China’s 600-year-old Forbidden City is renovating its website in a move to improve its offerings of Chinese culture, said the information chief of the Palace Museum Wednesday.

The new website will launch during the National Day Festival in early October, said Hu Chui, head of the museum’s information department.

“It will give visitors richer and easier access to the imperial city, and the ancient building complex with as many as 8,707 rooms and 1.5 million artistic articles,” said Hu, who is leading a team of 60 to boost the museum’s digital display.

The Forbidden City is the world’s largest surviving imperial palace complex and served as the home of the emperor and his household, as well as the ceremonial and political center of Chinese government, from 1420 to the early 20th century.

The new website is restructured to meet the different demands of laymen, researchers and academics, Hu said.

The site will include quiz games, suitable for children, that teach basic knowledge about ancient China. The museum has created a cartoon figure as its image ambassador, a young emperor clad in a bright yellow royal robe adapted from Emperor Kangxi, one of the most famous emperors of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Older visitors can expect tens of thousands of pictures in refined quality with explanatory introductions. And researchers can have access to the museum’s academic research findings in a database.

‘Virtual world’ stages

The new website is part of the imperial palace-turned museum’s effort to move into the virtual world.

Hu’s team is producing seven 3-D documentaries, each a 20- to 30-minute film mixed with real photographs or archival footage, and special effects produced by computer.

A yet-to-open 3-D cinema is in the southwestern corner hall in the yard of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, with black walls and red chairs.

Xu Ying, director of the museum’s exhibition technology section, said the cinema is built of a removable steel structure that minimizes possible damage to the ancient wood architecture of the hall.

“We are recruiting management staff now. Our top problem is to ensure the safety of the palace hall when the audience crowds in,” she said.

Preserving architecture

Qi Xin, technician of the team, admitted this is a difficult task.

“Unlike ordinary museums, the wood construction of the building is the exhibit itself. The preservation is as important as the exhibition,” Qi said.

From April until now, visitors have been able to use electric touch screens to look at details of ancient works of calligraphy and paintings in the imperial collections in the Hall of Martial Valor in the southwestern part of the palace.

On the screens, beside each exhibit, visitors can easily find information about the exhibit in detail and zoom in on high-definition pictures, large enough to discern even tiny strokes.

A project in collaboration with IBM

The US technology colossus spent more than three years working with Chinese officials and the Palace Museum to construct an interactive, animated replica of the 178-acre (720,000 square-meter) walled fortress in the Dongcheng District of Beijing.

“Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time,” online at www.beyondspaceandtime.org, is billed as a first-of-a-kind, fully immersive, three-dimensional virtual recreation of “this Chinese cultural treasure.”

“The rich cultural heritage of China’s imperial past, embodied in the Forbidden City for over five centuries, is now brought to life and accessible to all through a virtual world,” said Henry Chow, chairman of IBM’s Greater China Group.

“This initiative takes the online experience to a new level of innovation with rich content, educational storytelling, community and social networking features that represent the next generation of 3D Internet applications.”

Built in the early 14th Century, The Forbidden City served as home to the emperor and the political heart of Chinese government from mid-Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty.

The Forbidden City is now overseen by the Palace Museum and Friday marked the 83rd anniversary of it being open to the public as a cultural attraction.

Visitors to the virtual Forbidden City can explore it as animated characters, or “avatars,” able to chat with others or take part in activities such as archery, cricket fighting, or a board game called Weiqi.

Animated tourists can also scrutinize artifacts and scenes including “The Emperor Having Dinner.” Virtual tours can be narrowed to topics such as dragons, halls, symbolic animals, or the expansive Imperial Garden.

“The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time is a program that combines China’s world-class cultural heritage with state-of-the-art information technology,” said Palace Museum director-general Zheng Xinmiao.

“This program is only a start, which, as we believe, will have an unlimited future to explore China’s traditional culture.”

Computer kiosks in the real Forbidden City allow people there to visit the virtual version as well.

Source: China Daily (August 26, 2009)