve a deep transformation from literary narrative to digital scenes, creating touchable, smellable, and interactive immersive digital cultural tourism scenes. In the Carrying exhibition hall, an AI-generated digital avatar of a Palace Museum figure narrates the story of the 1931 relic evacuation from a first-person perspective, combined with scent simulation technology, making history an immersive physical and mental experience rather than just words on paper.
  • Interactive Participatory Experience: The Galloping Through Time Horse Culture Digital Art Exhibition at the Dagaoxuan Hall Digital Pavilion, utilizing a fully digital exhibition hall, presented over 500 ultra-high-definition horse culture relic images from the Palace Museum’s collection through immersive projection, 3D interaction, and knowledge graph technology. When visitors clap their hands, horses on the large screen neigh joyfully in greeting, creating an emotional interactive experience.

3. Reshaping Cultural Dissemination and Public Engagement

Immersive digital experiences have fundamentally changed how the public connects with cultural heritage:

  • From Passive Observation to Active Participation: The Digital Night Watchman project engages the public in patrolling the Central Axis heritage via a mini-program. As of November 2024, the “Cloud Central Axis” mini-program had over 1 million registered users and 26,000 registered volunteers, generating 64,103 inspection records and 132,569 patrol images—many contributed by Beijing primary and secondary school students.
  • From One-Way Reception to Co-creation and Sharing: At the Ink Shadows Follow: AI Co-creation Installation of the Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains within The Palace Museum Trilogy exhibition, participants engaged in the digital restoration of the masterpiece through gesture interaction, transitioning from viewer to co-creator.
  • Innovation in Education Models: Zhongbei College of Nanjing Normal University leveraged The Palace Museum Trilogy AI Art Exhibition to organize immersive study activities blending technology and literature for teachers and students. This promoted collaborative education integrating AI + Ideological & Political Education + Aesthetic Education, cultivating versatile talents proficient in both technology and artistic appreciation.

4. Extension and Creation of Economic Value

The Palace Museum’s digital transformation has generated significant economic and social benefits:

  • Extension of the Cultural Industry Chain: Digital resources provide rich source material for the cultural creative industry. The Palace Museum’s Digital Cultural Relics Library has become a content source for the creative economy. Designers and film/TV creators use these resources for secondary creation, extending the value chain of the cultural industry.
  • New Pathways for Global Cultural Trade: The Palace Museum collaborated with Phoenix Satellite Television, using AR, MR, and other technologies to artistically reinterpret collections like the Twelve Beauties, A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, and Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Plans include nationwide touring exhibitions and global outreach, promoting the going global of Chinese culture.

Challenges and Successes

Challenges

 
  • Regarding digital infrastructure, data storage media have limited lifespans (optical discs 5-10 years, hard drives 3-5 years), and specific storage formats risk obsolescence with technological iteration.
  • Inconsistent technical standards across institutions create resource silos, while the need for continuous resource investment places cultural institutions in a can-build-but-cannot-sustain dilemma.
  • In immersive curation, the core challenge lies in balancing multiple considerations: avoiding the overshadowing of cultural meaning by an excessive pursuit of technological spectacle, while finding an equilibrium between historical authenticity and artistic creativity.
  • Exhibition methods reliant on audio-visual systems entail high maintenance costs, and system ageing directly impacts experience quality, urgently necessitating the establishment of sustainable operational mechanisms to ensure long-term project value.

Successes

 
  • From passive observation to active participation: audience engages and relates in new ways and with new interests.
  • Innovation in Education Models: immersive study activities merging technology and arts and culture promote collaborative education integrating AI + Ideological & Political + Aesthetic Education.
  • Engaging the audience in the digital restoration of masterpieces through gesture interaction.
  • Extension of the cultural industry chain: digital resources provide rich source material for the cultural creative industry.  Designers and film/TV creators use these resources for secondary creation, extending the value chain of the cultural industry.
  • Global Cultural Trade: partnership with television and media using AR, MR, and other technologies to artistically reinterpret collections for nationwide touring exhibitions and global outreach, promoting the going global of Chinese culture.

Discussion

The digital transformation of the Palace Museum is, in essence, a successful efficiency revolution in cultural capital operation. Through systematic digitalisation, the Palace Museum has broken the zero-sum game between preservation and utilisation, creating a new paradigm for the non-rivalrous use of cultural resources—digital relics can be accessed infinitely without risk of damage and used concurrently by different users (for research, education, cultural product development, etc.), significantly enhancing the marginal utility of cultural assets and total social welfare. From an economic perspective, the Palace Museum case validates three core propositions:

  • Digital technology significantly reduces the exclusivity cost of cultural resources, enabling public cultural services to simultaneously meet the differentiated needs of mass consumption and professional research, achieving economies of scope.
  • Immersive experiences enhance user stickiness for cultural products through emotional connection and a sense of participation, creating stronger consumption willingness and higher brand premiums, forming a sustainable business model.
  • The digitalisation of cultural heritage generates positive network externalities; the more users there are, the greater the value of data resources and the richer the possibilities for innovation, leading to increasing returns on knowledge output.

 

The Palace Museum’s practice demonstrates that cultural heritage, empowered by digital technology, can achieve a value leap from resource to capital, releasing economic value while creating social benefits, and paving a new path for sustainable development in the cultural field.

Further Resources

Websites:

Palace Museum and The Forbidden City – https://intl.dpm.org.cn/index.html?l=en

Images

Image Credit: Simona Cosentino, Research Project Assistant.