The museum that was getting more and more rolled up my wallet
Author | Fir firs
Edit | Lu Yiming
Title map | Figureworm Creative
The tourist season is not over yet, and this year's most unexpected Internet celebrity attractions have been released ahead of schedule.
Throughout the summer vacation, tickets to major museums are difficult to find, make an appointment to enter the museum, you have to use the skills and techniques to grab concert tickets: multi-threaded operation, pinching into the system, eyesight and hand speed, pay attention to a stable, accurate, ruthless, psychological and physical fitness is a test.
Really can't grab or temporarily want to visit the museum, you can also take the special exhibition passage to enter, open the mobile phone to see, the special exhibition ticket price is amazing - regular price ticket 198 yuan, half-price ticket 99 yuan, it is inevitable to be nervous, but come to come, or grit your teeth and spend money in.
The ticketing interface of the National Expo paid exhibition. (Photo: National Expo Exhibition Mini Program)
After getting the ticket, I finally followed the team to move into the cool museum from under the scorching sun of 53 ° C, and found that the people who poured into here were no less than those who were blocked out of the "ticket gate" - there were people walking their babies in the lobby, picnicking in the rest area, stamping and punching the "museum passport" in each exhibition hall... Popular museums such as Sanxingdui and the flow of people in the exhibition halls are huge, and the degree of friction is comparable to that of the Bund in Shanghai during the National Day holiday.
Sanxingdui Museum exhibition hall. (Photo/Little Red Book @ I'm Just a Zongzi)
Many museums have announced additional openings and extended summer opening hours, but it is not enough to open until the evening, because there are still those who have been strolling all day and are not willing to leave when it is dark.
Announcement of the delayed opening of the Shaanxi History Museum (Photo/Weibo)
How is this year's "Wenbo fever" hotter than the weather? Why does this museum have to go?
Museum revenue,
Dreamy linkage, each showing its own powers
At present, more than 90% of museums in the country are open for free, and cultural and creative products are becoming an important source of income for museums.
10 years ago, the Forbidden City Cultural and Creative Industries relied on creative products such as account tape, folding fans, luggage tags and other creative products to get out of the circle, and after opening an online store, various "gifts from the Forbidden City" swept the whole Internet, and the "cultural and creative competition" of major domestic museums also began.
The popular folding fan of the Forbidden City. (Photo/Screenshot of the Forbidden City Taobao)
In 2019, the Henan Museum launched an archaeological blind box, if you want to take out the "cultural relics" buried in the soil, you have to simulate the steps of field archaeology, starting from the exploration party, excavating the ground, cleaning and even repairing, so that many netizens have enough of archaeological addiction, experience the excitement of opening the hidden treasure of the town hall, and witness the joy and sense of achievement of cultural relics unearthed.
I dig "artifacts" at home. (Photo/Weibo)
Nowadays, cultural and creative stores have long become the standard of major museums, in addition to the surrounding cultural relics of their respective town halls, there are also various figures, toys, and even life department stores: "Queen's Seal" bus card, Yue Wang Goujian sword U disk, naan-shaped mouse pad... are all practical choices for migrant workers to work from home, even the "horse step feiyan" doll, which is called "green horse stepping chicken" by netizens, was favored because of ugliness and once sold out.
As a tourist with a habit of visiting museums, Sha Sha admitted, "I didn't spend too much money on cultural and creative aspects before, and the quality of some things made me feel that it was not very worthwhile", but recently when visiting museums, "I think that some small things are quite cute and thoughtful, and because it is difficult to travel far during the holidays, from south to north, I am willing to bring a little souvenir."
Buying cultural creativity in a museum simply can't stop. (Photo/Little Red Book @ Chuyi One Pinch of Mao)
Sha Sha remembers that once a friend who was traveling with her saw a hat with a calligraphy inscription in Luoyang, "She liked it at the time, but she didn't buy it." Later, I found that I couldn't find that model on the Internet, so I regretted it very much, and I wanted to take the car and go back to buy the hat immediately. After that, he also said that if he saw something he liked in the future, he would still buy it as soon as possible, and this situation really passed through this village and there was no such store."
During May Day in 2021, the "bronze mask" ice cream launched by Sanxingdui Cultural and Creative only took one morning to sell out of stock and explode out of the circle, after that, many netizens went to the museum specially for ice cream, and other museums also developed their own cultural and creative ice cream and joined the battle.
Out of the circle "bronze mask". (Photo/Weibo @ Sichuan Guanghan Sanxingdui Museum)
Cultural and creative ice cream has blossomed everywhere, but also broadened the research and development ideas of cultural and creative food, and when it comes to the meal, the audience does not have to go out of the museum gate, go to the restaurant to show off the bowl of "chime braised egg noodles", taste a "Four Sheep Fangzun" cake, drink a cup of Song Dynasty tea drink "endorsed" by Song Xiaozong, or taste the "Wanchun Jinfu" Forbidden City afternoon tea... The dining category is comparable to the food stalls and coffee shops outside, but these products also carry a historical heritage and book atmosphere.
If you're hungry, eat some of the treasures of the town hall. (Photo/Little Red Book @ East Lake Ono)
When the museum opens its doors, the main theme is fantasy linkage, all-encompassing, breaking the spatial division and field boundaries, and finding ways to become shopping malls, restaurants, and even parks and theaters.
fancy inner roll,
How spelling the museum is
Once regarded as a cold and mysterious museum, it has been trying to "put down its body".
(Photo/"I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City")
In 2016, the documentary "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", which tells the daily life of cultural relics restoration workers, became popular, and since then, everyone's impression of the cultural museum industry has changed greatly. After watching this film, many young viewers even shouted to go to work in the Forbidden City.
"I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City" can be called a job advertisement for the Forbidden City. (Photo/Douban)
In the following years, many cultural and museum programs close to the people, such as "National Treasure" and "If National Treasure Could Talk", were successively relayed, either inviting stars to be "guardians of national treasures", or letting cultural relics "speak" and telling about their past and present lives, and the museum that gave the mirror attracted a large wave of "traffic".
At the same time, the discovery of the 1800-year-old "Qi Analects" bamboo and Sanxingdui sites in the Haiduhou Tomb restarted excavation, and the cultural relics continued to be "updated", which attracted the attention of the whole people and greatly enhanced the willingness of the audience to visit the museum.
(Photo/Figureworm Creative)
On March 20, 2021, Sanxingdui announced major archaeological discoveries, followed by the Qingming holiday, and the number of visitors to Sanxingdui Museum hit a record high - 45,300 people poured into Sanxingdui Museum, achieving ticket revenue of 2,465,800 yuan, an increase of 278% and 329.73% respectively over the same period in 2019 before the epidemic.
Many people have the opportunity to walk into the museums around them because of these documentaries, variety shows or archaeological progress, to see the true face of national treasures, and every winter and summer vacation, museums everywhere are welcoming new peaks of traffic.
The "Canal Trail" secret room. (Photo: Grand Canal Museum of China)
This year, the museum circle has detected the heat of the escape room: in the "Canal Mystery" secret room of the Grand Canal Museum of China, the audience can turn into a "secret agent of the capital water supervision" to escort Jia Wang back to Beijing, because it is a free project, some netizens feel that "the difficulty of grabbing tickets in the secret room is greater than making an appointment to enter the museum", and some audiences have played for too long because they are addicted to the plot, and finally they have not even finished watching the basic exhibition of the museum.
The "ancient tomb exploration" of Luoyang Ancient Tomb Museum is known as the country's first "history and humanities museum overnight project", in this "script killing" game, players will "resurrect" the tomb owner and spend the night in the museum, as for the 1688 yuan to be spent in these two days and one night, compared with the curiosity of players, it is almost not worth mentioning.
Registration page for "Night at the Museum". (Photo: Ancient Capital Study Mini Program)
Some museums choose to move the drama stage into the museum: in order to let everyone face to face with Su Dongpo "himself", the Sichuan Provincial Museum cooperated with the Sichuan Renyi Theater to perform a drama in the Su Shi-themed cultural relics exhibition hall; The audience listened to the live chime concert of the Hubei Provincial Museum and understood how ancient emperors could not think about dynasty politics because of drinking banquets; In the Guangdong Provincial Museum, dancers dance modern dances in front of Song and Yuan calligraphy and paintings accompanied by live folk music, using modern human body language to talk with pen and ink on a thousand-year-old picture scroll...
The audience meets Su Dongpo at the museum. (Photo/Weibo @Sichuan People's Art Theater)
Online and offline, the museum presents a scene of flowers, but is it enough to show that the core of the museum is really "hot"?
Behind the "heat" of Wenbo,
Imperceptible "cold"
Stripped of the coat of entertainment, back to the exhibition hall, the audience stood in front of the display case, facing the unfamiliar areas that are difficult to touch in their daily lives, for most of the audience, many exhibition displays are likely to be "incomprehensible", "uninteresting" and "unrememberable".
(Photo: Photo by Fir)
People who visit museums often are no strangers to scenes where children drag their parents to leave, sometimes screaming, running, and slapping on display cases. In the end, tired adults and children had to walk around and check in, and in the case of hurriedly taking photos of each exhibit and leaving, the audience's impression of the local culture remained in the hearsay of the past, and the invisible threshold made the story behind the exhibits still unpopular.
Spectators taking pictures of the exhibits. (Photo: Photo by Fir)
Initially, people walked into the museum because they were curious and expectant about the past of the land under their feet, and the collection of cultural relics and the origins behind them are the root of the museum.
In "National Treasure", cultural relics photographer Zhao Zhen shared the story of his photographs of nearly 8,000 terracotta warriors, among which there is a clear fingerprint on the "No. 28 Figurine" of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin, "It is the fingerprint left by the craftsmen who made the terracotta army more than 2,200 years ago!" Zhao Zhen choked up, "When I saw that sight, time had disappeared, right in the same position, he had just left, and I stepped on his feet..."
Clear fingerprints on terracotta warriors. (Photo/"National Treasure Season 3")
Try to use our eyes to trace those objects that have existed for thousands of years, gaze and imagination can make us go back in time, return to the old place, and feel the resonance and shock brought by calm thinking.
However, if "laymen" want to achieve such an exhibition experience, they must also use the museum to set up the handle, using more popular and intuitive exhibition board text, more colloquial audio guides and manual explanations, or unexpected tips, which can help understand and reduce the strange and cold distance of the exhibits.
A girl listening intently to a volunteer in the exhibition hall. (Photo/Fir Fir)
Although the way of exhibition needs to be improved, visiting museums is indeed becoming a way of life for more people: in the exhibition hall, there are often children as tall as the exhibition booth, tinkering with their own audio guides and wearing headphones to quietly watch the exhibits; Young people in groups of three or two, stopping in front of the display case, immersed in discussion and thoughts; The volunteer docents were surrounded by groups, and everyone's inquisitive eyes were condensed...
(Photo: Photo by Fir)
As long as it can attract more people to enter the door of the museum with curiosity and expectation, the various flower work of the cultural and museum circle competing to be a "conspicuous bag" will finally be in vain.
Proofreader: Yang Chao
Operation: Hee-hee
Typesetting: Xiong Ziyu
1. Beijing News Museum income reaches the highest in history Which cultural and creative products can best "live"?
2. Yang Xiaolin. Research on funding sources of state-owned museums (1996-2019)[J]. Museum,2022(1):102-112. DOI:10.3969/j.issn.2096-1715.2022.01.016.
3. Sanxingdui Museum continues to create a circle of cultural and creative products, with unlimited creativity and infinite charm China Tourism News, 2021.04.26