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in recent years, everyone’s understanding of entertainment has really changed.

this is particularly obvious when compared.

for example, more than 60 concerts were cancelled in the first half of this year.

one of the main reasons is that the tickets cannot be sold.

it is said that the lowest discount for jacky cheung's concert in zhengzhou is 56%, mayday's concert in shenzhen is even 50% off, and eason chan, twins, rainie yang and other tours also have discounts...

but on the other hand, the museum, which originally looked serious, was packed with young people having fun.

for example, the palace museum has 40,000 tickets available for sale every day, and they are sold out in seconds.

the original design capacity of the shaanxi history museum was 4,000 people per day, but now it has been increased to 12,000 people per day, but 600,000 people are rushing for tickets.

museums, why are they so popular?

needless to say, the first-tier museums.

the forbidden city has a collection of more than 1.8 million items, which is 4.6 times that of the louvre. it sells 40,000 tickets a day, and its reception capacity crushes that of the british museum.

not to mention the summer vacation, there are long queues even on weekdays.

new museums are even more arrogant.

the "china archaeological museum", which was only opened to the public in september 2023, was named "the most difficult museum to make an appointment with in china" by netizens as soon as it went online.

the ticket price is 198 yuan, and only 500 people are accepted every day. reservations must be made 3 days in advance.

not only that, it is not open to the public on mondays and tuesdays, and is left to staff to do protection and repairs, as well as for history, archaeology, and cultural and museum professionals to study and research.

what they want to study are more than 6,000 authentic artifacts, many of which are exhibits moved directly from the archaeological site.

the pressure is put on the reservation and ticket grabbing system.

looking across the country, almost none of the top 100 museums are easy to make an appointment with.

at the entrance of the national museum, scalpers clearly marked the prices of tickets, with the agency fee being “85 for adults and 100 for children”.

a media interviewed 20 tourists, among whom only one got the ticket through the normal reservation procedure.

but because they are hard to get, the market has inadvertently opened up to scalpers.

someone used technical means to invade the reservation platform with millions of fake accounts to grab tickets in advance, creating the illusion that 1.6 million people were grabbing tickets at the same time and they were sold out in one minute.

this summer, 425,000 high-risk accounts were blocked on the national museum's reservation platform.

another 1.657 million high-frequency access ip addresses were all banned from logging in.

there are also human purchasing agents. in beijing alone, 62 people were criminally detained and 117 people were administratively detained, all of which were related to reselling tickets.

the fact that it supports such a huge illegal industry chain indirectly proves tourists' enthusiasm for museums.

data shows that chinese museums received 1.29 billion visitors in 2023, more than double the number in 2022 and exceeding the peak year of 2019.

this year, many museums, such as the chongqing china three gorges museum, have received as many visitors as they did in the whole of last year in the first eight months.

a short-term boom can be due to luck, but a long-term boom with lasting effects must have reasons behind it.

according to a report by unesco, there are approximately 104,000 museums in the world.

the number of museums in the united states alone exceeds 33,000. in addition, the number of museums in russia, germany, and japan exceeds 5,000 each.

by the end of 2023, there will be 6,833 museums in china.

according to data disclosed by the state administration of cultural heritage, in 2023, chinese museums held more than 40,000 exhibitions, attracting 1.29 billion visitors.

it would take at least eight years to appreciate all 46.916 million cultural relics in the collection.

judging from the above facts, china's museums are very competitive in both quantity and quality.

but the problem is that once china’s museums are divided by the population, there will not be enough.

let’s take the uk as an example.

the population of the uk is approximately 68.35 million, and there are a total of 3,183 museums in the uk.

on average, there is one museum for every 21,400 people.

but in china, there are 6,833 museums for a population of 1.41 billion, meaning there is approximately one museum for every 206,000 people.

the per capita holdings are too small and there is not enough to go around, which is the direct cause of the congestion in chinese museums.

china is not unaware of this problem.

in the ten years from 2008 to 2018, the number of museums in china grew rapidly, from 2,970 to 5,354.

after 2018, china opened approximately 300 new museums every year.

as the number of museums increases, the number of related practitioners also increases year by year.

in the 20 years between 2000 and 2021, the number of people working in museums in china increased by about 91,000.

with the successful broadcast of the documentary "i repair cultural relics in the forbidden city" in 2016, its huge influence enabled the chinese museum industry to gain 12,000 new staff members in 2017.

antique clock restoration

the other side of rapid growth is often a huge gap.

although china's museums and related facilities have grown rapidly in recent years, they still cannot meet the needs of tourists.

from 1956 to 1976, after twenty years of bumpy attempts, there were only more than 200 museums in china.

it was not until 1990 that the number of museums in china reached more than 1,400.

from 1990 to mid-2005, almost all museums were busy protecting, restoring and displaying cultural relics.

during this period, china has introduced a large number of museum-related policies, with the main focus on the protection and management of cultural relics collections.

the museum has no time to take care of detailed service aspects, so most ordinary tourists can only browse the exhibits.

after 2000, at the policy level, display, cultural heritage and mass education functions have received increasing attention.

on the one hand, the museum's curatorial ideas are becoming more flexible.

large museums with important cultural relics use digital technology as a standard for curatorial work and provide finely stratified services to the population.

for example, activities such as dreaming of the old summer palace and treasures of the silk road are all activities in which museums use vr technology to restore historical scenes that have disappeared.

when you search for sanxingdui, you will find 6 sacrificial pits, laboratories, archaeological excavation cabins and other scenes presented in a 1:1 scale.

some small local museums have also followed the big museums to go to the cloud, leveraging the power to improve their own exhibition experience.

there is a "dragon carving cloud" in jilin province, which contains the contents of all the large and small museums in the province, allowing tourists to visit the exhibition online.

after perfecting every link in the industrial chain, the museum industry once again integrated its resources and launched the killer move of pan-entertainment.

the most successful example is "national treasure", which premiered in 2017.

as of the fourth season this year, the ratings for each season have been above 9 points.

in terms of format, it is still the same as variety shows, inviting celebrities to perform stage plays to make people laugh.

but "national treasure" also invited museum staff to orally describe how they interact with cultural relics in their work, making archaeology a zero-threshold event.

qin shihuang asked craftsmen to build his imperial mausoleum and terracotta warriors for him. how could the quality and progress of such a project be guaranteed?

it is based on a seal that each craftsman stamped on the terracotta warriors. whoever makes it is responsible for it.

these terracotta warriors were all hand-carved by craftsmen. one craftsman even left clear fingerprints on the lips of the warrior.

the touching story is hidden in the details.

using digitization and entertainment to upgrade the industry, major museums are armed to the teeth and hair tips, it is hard not to be popular.

the current popularity of museums is largely inseparable from the spread of information by ordinary people.

this kind of spontaneous, phenomenal assistance is hard to come by.

why have chinese museums waited for this opportunity in recent years?

one direct reason is that chinese people have the money to travel and see other cities.

data from the national bureau of statistics show that as of 2017, china's middle-income population (with annual household income between 100,000 and 500,000 yuan) has exceeded 400 million and is growing steadily.

not only that, as of 2018, the per capita disposable income of chinese residents has reached 28,228 yuan.

by 2023, this figure had grown to 39,218 yuan, an increase of 6.1% over the previous year.

this means that china already has the world's largest and most growing middle-income group.

when ordinary people have money, they will constantly upgrade their consumption and experience, from satisfying their basic needs to satisfying their spirits.

another reason is the convenient transportation.

more than a decade ago, chinese people had two general ideas when visiting museums.

one is when you see a museum during your travels, you would feel really sorry for yourself if you don’t go in and take a look.

after all, you have spent so much time on the road, and you have to maximize the value of the train ticket whenever you go to a place.

second, people go to museums specifically for learning, and have goals and burdens, so it is not easy for them to relax.

but with the rapid development of china's high-speed rail, the time cost for chinese people to travel within the country has been greatly reduced.

within three hours, a chinese person can take the high-speed rail to travel between beijing-tianjin-hebei, the yangtze river delta, and the pearl river delta; within four hours, he can reach shaanxi from sichuan.

if you go from shanghai to xi'an, it used to take at least 12 hours by ordinary express train. now by high-speed rail, the time has been shortened to about 7 hours.

as air ticket prices become more affordable, air travel has become mainstream, and the time saved is significant.

the convenience of transportation has reduced the chinese people's harshness and compulsion to travel, and visiting museums has become a voluntary and enjoyable thing.

this is the spillover bonus of the development of the national transportation industry to the cultural and tourism industry.

another very important point is the popularization and development of education in china.

especially the well-educated generation has become the backbone of society. after having children, they have a stronger desire to let their children feel the influence of history.

the cultural and tourism industry also contributes to the summer museum craze.

where have all the people gone?

dispersion and sinking.

for example, in shandong, people are no longer just focusing on jinan and qingdao. many people also go to linyi to visit the ancient city of langya, to qingzhou to see the capital of southern yan, and to the qingzhou museum and the li qingzhao memorial shrine.

many people are no longer obsessed with pursuing superficial knowledge, but need to truly understand and comprehend some deeply buried history.

the popular cultural programs such as "national treasure", "if national treasures could talk", "china in classics", "china in intangible cultural heritage", and even the 2016 "i repair cultural relics in the forbidden city", actually coincide with this time node.

at the same time, china provides billions of special subsidies every year to support the development of museums.

for example, to support the free opening of museums, the central government provides a special subsidy.

it will be 3.084 billion yuan in 2021, 2.851 billion yuan in 2022, and 3.44 billion yuan in 2023.

with the two-way rush, the cultural and creative products of major museums have also come up with new ideas, which not only have cultural heritage, but are also bold and humorous and suitable for online dissemination.

for example, the "yongzheng imperial approval" series of folding fans launched by the palace museum's taobao website easily sold over 10,000 units on the official website, and even the imitations from small knockoff shops were selling out.

recently, "black myth: wukong" has become a hot topic, and the game screen presents a lot of realistic details.

in order to present these, the game team spent several years scanning 36 ancient temple ruins across the country, 27 of which are located in shanxi. this also allowed shanxi to catch the last train of popularity at the end of the summer vacation.

"black myth: wukong" (above) and the real-life thousand-armed guanyin statue at baoding mountain in dazu rock carvings (below)

however, if there is one thing that is most worth watching in "black myth: wukong", it is the culture hidden in the details.

for example, as the man destined to inherit wukong's will, whenever he arrived at a land temple, he would burn incense with his left hand and hold weapons with his right hand, which embodied the words in the "tao te ching" such as "a gentleman values ​​the left when living and the right when fighting", "good things are done on the left, bad things are done on the right".

even among chinese people, only one out of ten has read a classic like the tao te ching seriously.

but it is precisely this level of dissemination that has allowed chinese culture to break through the hegemony of western discourse. "dragon" is no longer the "dragon" misunderstood by foreigners, and monster can be directly translated into "yaoguai".

this is the power of culture, invisible, yet profound and huge.

the popularity of museums is actually a natural result of decades of development in china.