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Digitalization is the standard for this year's Chinese Cultural Heritage Day exhibits that opened Saturday at the Capital Museum in Beijing.

Performers in the Capital Museum arts troupe display a traditional Shandong folk dance entitled "Fisherman's Serenade," accompanied by a Gu Zheng, at the opening of the fifth annual Chinese Cultural Heritage Day exhibition. [Courtney Price/China.org.cn]

The event marked the fifth annual Cultural Heritage Day celebration, during which the museum and the Ministry of Culture intend to catalogue and share what they call intangible culture from all over China. Intangible culture includes festivals, song and dance traditions, arts and crafts, literature and theatre.

"When we entered the new century, the digital technologies showed us their advantages to preserve and to communicate," said Li Song, who is the director of the Native Literature and Arts Development Center of the Ministry of Culture. That's why the theme for this year's celebration is "Feel the Heritage: Digital Efforts to Preserve China's Intangible Cultural Heritages."

Li spoke at the press conference held at the museum to initiate this year's cultural commemoration. Performers in the museum's arts troupe opened the press conference with an elegant Shandong classic folk dance, Fisherman's Serenade, which was accompanied by a Gu Zheng, a Chinese plucked zither.

Visitors in the new exhibit view walls covered with photographs of diverse cultural customs. The pictures display many different types of customs, including arts and crafts, festivals and traditional dress. [Courtney Price/China.org.cn]

In creating the exhibit, which will be on display in the bottom floor of the museum until August 1, Chinese scholars not only digitally collected cultural information, but also used new media to share the culture with museum visitors. The exhibition room is filled with many different media forms - including audio with music and stories, video, photography, text and interactive computer programs - which are designed to optimize the visitors' cultural experiences.

In the 1970s, the Ministry of Culture, along with the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the China Federation of Literary and Artistic Circles, began cataloging folk music, dance, theatre opera and legends. The effort has produced 298 volumes that include 400 books and 450 million words of cultural record.

"The development of the modern technologies allowed us to have more space for preservation, communication, promotion and utilization of the Intangible Cultural Heritages," Li said. "The combination of heritage and technology is pushing current promotion and future development of cultural heritage forward, and it will revolutionize heritage education, public cultural service and cultural industry development."

For centuries, Chinese scholars have been recording the history and culture of China, producing works like The Book of Poetry, Yue fu and the Complete Works of Chinese Classics. The ever-advancing technology promises to provide a means of preservation and communication of Chinese culture for centuries more.

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