Ancient city uses innovation to attract new visitors

ZHENGZHOU — Luoyang, an ancient capital city in Henan province, has been a significant name amid the splendors of Chinese civilization. Over the 4,000 years of national history, the city served as the capital for 13 dynasties.

Luoyang is home to five capital city ruins, six UNESCO World Heritage sites, 197 cultural relic listings under national and provincial protection, 9,000 pieces of immovable cultural relics and 102 museums.

While strengthening the preservation of cultural relics with tailored measures, Luoyang has, in recent years, explored innovative transformation and injected new vitality into its historical and cultural treasures.

Since 2020, Luoyang has been accelerating the digital transformation of its historical and cultural heritage. Many museums have added digital equipment and applied digital technologies, such as 3D and virtual reality, to increase interactive and immersive activities and capture the attention of visitors, especially young people.

In the 760-square-meter digital interactive hall of the Erlitou Site Museum of the Xia Capital, an immersive 3D space created by nearly 40 projectors reproduces the grandeur of the Erlitou ruins.

They were discovered in 1959 and have been identified by many archaeologists as one of the capital cities during the Xia Dynasty (c. 21st century-16th century BC).

The digital exhibit showcases the dynasty's capital city, handicraft workshops and sacrificial ceremony, providing visitors with impressive visual effects, says Gong Wanyu, director of the museum's digital information department.

The peony museum in Luoyang, the country's only peony-themed museum, has also opened an interactive area at the museum's exhibition hall, displaying a variety of cultural relics and other items related to peony culture through digital technology.

After visitors step on a Chinese character on the ground, a poem related to that character appears. When visitors walk through the gallery, peonies bloom with their footsteps and change into different shapes and colors.

The museum's digital exhibits now account for about 70 percent of the total. Li Danyao, a docent at the museum, says application of digital technologies has broken the traditional static exhibition mode and improved the audience's immersive experience.

Luoyang is also providing tourists with an immersive cultural experience through a mix of shopping, dining and other recreational activities.

In a live-action role play (LARP) shop in the old town of Luoyang, players can don traditional apparel and experience various roles from more than 1,000 plays. These plays have turned historical ruins, museums and historical scenic spots into a stage for such live-action role playing, allowing participants to have an immersive experience of ancient times.

Luoyang has been striving to become a national immersive cultural tourism destination in 2025 and China's "capital of LARP". The city has completed the building of an LARP industrial park with an area of 20,000 square meters.

During this year's peony cultural festival in Luoyang in April, the city received 12.32 million visitors in 20 days, becoming one of the country's most popular tourist destinations. Information related to the event's LARP was read 120 million times on Weibo, a major Chinese social media platform.

From January to May, Luoyang received 61.68 million tourists, an increase of 116.96 percent year-on-year. Total revenue was 45.2 billion yuan ($6.3 billion), an increase of 154.63 percent.

"The digital transformation and immersive recreational activities allow visitors to interact with cultural relics in a new way, injecting new vitality into the historical and cultural treasures and helping visitors fully experience the profound history and culture of the ancient capital," says Wang Li, deputy director of the Erlitou Site Museum of the Xia Capital.