Cultural tourism inspired by commercial hits

Tourists ride camels at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring Scenic Area in Dunhuang, Gansu province, last month. The tourist city is renowned for desert landscape as well as Buddhist murals and grottoes. (ZHANG XIAOLIANG/FOR CHINA DAILY)

Hidden within a village community in Gaoping city, North China's Shanxi province, the Tiefo Temple kept its exquisite 500-year-old painted sculptures low-profile for so long. It wasn't until August that its 72-square-meter main hall was opened to the public.

This move came shortly after the release of the blockbuster AAA video game, Black Myth: Wukong, which brought the ancient architecture that inspired 36 scenes in the game into the limelight. The Tiefo Temple is one of them.

Since August, an unprecedented number of tourists have flooded to Gaoping. During holidays and on the weekends, visitor flow at the temple always reaches its daily cap of 3,000 people. On regular days, there are still 400 to 500 travelers, according to Shen Fei, secretary of the leading Party members group for Gaoping's culture and tourism bureau.

Visitors need to book online in advance and queue for a chance to glimpse the fragile sculptures from a safe distance. Sometimes, they wait in line for hours just to observe the sculptures for a few minutes.

Yet, Shen said, no negative feedback has been received from visitors. "They understand that the safety of the artifacts is the priority. The painted sculptures are so overwhelming that they don't mind waiting."

In recent years, China's cultural tourism boom has driven heritage preservation organizations to continuously reflect on the balance between protection and utilization. Just like the Tiefo Temple, wider public access to cultural heritage sites and museums has been taken into consideration.

During this year's two sessions, the annual gatherings of the National People's Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Hang Kan, a deputy to the 14th NPC and director of the Yungang Research Institute, which is in charge of the protection, research and administration of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, Shanxi, suggested the implementation of a classification and evaluation system of cultural heritage sites.