Tech Meets Heritage: Mural Museum and its Modern Makeover

In this first installment of what will be a two-part feature, we’ll be talking about the innovative Taiyuan Northern Qi Dynasty Mural Museum, which has embraced modern technologies including VR and 3D displays to bring its ancient murals to life. 

Transcript

Tech Meets Heritage: Mural Museum and Its Modern Makeover

In this first installment of what will be a two-part feature, we’ll be talking about the innovative Taiyuan Northern Qi Dynasty Mural Museum, which has embraced modern technologies including VR and 3D displays to bring its ancient murals to life. 

Traveling to another Chinese city and visiting its top museums has become a popular way for vacationing families to tour the country. During holidays and weekends, attractions like the Shanxi Museum, Jinci Temple, and Northern Qi Dynasty Mural Museum in Taiyuan, central China’s Shanxi Province, are consistently packed with tourists from all over the country.

Civilization in Taiyuan, formerly known as Jinyang, boasts a history of 5,000 years with its city being established over 2,500 years ago. The city is currently home to more than 2,000 immovable cultural relics, including 334 ancient sites, 121 ancient tombs, 932 ancient buildings, 48 grotto temples and stone carvings, and 796 important historical sites and representative buildings from modern times.

In recent years, Taiyuan has adhered to a policy of “priority to protection, strengthened management, excavation of value, effective utilization, and revitalization of cultural relics.” Focused on creating internationally renowned cultural tourism destinations, museums have been established as key points of cultural preservation and development. 

Local authorities in Taiyuan have made concerted efforts to create four types of museums: “classic,” “smart,” “popular,” and “revolutionary,” with a total of 101 museums constructed across the ancient city. On average, there is one museum for every 54,000 residents, establishing Taiyuan as a “city of museums.” Today, museums are ubiquitous cultural landmarks in Taiyuan, enriching its cultural landscape.

At the same time, many museums are actively adopting technologies such as digital twins, virtual reality, glasses-free 3D, and others. They are innovating exhibition formats and interactive experiences, allowing visitors to experience the beauty of the integration of technology and culture. Taiyuan Northern Qi Dynasty Mural Museum, which opened at the end of 2023, is one such museum where technology has empowered the exhibition. In just a few months, it has become an ideal destination for history enthusiasts and has made it onto the list of must-visit sites for tourists in Shanxi.

Just a few steps into the Taiyuan Northern Qi Mural Museum, among the mottled and incomplete murals, Wu Jianxin once again found himself pausing before the mural “Mounted and Horseback Riding” from Lou Rui’s tomb. Despite his countless explanations to visitors as a museum guide, he is always drawn to the reddish-brown horse at the center of the mural. The horse’s face combines human features, and its eyes amazingly exhibit a so-called “naked-eye 3D” effect, that is, they seem to follow the observer across the room communicating countless words through a gaze that spans over 1,450 years.

Some speculate that this is the work of Yang Zihua, the Northern Qi “Saint of Painting” whose original works no longer exist. Northern Qi ruled the eastern part of northern China from 550 to 577. Others believe that regardless of the artist, he poured his gaze and emotions into this magnificent horse. As too many mysteries about the painting remain unsolved for modern audiences, this horse has earned the online nickname “Mona Lisa Horse”. Together with elements like the Louis XIV-style ermine fur coat worn by Northern Qi’s King Xu Xianxiu and the saddle blanket pattern resembling “LV” designs, young people on social media refer to these as “hidden Easter eggs” that must be found. As slices of history collide with modern reality, people find joy in those aspects that resonate with today. 

Wang Jiang, director of the Northern Qi Mural Museum, gently touched the museum’s loess-textured exterior wall. “Doesn’t it look just like the burial mound inside?” he said. The weathering cracks on the “loess” and the rain erosion marks, or “wormholes” as Director Wang calls them, are all replicated from the burial mound of Xu Xianxiu’s tomb. 

Walking into the museum, standing beside the actual burial mound, one easily notices its remarkable resemblance to the museum’s exterior wall. This museum, a small one of only 3,830 square meters, is built on the site of Xu Xianxiu’s tomb from the Northern Qi Dynasty, one of the “Top Ten Archaeological Discoveries of China in 2002.” It presents to the public the original appearance of Xu Xianxiu’s tomb when he was buried in 571 AD, making it the first museum in China dedicated to mural tombs on their original site. Wang Jiang has been involved in the planning and construction of the mural museum in Taiyuan since his appointment in 2015, from the design of the museum building to the arrangement and display of exhibits, even down to the placement and adjustment of every light fixture.

Now, let’s introduce the owner of this ancient tomb. The illustrious and brave Prince Xu Xianxiu of Wu’an, who lived through the Northern Wei, Eastern Wei, and Northern Qi dynasties, witnessed the transition of Chinese history toward the prosperous Tang Dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907. His final resting place is adorned with over 300 square meters of murals, depicting nearly 200 figures. The size, artistic quality, and preservation of these murals are exceptionally rare, making it one of the best-preserved large mural tombs from that period. Today, alongside the murals discovered in the Taiyuan Lou Rui Tomb in 1979, the Shuozhou Shuiquanliang Tomb in 2008, and the Xinzhou Jiuyuangang Tomb in 2012, they all narrate a history untouched by time.

During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Northern Qi lasted only 27 years, experiencing six emperors. Amidst the turmoil, artists’ vibrant emotions left a legacy of magnificent mural art for this brief regime. At that time, Jinyang, as an alternate capital of the Northern Qi Dynasty, was a hub of frequent trade and cultural exchanges between various ethnic groups. 

The ceremonial procession depicted in Xu Xianxiu’s tomb murals includes both Xianbei and Han people, coexisting in the same scene without clear social status distinctions. In the murals of the Shuozhou Shuiquanliang Tomb, Central Asian Sogdian grooms with high noses and thick beards are part of the tomb owner’s entourage. The dawn of cultural fusion during the Tang Dynasty had already begun to show.

Six years before the fall of the Northern Qi, Xu Xianxiu, then 70 years old, passed away at his home in Jinyang after a lifetime of battles. It must have been a grand funeral performed according to high standards, with renowned artists of the time invited, as the tomb murals are extremely exquisite and lifelike, with the figures painted at quite nearly a life-sized 1:1 ratio. However, for unknown reasons, this grand burial was hastily completed. 

For instance, the corridor murals lacked the base layer, only a coat of whitewash on the rough earthen walls; the noble and beautiful mistress was depicted with three eyes, a mistake left uncorrected in haste; a musician on the north wall’s eastern side was shown playing a flute, but the instrument was omitted. These unsolved mysteries and the past splendor were buried until a rescue excavation in the spring of 2001 brought the Northern Qi past back to light.

Wang Jiang still vividly remembers the first time he entered the Xu Xianxiu Tomb site located on a loess slope in a pear orchard. Although it was marked as a national key cultural relic protection unit, there was not even a surrounding wall at the site, “just an earthen house and two old men,” he said. When he entered the tomb passage, the state of the flaking and crumbling murals shocked him: “It felt like they would disappear with a single breath. At that moment, I was truly frightened. How could we protect such precious and fragile relics?”

When Wang Jiang was appointed director, the Xu Xianxiu Tomb site had already completed field archaeology and had gone through excavation protection and restoration protection phases. The excavation took two years, far longer than other similar tombs. Chang Yimin, the leader of the original Xu Xianxiu Tomb archaeology team, recalled, “The tomb’s location was right under the pear orchard, with some pear tree roots already entangled in the tomb passage and intertwined with the murals. To protect the murals as much as possible, archaeologists knelt and laid down in front of the mound, using toothpicks to clean bit by bit, as delicately as peeling the membrane from an eggshell.”

Despite the reinforcement and restoration of the murals during the excavation, experiment, and protection process, opening the mural tomb inevitably disrupted the stable underground environment. Issues like structural instability, plant root damage, peeling, hollowing, cracking, pigment powdering, and alkali crystallization repeatedly emerged, posing difficult problems for Wang Jiang upon taking over the site. The even more challenging decision was whether to choose relocation and protection off-site or to protect the original site. Opinions within the industry were divided.

From domestic experience, mural tombs excavated before the 1970s generally adopted the method of relocation and protection off-site, with the tombs themselves sealed and backfilled. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that exploration of in-situ protection began. Internationally, in-situ protection has always been a significant challenge, with occasional failures in such efforts.

As a supporter of in-situ protection, Wang Jiang told The Context that what is taken down is art, while in-situ protection preserves complete historical information. From the passage, skylight, tomb gate, and corridor to the tomb chamber, all murals in Xu Xianxiu’s tomb form a complete system. Unlike other mural tombs that were partially collapsed or detached upon discovery, its murals are still intact, and its location is on a high slope, with almost no groundwater erosion. 

Moreover, the murals have no base layer; they are supported only by a thin layer of whitewash, meaning the murals are almost directly painted on the earthen walls. If relocated, the loss rate during the process would be very high. Thus, although in-situ protection of Xu Xianxiu’s tomb is difficult, the possibility of completely relocating it is even more so. After multiple evaluations, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage ultimately decided on in-situ protection.

From the moment the decision for in-situ protection was made, it was determined that the Northern Qi Mural Museum based on the original site would be a unique museum. Later, Wu Jianxin, who was in charge of the museum’s digital virtual reality, recalled that for several years, Wang Jiang often invited a few industry experts who loved murals and had good relationships to sit in the pear orchard outside the earthen house, envisioning what the future museum should look like. Tune in to our next podcast to hear what they decided.

Well, that wraps up part one of our podcast on innovative Chinese museums. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Li Jing, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.