Written by: Xinhua News Agency and Shanghai Morning Post
Posted on: December 13, 2018 | 
| 中文
Cultural Expo programme, Nation's Treasures
Visiting exhibitions, listening to lectures, and buying related cultural and creative derivatives?in recent years, has gradually become a new way of life for an increasing number of Chinese people, as they are becoming more and more fond of museums. China "National Treasures", a relics and museology exploration program made and shown by Central Television (CCTV), blends documentary with elements of variety show, selects artifacts from nine major museums in China and tells the stories behind the pieces, to arouse the audience’s attention for the protection of the national cultural relics and civilization.
If you open the bullet screen video website bilibili, whose major user groups are people of post-1995 and post-2000 generations, you will see 240,000 realtime bullet comments scrolling across the screen. Behind the densely projected comments, the program attracted a large number of young fans through the scenes of the Yuan Dynasty painter Huang Gongwang, the Eastern Jin Dynasty calligrapher Wang Xizhi, and Emperor Yongzheng, who traveled back to the Qing Dynasty time and taunted his fourth son—Emperor Qianlong—about his “rural” aesthetics in all respects.
Without the lighting focusing on the porcelain bottle that showcases the great arts of all dynasties, you cannot imagine that this is a cultural legacy exploration program of CCTV.
After the program, known as the Chinese version of the "Night at the Museum" is broadcasted, not only are its main stars frequently listed as the most searched key words on Weibo, but many cultural relics also become online sensations, such as the famous painting "The Vast Land", duhufu, a tiger-shaped tally issued to generals for troop movement from the Warring States Period to Qin Dynasty, the murals "Guard of Honor at the Imperial Palace," and the bone flute.
The TV program collaborates with nine museums, including the Palace Museum of Beijing, Shanghai Museum, Nanjing Museum, Hunan Provincial Museum, Henan Museum, Shaanxi History Museum, Hubei Provincial Museum, Zhejiang Provincial Museum and Liaoning Provincial Museum. In the program, the audience can “watch” the histories of the museums, see three most precious relics selected by each museum, and learn the stories behind them.
In order to make the cultural relics come "alive" on television, the program uses various literary and artistic methods to interpret the national treasures. Each episode of the program is presented by a celebrity, who acts as a “national treasure guardian” and tells the history of the artifacts, while archaeologists, scholars, curators and docents are invited to tell the current situation of the pieces as the "figures in this life." The program connects the past and the present in short plays and story-telling forms, to fully interpret the history and stories behind the national treasures.
In the view of Yu Lei, chief director of the program, cultural relics are like a weathered man with character and vitality. "They not only represent the character and values of our nation, but also affect our way of life today. The audience can “watch” the touching stories about the relics, and perceive the humanistic spirit behind them, which is connected to the audience themselves in blood."
The visual director Hu Zengming was stunned upon seeing the 65 chimes, weighing 2,567 kilograms, neatly hung on a wooden bell shelf. Actor Wang Gang bowed deeply to the 2400-year-old chimes set.
The patterns on the chimes and the bell shelf look extremely magnificent, with a variety of subjects such as people, beasts, dragons, flowers and geometric graphics and multiple techniques such as intaglio, scribing, line drawing and colored drawing.
Yu Xinling, the literary editor in chief, consulted a professor of bamboo slips of the Qin Dynasty from Yunmeng. The elderly professor sat in front of her with a large book containing 1,155 annotated and numbered pieces of bamboo slips and asked, "Which piece do you want to know?" This left the editor in awe again.
A lot of efforts are taken to compare and consider the narration of every story and the explanation of every connotation. Every work, whether it is the expression of artistic creation or the details in the background, must be tightly woven and connected, just like the relics.
After completing each episode, Yu decided that his first task is to open the bilibili website and read the bullet comments from one frame to the next, to see the reactions of the audience.
Someone asked in his comment, "Who is King Chuhui"? Another one replied later, "Goujian's grandson"(they were kings of Yue Kingdom about 2400 years ago). When the story of Zeng Houyi’s chimes was broadcasted, a comment scrolled over, saying, "It feels a bit like reading The Strategies of the Warring States."
Among the 27 artifacts, there are works made out of melancholy, masterpieces built through hard work, and crystallization collecting techniques of different craftsmen, all of which are emotional links between every Chinese and the history.
“The pride of China is scattered on every piece,” Tang Hao, the executive director, said. He added that cultural relics are like a time and space tunnel, through which you can travel to the past. After watching them, you will have a better understanding of where you come from and where you will go.
For a majority of young people, this program makes history appear not simply as numbers over the past 5000 years, rather, as the construction of lively people and things. Cultural relics are no longer strange objects placed in museums, but are the codes carrying Chinese culture genes.
Translated by Xu Donglin
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