Visiting the Forbidden City at Night with a Cultural Treasure Tot as Your Guide

Text by Wei Ruyu, compiled and reported

Recently, the Forbidden City Museum has been quite lively in the middle of the night, with a porcelain doll of the “White Glazed Baby Pillow from the Ding Kiln of the Northern Song Dynasty” making appearances. It leads visitors into the “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” painting, exploring its features and meanings, and engaging in dialogue with the figures in the artwork; it also joins supporting characters such as the “Jade Duck” and the “Jade Exorcising Talisman,” along with the handsome little white horse from Giuseppe Castiglione’s (Lang Shining) “Hundred Horses” of the Qing Dynasty, to get acquainted with Huang Tingjian’s “Poem on the Intoxication of Floral Fragrance,” and returns to the plains where the little white horse once galloped…….

This is the sequel to the popular Palace Museum video “Animating National Treasures” — “Treasure Tots Enter the Treasure Mountain.” It can now be viewed on the official Palace Museum website (www.npm.gov.tw/digital/archives), where you can journey through the 3D spaces of exhibition halls and artworks alongside characters from famous paintings — truly vivid and entertaining.

In addition to accessing the Palace Museum through the boundless internet, technological creativity is also showcased on-site through a ten-meter-long “Animated Ancient Paintings” video, the dreamlike blend of past and present in “Roaming Through Time: Savoring Life,” and the results of the “One Billion Pixel Artifact Photography” project jointly developed by the Palace Museum and Microsoft Research Asia.

“Animated Ancient Paintings” combines the format of traditional handscroll paintings with the essence of animation. The content is drawn from two of the Palace Museum’s most treasured works: the “Qing Court Version of Along the River During the Qingming Festival” and the “Ming Dynasty, Wen Zhengming’s After the Red Cliff, After Zhao Boju.” The animation team selected the most iconic and story-rich scenes from the paintings, faithfully modeling, coloring, and layering them to authentically reproduce 100% of the original brushwork, character details, silk texture, and color palette.

“One Billion Pixel Artifact Photography” is a collaboration between the Palace Museum and Microsoft Research Asia (MARA), using prototype equipment to photograph two highly popular Palace Museum collections: the “Yuan Dynasty, Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” and the “Ming Dynasty, Qiu Ying’s Spring Morning in the Han Palace.” The public can experience these works firsthand via touch interaction at the “National Treasure Appreciation Interactive Table” in the exhibition hall.

“Roaming Through Time: Savoring Life” interprets the Palace Museum’s collection of calligraphy and paintings in an innovative dynamic multimedia format. Through the fantastical journey of the animated protagonist, it introduces the ancient lifestyle arts — the “Four Arts of the Literati” (music, chess, calligraphy, painting) and the “Four Arts of Daily Living” (tea preparation, incense burning, hanging paintings, flower arranging). It is screened daily in the Palace Museum’s B1 Multimedia Theater at 11:30 AM, 2:30 PM, 4:30 PM, and 6:00 PM.