The country's museums are going all out to reach the public — with cartoons, cushions and LOADS OF trinkets
Something quirky was happening in the usually rarefied, straight-laced confines of Prince Kung's Mansion in Beijing. A show whose star turned to be a red fox dressed in the blue and white long suit of a prince was being held in the mansion, and hundreds of people, mostly young, had flocked to see it.
More other red foxes, with round hats, held in their hands a rendering of the Chinese character fu, meaning lucky, inspired by Emperor Kangxi's representation of fu as a birthday gift to his grandmother in 1673. It is part of the collection of Prince Kung's Palace Museum, as the mansion is officially known, and reproductions of it are the most popular products the museum's store sells.
In July the museum welcomed to its promotional team a cartoon image that will help it develop its merchandise. The designer of the red fox, called Ali, was the company Dream Castle Culture of Beijing, which in conjunction with the museum has produced other merchandise such as chopsticks, dolls, fans, key rings and lanterns.
"We hope to attract young people and develop more interesting products in a market for museum merchandise that is booming," says Chen Xiaowen, deputy director of Prince Kung's Palace Museum.
The museum shop sells more than 100,000 scrolls a year inscribed with the character fu, and it took in a total of 70 million yuan ($10.5 million) last year, Chen says, most of their buyers being middle-aged tourists.
However, the museum's ambitions extend far beyond hawking good-luck symbols to the masses, and this year it set up a department whose task is to look at how it can draw on its huge collections to develop more products, especially those young people, and thus set the museums cash registers ringing.
In so doing, Prince Kung's Palace Museum is a kindred spirit with thousands of other museums throughout the country that over the past few years have begun to cast aside the image of stuffy institutions out of touch with the public to be replaced by switched on business operations that know how to turn a dollar.
In July, Suzhou Museum in Jiangsu province and fashionable clothes brands on T-mall, China's largest e-commerce platform, put their heads together to use elements from the museum's ink paintings and calligraphy in designs for T-shirts and dresses. Not only that, but for a brief time the museum became the venue for a fashion show, perhaps a first in China.
Elements of works by the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) scholar and calligrapher Tang Bohu and even of the museum's architecture designed by I.M. Pei have even found their way onto chic articles of clothing, and in just one three-day period the platform attracted about 60,000 buyers.
Jiang Han, who is responsible for product development for Suzhou Museum, says its fashion initiative has set the standard for other museums across the country that need to get in touch with people and reshape the attitudes of young people regarding museums.
Chen Ruijin, director of Suzhou Museum, says: "Online shopping platforms are perfect for helping sales of museum products grow. We ought to use the era of the internet to spread our traditional culture in new ways."
Just as the Suzhou Museum has set itself up as an exemplar of innovation for other cultural institutions, the country's top museums, the China National Museum and the Palace Museum (also known as the Forbidden City), both in Beijing, are showing the way on e-commerce, having set up separate operations on the online trader.
The two museums have sold thousands of artistic items, many inspired by items in their collections, in thousands of categories, priced from 20 yuan to more than 10,000 yuan.
China National Museum announced in March that it would work with the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group on a project called Cultural and Creative China, which aims to bring together more than 100 museums in the country to develop and sell museum merchandise. In June, the Shanghai free trade zone gave the museum approval to develop some products there. The approval covers about 400 antiques from museums that are participants in Cultural and Creative China.
"The project is akin to an aircraft carrier for museums," says Hu Huanzhong, general manager of Shanghai Free Trade Zone International Culture Investment and Development Company. "China National Museum alone has 1.3 million collections. Now many foreign design companies are looking to work with us."
