On October 22nd, the sharing session of the Palace Museum and Tencent’s Three-Year Cooperation Outcomes & Next Idea Music Contest was held in the Garden of Established Happiness at the Palace Museum. Director Shan Jixiang of the Palace Museum and Vice President Cheng Wu of Tencent delivered a speech. Among the guests are Deputy Director General Song Qihui with Department of Industrial Development under Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Director General Luo Jing with Department of Museum and Social Relics under National Cultural Heritage Administration, deputy directors Feng Nai’en and Ren Wanping of the Palace Museum, Secretary Zhu Hongwen of Committee for Discipline Inspection of the Palace Museum, Vice President Jiang Yang of Tencent, Vice President Hou Deyang of Tencent Music Entertainment Group, and musicians, including Zhang Qu, Zhang Yadong, Fang Wenshan and others.

The sharing session features various activities. Experts from Institute for the Study of Paintings and Calligraphy of the Palace Museum and musicians appreciated the paintings together. The finalists performed the excellent music pieces from the Next Idea contest which were made into an album exclusively released by QQ Music. In addition, the session showcased the cooperation outcomes of the Palace Museum and Tencent over the past three years.

Director Shan Jixiang of the Palace Museum fully recognized a host of achievements in cooperation with Tencent over the past three years. “The Palace Museum is a carrier of the traditional culture as well as a crystallization of wisdom and creativity of the Chinese people. Exploring its cultural wealth and passing it on to the future generations constitute the most important mission of the Palace Museum. In collaboration with Tencent, we took advantage of the new-tech to promote the spread of culture, which in turn facilitated further technological innovation. The traditional culture represented by the Palace Museum has been constantly enriched by new ideas and integrated with new fields and new technologies, advancing the inheritance and continuation of the traditional culture while bring new vitality to the traditional culture in the new era. ”

“In cooperation with the Palace Museum for over three years, we have achieved a cultural breakthrough by virtue of digital technology. Together, we have witnessed the integrated development of science and technology and culture, beheld the power of innovation and inheritance, created Chinese experience and set new heights for the global digitalization of cultural museums,” said Vice President Cheng Wu of Tencent. “Revitalizing the inheritance injects impetus to traditional culture and presents an opportunity in the new era as well as a historic responsibility. Tencent leveraged our own capabilities to provide innovative social services of “digitalizing and revitalizing traditional culture”. We’ll continue to serve as the connector and converter of the traditional culture, boost social progress and showcase a more splendid traditional culture in the digital age.”

Incorporating Traditional Culture into Digital Life By Means of Top Ten Activities and Frontier Technologies in Culture and Creativity Industry

The Palace Museum and Tencent officially established a partnership in July 2016 to jointly promote the in-depth integration of traditional culture with digital creativity and “revitalize” the traditional culture represented by the Place Museum by means of the top ten activities and frontier technologies in the culture and creativity industry, including social media, game, animation, music, tools, youth innovation contests, AI, cloud computing, LBS, and eye movement technique. They have launched more than ten outstanding products, including the Palace Museum-themed emojis on Tencent’s instant messaging software QQ, Miracle Nikki—on the theme of traditional costumes in the Palace Museum, themed comic Echo of the Place Museum, the Palace Museum app, Tiantian Photo Editing App—on the theme of “lip gloss from the national treasures of Palace Museum”, and “ancient paintings can sing” musical album.

A musical album has been launched for the first time, featuring a selection of songs from the Place Museum X Tencent Next Idea music contest 2018 jointly held by The Palace Museum, Tencent Next Idea and QQ Music. On the first day it went online, the video of its first song A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains, based on one of China’s most celebrated works of art, attracted over 34 million view counts and the clicks of the topic on the contest theme #Ancient Paintings Can Sing# on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, exceeded 120 million. The Palace Museum-themed emojis from the Next Idea contest 2016 were downloaded over 40 million times in the first month since its launch on QQ and the interactive H5 program themed on the Palace Museum registered over 1.5 million page views within three hours after it hit online and went viral on WeChat.

In collaboration with Tencent’s dress up game Miracle Nikki, the Palace Museum granted the authorization of the images of “traditional costume culture”. The court dress skins from the first stage of cooperation themed on “Qing Dynasty empresses’ court dresses” and “Twelve Beauties of Prince Yong” were downloaded nearly 40 million times. Echo of the Palace Museum, the first comic series on the Palace Museum, portrays the stories of sending its relics to Shanghai. Its serials were published on Tencent Comic and topped the most popular list on the platform. The AI-based Tiantian Photo Editing App introduced the makeup interactive game themed on “lip glosses from the national treasures in the Palace Museum”, with a view to spread the knowledge on the cultural relics’ colors in an entertaining way of trying the lip gloss colors in online games. It engaged tens of millions of players within the first week since its launch online.

Such innovations in the forms loved by the public, combined with Tencent’s powerful product matrix, has helped the traditional culture represented by the Palace Museum permeate the public life and further integrated into the lifestyle of the young people.

A Variety of Functional and Avant-garde Games for Edutainment

In combination with the concept of “making the Palace Museum a way of life” lately proposed by the Palace Museum, the two sides conducted in-depth cooperation in games and developed a variety of functional and avant-garde games. Take “The Fifth Great Invention” for example. It won the golden award in the first Next Idea contest on “creative online games” since the establishment of partnership between the Palace Museum and Tencent. The applied game is designed on the basis of the “mortise and tenon joint”, a vital part in the ancient Chinese architectural art, in a bid to help players experience the unique charm of the structural art in ancient buildings.

First themed applied game “The Palace Museum: Little Craftsman” (tentative name) was released by honored guests.

The event featured the demonstration of the upcoming “The Palace Museum: Little Craftsman” (tentative name), the first Palace Museum-themed applied game ever. Applied game distinguishes itself from the traditional entertaining games by attaching more importance to the functionality of the game other than pure entertainment. It’s generally developed to teach knowledge and techniques, provide professional training and simulate. “The Palace Museum: Little Craftsman” (tentative name) is jointly developed by the Palace Museum and Tencent Games. In a simulated real scene of the Palace Museum, the players could “build” the Hall of Mental Cultivation, Hall of Consolation of Mothers and other renowned halls through simple operations and easily acquire the knowledge about the ancient palace buildings in interactive games.

In addition, the avant-garde eye-movement game “Eye·Dream” was launched at the event. This is Tencent’s first game based on the eye-movement tracking technique. Incorporating the elements of the Palace Museum’s collections of classic paintings and calligraphy works, the game realizes real-time synchronization of the screen with the player’s eye movement. All the paintings on the game screen come from classic Chinese paintings and calligraphy works so that the players could appreciate these works in the interactive game.

The cooperation between the Palace Museum and Tencent integrates the brilliant traditional culture with the games and conducts in-depth exploration of the games’ role in education.

Digital conservation of cultural heritage sets new heights for digital museums.

In addition to innovative revitalization of traditional culture in digital forms, the two sides established “Palace Museum—Tencent Creative Lab” in 2017. By virtue of Tencent’s technical advantages, the two sides jointly explored the application of the advanced digital technologies to the conservation, research and display of cultural heritage. By tightly integrating the conservation of cultural heritage with various links of cutting-edge digital technology, the full-process digital coverage from the frontend user to the backend technology was realized, providing a smart solution for the sustainable preservation of the world cultural heritage.

The public launch of frontend products, such as the navigation app “Palace Museum” incubated in the lab and based on the Tencent’s LBS technology, has led to the upgrade of online and offline experience of touring the Palace Museum. The “Palace Museum” app was jointly developed by the Palace Museum and Tencent Map to vividly present a full view of the museum and provide visitors with services like introduction to the museum, location search, route planning and others.

As regards the backend platform building, Tencent Cloud provided technical support for the Palace Museum to establish online platform, achieve rapid expansion to meet the increasing demands for online services in the future, and store the multiple backups of digital images of the cultural relic collection in the Tencent Cloud to ensure the data security of the digital cultural relic. Currently, the two sides will discuss further cooperation in the conservation of digital cultural relic and other fields by use of blockchain technology.

The Palace Museum has comprehensively cooperated with Tencent in the protection, restoration, display, publicity, exhibition, dissemination and public service to advance the digital construction of the Palace Museum in an all-round manner. The three-year cooperation in innovating and revitalizing the digital contents of the “neo-culture creativity” as well as the new-tech’s full-chain support to the digital cultural museum has given birth to a complete digital culture protection solution. Such advanced solution will surely further promote the inheritance of traditional culture, create a growing number of widely popular Chinese cultural symbols and set up new heights in digital cultural museums.