The future of history: How Digital Dunhuang revitalizes cultural heritage

31 October 2024

The legal landscape for digital cultural heritage echoes broader digital copyright issues, from rapid online content dissemination to the complexities of copyright enforcement in a world of influencers and content creators. Cathy Li reports.

Walking through a museum’s quiet halls feels like stepping into history itself. Centuries-old faces gaze from the walls, and relics once silenced by time seem to come alive, recounting tales of ancient empires, forgotten rituals, and worlds long past.

Once confined to glass cases, these treasures find new life in the Digital Dunhuang project, an initiative by the Dunhuang Research Academy in China. Home to the Mogao Grottoes – a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the 20th century’s most significant archaeological discoveries – the Academy has developed this blockchain-based, open co-creation platform for digital cultural heritage. Through it, murals, grottoes, sculptures, and other artifacts are preserved digitally, even those in caves closed to the public.

Shiming Xiu, the director of the Dunhuang Museum, said, “Traditionally, people perceive museums as cold and outdated. In recent years, we have been committed to making museums more youthful. By leveraging the internet and new technologies, we aim to attract more young people. The digital museum we are building in Dunhuang brings cultural relics to life.”

Digital Dunhuang transforms these treasures into a virtual experience, inviting global audiences – from students to researchers, history enthusiasts, and even digital artists – to connect with the legacy of Dunhuang’s cultural heritage. For students, the platform offers an immersive educational experience, bringing ancient art and history into classrooms worldwide. For researchers, it offers easy access to high-resolution images and curated data that would otherwise require travel. Even digital artists find inspiration in these ancient murals and sculptures, sparking creative reinterpretations and connecting contemporary art with historical traditions. This wide reach democratizes access to Dunhuang’s heritage, ensuring that these artifacts impact and inspire diverse audiences across generations.

The Dunhuang Academy is enhancing cultural preservation with advanced technologies like high-definition scanning and game engines, creating immersive experiences of sites such as the Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes. Users can explore these replicas via a WeChat mini-program, enjoying stunning visuals.

Tourist attractions are integrating VR and AR, turning visitors into active participants. The Exploring Dunhuang–Digital Immersive Exhibition, in partnership with Tencent, allows guests to wear VR headsets and experience ancient murals. An 8K VR flight at Mingsha Mountain offers a breathtaking virtual journey.

Preserving cultural heritage has become vital as artworks enter the digital age. Technological advances allow societies to digitize vast collections of historical artifacts, artwork, and traditions, introducing both challenges and opportunities. These digital initiatives create vast new realms for broader access, interactivity, and education, with the pandemic accelerating culture's transition into the digital sphere.

In the face of climate change, safeguarding cultural heritage is more critical than ever as rising sea levels, extreme weather, and temperature shifts endanger artifacts and heritage sites. As physical structures face erosion, the cultural narratives they represent also risk fading into obscurity. Protecting these sites goes hand in hand with preserving their digital and intangible aspects.

Intellectual property and open access in digital heritage

The murals and artworks within the Mogao Caves, vulnerable to environmental exposure, risk disappearing – along with their centuries-old stories – without intervention. Digital Dunhuang seeks to address this by transforming these treasures into an accessible, immersive resource that secures their legacy for future generations, providing an experience of these sites as if stepping into history itself.

Preserving cultural heritage today requires balancing conservation of the past with technology’s potential for global reach. Digital tools such as virtual reality, AI, and high-definition 3D scanning allow deeper, more interactive connections with cultural artifacts and historical sites. These advancements open doors to new experiences and appreciation, helping to share the legacy of human creativity with audiences worldwide, now and in the future.

Yet with the global sharing of digital replicas comes the challenge of managing attribution. “In an evolving digital culture, it may be that organizations embrace more making their digital resource collections available on an open access basis, particularly if it becomes harder and harder to regulate use,” said Anisha Birk, an associate at Farrer & Co. in London. Open access broadens engagement, promoting creativity, public benefit, and simplified academic use with fewer licensing restrictions.

“However, while digital resources can be a potential revenue source, the profitability remains uncertain due to the costs associated with maintaining a picture library,” Birk said. Notably, users can also use the materials for secondary creation, and the resulting works can become new digital resources. If used commercially, creators can share the profits with the copyright holders.

“This enriches the content and provides a platform for sharing and co-creating works using digital resources, fostering a healthy creative ecosystem,” said Xiaohong Ding, the deputy director of the Digitalization Research Institute at the Dunhuang Academy in an article by Xinhua News.

Open access presents a transformative opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. While digital resources can generate significant revenue potential through various models, the costs associated with maintaining and updating digital libraries can be substantial. This includes expenses related to technology infrastructure, content curation, and ongoing support for users.

Moreover, digital materials often inspire secondary creations – such as adaptations, remixes, and scholarly analyses – which enrich the cultural and academic ecosystem. These secondary works not only enhance the original content but also foster a collaborative environment where creativity can flourish.

Since its launch in late 2022, the Digital Dunhuang Open Material Library has seen impressive engagement, with over four million views and 30,000 downloads. This indicates a strong interest in the resources it offers, highlighting the library’s role in making cultural heritage accessible to a global audience.

Reimagining the museum experience

The works of Dunhuang Academy take digital preservation to new heights, using high-definition scanning, advanced game engines, dynamic lighting, and cloud gaming to create an astonishingly immersive experience. This digital reconstruction offers high-resolution replicas of notable sites, including the Mogao Caves’ cliff faces and detailed replicas of specific caves. Users can explore these lifelike recreations on a WeChat mini-program, experiencing the timeless artistry of Dunhuang with movie-quality visuals.

Popular tourist sites in Dunhuang are now using VR and AR technology to turn visitors from passive spectators into active participants, creating a dynamic blend of history and modern innovation. The Exploring Dunhuang – Digital Immersive Exhibition, a collaboration between the Dunhuang Academy and Tencent, allows visitors to don VR headsets and immerse themselves in the ancient world of Dunhuang’s murals. At Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake, an 8K VR flight experience lets visitors “soar” over Dunhuang, providing an awe-inspiring virtual journey with no transportation needed.

Another immersive highlight, Dunhuang Unbound: Secret Treasures and Desert Sands, has quickly become a tourist favorite since its debut on September 10 in Dunhuang City. Using advanced spatial positioning, multi-user interaction, and real-time rendering, this project reconstructs the Tang Dynasty city of Shazhou, allowing visitors to step back in time in a highly interactive setting. Participants become part of the storyline, moving through the experience as first-person characters in an adventurous treasure hunt. This role-play deepens their connection with Dunhuang’s vibrant history and culture.

Located in the Shazhou Yijing Digital Aesthetics Space, a hub for digital cultural tourism, Dunhuang Unbound is part of a broader array of VR experiences, including Dunhuang Manuscripts, Han Bamboo Slips of Dunhuang, and Beyond Time Exploration. These projects skillfully weave technology and art, offering visitors an unparalleled opportunity to explore the enduring charm of Dunhuang.

Copyright and ownership in the digital age of cultural preservation

Beyond mere replicas, Digital Dunhuang collaborates with companies to recreate vibrant murals based on original designs, capturing the brilliance of ancient artworks through rigorous color studies. Although these digital resources primarily serve educational purposes, their profound cultural value raises thought-provoking questions for intellectual property scholarship.

Alvin Antony, an associate in the digital tech and law practice at Anand and Anand in Noida, noted that digitizing cultural artifacts often requires navigating intricate copyright challenges, even when the original materials are in the public domain. For instance, elements like photographs, the software used for digitization, or the creation of a digital database might still be under copyright protection, posing difficulties for institutions aiming to share these resources broadly. This situation is further complicated by orphan works (those with unknown authors) and out-of-commerce works, which make it hard and expensive to secure the necessary permissions for digitization and distribution. To tackle these issues, various strategies can be employed, such as creating clear legal frameworks for orphan works, considering extended collective licensing options, and establishing international databases for copyright information to simplify the rights clearance process.

With the shift toward open access, the concept of ownership over culturally significant relics remains complex. Museums and cultural institutions must balance public access with protecting the cultural and economic value of digitized assets. Antony underscores the need for carefully crafted licensing agreements, technological safeguards, and community engagement to strike this balance, especially for public-domain relics vulnerable to commercial exploitation that could diminish their cultural meaning.

Digitizing cultural relics presents unique copyright complexities seen in digital heritage projects worldwide. For instance, Europe’s Europeana project, which digitizes cultural resources from museums across the EU, similarly grapples with balancing access and copyright. The project’s use of Creative Commons licenses demonstrates one solution for maximizing public benefit while acknowledging rights. Meanwhile, Japan’s National Diet Library has adopted a collective licensing model to streamline access to its digitized works, particularly for out-of-commerce pieces. These examples highlight the challenges faced globally, as cultural institutions increasingly find themselves navigating copyright in the digital space to preserve their national heritage.

Digital relics easily transcend borders, but differences in national copyright laws can cause friction. For example, varying interpretations of "fair use" can complicate cross-border collaborations, with potential disputes arising if one institution’s interpretation differs from another's. International agreements and shared protocols are essential to protect and ethically manage digital cultural heritage across jurisdictions.

“The global and interconnected nature of the digital realm poses significant jurisdictional challenges for protecting digital cultural heritage. Variations in national copyright laws, particularly regarding concepts like fair use or the duration of copyright protection, can create legal uncertainties and hinder cross-border collaborations,” said Antony.

“For example, an institution in one country may interpret fair use more broadly than an institution in another country, leading to disputes over the permissible use of digital cultural heritage.” Antony explains that varying interpretations of fair use across countries can result in conflicts regarding the use of digital cultural heritage. He highlighted the importance of fostering international collaboration and creating unified legal standards to effectively manage these jurisdictional issues. Such cooperation is crucial for the responsible management of digital cultural heritage and to prevent its fragmentation across borders.

Questions of originality add another layer to the discussion. The “digital model” of a relic may possess its own copyright due to creative choices in scanning, processing and digital manipulation.

“It is important to note that the originality of digital resources often lies in the details of the work’s form. The reason is that the original heritage is public domain and not protected by copyright, but the digital resources created from this original heritage can have their own copyright,” said Yongwen Wang, founding partner of Johnson IP in Shenzhen, China. Copyright protects the digital work’s form – not its inherent content – and permits rights holders to prevent unauthorized commercial use.

The legal landscape for digital cultural heritage thus echoes broader digital copyright issues, from rapid online content dissemination to the complexities of copyright enforcement in a world of influencers and content creators. Addressing these challenges demands a nuanced approach to protect both cultural legacies and intellectual property rights, fostering an environment where history's treasures can be shared responsibly in the digital age.