In March 2023, Taiyuan hosted a province-level push to connect cultural tourism promotion with digital and interactive media, and Shanxi’s first “virtual digital promoter”, Qingniao , was introduced as a flagship character for promoting Shanxi’s cultural and tourism identity. The character was explicitly linked to cultural-heritage symbolism by being inspired by a bird-shaped wine vessel in Shanxi Museum , and was positioned as a province-facing promotional persona rather than an internal tool. Shanxi Zhisheng Media Technology (山西智胜传媒科技股份有限公司) was publicly identified as the builder of Qingniao, framing the project as a commercial, production-led virtual-ambassador build rooted in Shanxi’s cultural assets.
In August 2023, Qingniao’s construction and deployment began to be discussed in industry-facing terms as a replicable “case”, positioning the project not only as a cultural marketing asset but also as an example of virtual-human-enabled sectoral practice. Shiyou Technology (世优科技) publicly associated itself with Qingniao’s technical support, describing that support as part of its wider virtualhuman services and positioning Qingniao as a cultural-tourism virtual-human outcome rather than a purely artistic animation effort. This month-level framing mattered for Shanxi’s trajectory because it signalled that Shanxi-branded digital humans were already being treated as commercialisable, serviceprovider-deliverable implementations, aligning tourism identity work with an emerging vendor ecosystem.
In October 2023, Shanxi’s tourism-facing digital-human strategy widened from a single flagship character to a portfolio approach when Jin Yiyi was introduced as a new virtual image spokesperson aligned with regional identity, explicitly framed as “the Shanxi daughter” and presented as part of Shanxi cultural-tourism promotion rather than a limited-time campaign mascot. The development work was attributed to Shanxi Chenhan Digital Technology (山西辰涵数字科技公司), anchoring the initiative in a Shanxi-based production and development context and indicating that the province’s tourism authority was willing to commission local digital-technology capability for a persistent, publicfacing virtual persona.
In May 2024, Jin Yiyi was operationalised in tourism-facing settings as part of broader efforts to strengthen “tourism satisfaction” and visitor engagement, including the use of a themed “travel pass” concept linked to guided exploration and experience design in Shanxi tourism destinations. This period demonstrated that the virtual-promoter strategy was not confined to online promotional clips but was being used to scaffold on-the-ground or itinerary-led tourism participation in Shanxi, reinforcing the digital human’s role as an “experience layer” rather than a standalone media product. In May 2024, a second major strand of Shanxi’s digital-human development took shape around city branding and cultural IP in Datong , where local cultural strategy connected a legendary figure to contemporary digital embodiment. A cultural-creative competition was launched under local publicity guidance, creating an explicit pathway from cultural-IP planning to later digital-human productisation, and establishing the local political and media conditions for a digital-human project intended to represent Datong’s identity. This move mattered because it prepared a public narrative in which a digital human would be treated not as novelty entertainment but as a city-image asset and a driver of tourismcultural integration.
In July 2024, during Shanxi’s major tourism-development promotion cycle in Taiyuan, two city-facing digital characters, Jin Jin and Yang Yang , appeared in the event’s news-centre setting as interactive “explainers” capable of responding to common questions about the city and the programme. The characters were described as being built using large-model capability by Xinhua Zhiyun Technology (新华智云科技有限公司), and were not limited to a single display surface, since they were presented both on a large on-site screen and as interactive entities available via a mini-programme. The significance for Shanxi was that the province’s tourism-promotion events were becoming testbeds for multi-channel digital-human deployment, using event infrastructure and mobile access to turn a branding mascot into a functional visitor-information interface. In July 2024, Datong’s city-IP strand moved from preparatory cultural work into explicit crossorganisation production arrangements, forming the backbone of what would later become a widely publicised 3D hyper-realistic digital human. Zhonghua Book Company (中华书局) became a central partner in the Datong strand, with reporting describing strategic cooperation between Datong’s publicity system and the publisher, alongside contracting arrangements through Datong’s media system with GuLian Beijing Digital Media Technology (古联（北京）数字传媒科技有限公司) for custom development and related services. This month is important in the Shanxi chronology because it formalised the production chain: Shanxi city-branding demand on one side, and a publishing-anddigital-media technology consortium on the other, creating a pathway for a cultural figure to be rebuilt as an interactive, media-ready digital human.
In August 2024, Shanxi’s province-level cultural-tourism apparatus also engaged the commercial digital human supply chain through procurement, as Tianyu Digital Technology Dalian Group (天娱数字科技 （大连）集团股份有限公司) announced that its subsidiary Yuanyuan Technology (元圆科技) had won a Shanxi provincial culture-and-tourism promotional project explicitly framed around “talking Shanxi” through a virtual-human promotional programme. While the reporting emphasised the win rather than detailed delivery outcomes, the month-level signal was clear: Shanxi’s cultural-tourism promotion was being tied to externally delivered virtual-human capability at the level of provincial contracting, helping move digital humans from one-off showcases to structured promotional programmes.
In October 2024, Shanxi’s digital-human development also advanced into red-culture interpretation and museum-like settings in Wuxiang County in Changzhi , where an all-digital museum concept dedicated to the Eighth Route Army was reported as having opened without relying on physical artefacts as its interpretive core. The museum’s approach relied on artificial intelligence, a continually expanding database of historical materials, and interactive digital exhibits tied to people, places, and events; within this system, a digital guide in uniform named Yang Hongxing was described as a focal interactive avatar. The Shanxi-specific significance was the shift from tourism promotion alone to immersive historical storytelling where a digital human becomes part of an interpretive and educational interface rather than only a marketing persona.
In January 2025, Datong’s city-branding strand reached a high-visibility milestone with the public release of a 3D hyper-realistic digital human of Hua Mulan, framed as a city image and cultural-tourism integration asset for Datong and presented in Beijing rather than within Shanxi itself. The project was reported as a collaboration linking Datong’s publicity and media system—especially Datong Daily Media Group (大同日报传媒集团)—with Zhonghua Book Company and GuLian, positioning the digital human as both a cultural-civic symbol and a deployable media entity across tourism, education, and city promotion contexts. This month-level event matters for Shanxi because it demonstrated how a Shanxi city could combine cultural narrative, media infrastructure, and external technology/publishing partners to build a flagship digital human intended to operate as a durable regional identity vehicle rather than a short-lived campaign.
In April 2025, the Wuxiang all-digital museum model was further elaborated in public reporting, emphasising the operational logic of a “growing” database-backed exhibition rather than a static digital installation. The reporting highlighted interactive wartime storytelling features, including AI-narrated stories, virtual battlefields, and a set of digital exhibits powered by expanding historical data, reinforcing that Shanxi’s red-culture digital-human applications were being pursued as living, continuously updated systems with visitor-facing interaction at their centre.
In May 2025, Datong’s Hua Mulan digital human was used as a Shanxi-branded showcase outside the province at a major cultural-industry fair in Shenzhen , where the digital persona was presented as an interactive highlight and used to narrate Datong cultural features, including heritage attractions and local culinary identity. Although the exhibition itself was not located in Shanxi, the activity was explicitly tied to Datong’s cultural presentation and commercial outreach, illustrating how Shanxi digital humans were being mobilised as portable promotional interfaces in cross-regional cultural-industry settings.
In August 2025, the Datong Hua Mulan project received formalised provincial-level validation when it was reported as having been selected among typical cases of Shanxi cultural-technology integration, strengthening its status as an exemplary model rather than merely a single-city experiment. In the same month, Shanxi’s cultural-tourism authority staged a digital-tourism innovation programme in Taiyuan that released a set of “digital cultural tourism innovation cases”, explicitly including the Hua Mulan 3D hyper-realistic digital human among the highlighted examples, placing a Datong-rooted digital human inside a province-wide catalogue of replicable “digital + cultural tourism” practices. This combination of case-selection and province-level showcase mattered because it reframed a citybranded digital human as part of Shanxi’s broader digital-tourism innovation toolkit and not only as a Datong-specific identity initiative.
In September 2025, Shanxi’s digital-human landscape was described as having diversified into a broader set of IP-like digital personas operating across platforms and venues, with Shanxi’s tourismfacing digital humans portrayed as a bridge between cultural heritage and contemporary consumption. Within that description, Jin Yiyi and Qingniao were treated as established provincial tourism-promoter personas, while Datong’s Hua Mulan was positioned as a visible flagship, including references to holographic-style presentation on Datong’s city-wall context and to venue-based interaction where a digital personified “poet” could engage visitors in a museum setting. This month-level framing matters in the chronology because it shows digital humans being treated less as one-off launches and more as an emerging layer of Shanxi’s cultural-public interface, spanning short-video ecosystems, on-site venue interaction, and city-landmark-based storytelling.
In October 2025, discussion of Shanxi’s culture-tech integration increasingly placed virtual digital humans alongside a wider stack of immersive technologies—such as AR, VR, MR, and large-scale visualisation—as tools for making heritage legible and attractive in contemporary settings. Even where individual digital-human launches were not positioned as the central “news”, the month’s framing reinforced that virtual digital humans were being normalised as part of Shanxi’s mainstream approach to cultural presentation and visitor engagement, rather than being confined to isolated pilot narratives.
[Feb 2026]
2025
April 30, 2025: The all-digital Eighth Route Army Museum in Wuxiang, Shanxi uses artificial intelligence to present wartime history with interactive exhibits, virtual battlefields, and 17 digital characters.
2024
November 5, 2024: Taiyuan City Library introduced a new AI-powered digital human screen offering immersive reading experiences through AI-enabled voice interaction and intelligent Q&A features.
August 22, 2024: Tianyu Digital Technology‘s subsidiary Yuanyuan Technology won a bid for the Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism’s digital cultural tourism virtual human promotion project.
July 26, 2024: Shanxi Tourism Development and Splendid Taiyuan Cultural Tourism Promotion event in Taiyuan introduced two digital humans, Jin Jin and Yang Yang, at the news center.
April 20, 2024: Zhonghua Book Company held a reader open day featuring the debut of a digital human representation of Hua Mulan, developed in collaboration with Datong City.