Cultural Heritage · Design Research
Xiushan Flower Lantern
What happens when a 500-year-old tradition meets the digital age?
Xiushan Flower Lantern is a traditional folk art from Chongqing, China — integrating dance, music, theater, craftsmanship, and folk belief. Despite being a national intangible cultural heritage, it struggles to reach the people who might care about it most.
Project Info
Reviving an intangible cultural heritage through ethnographic research, digital media, and AR design.
Overview
This was a student research project conducted over one year, exploring how digital tools can revitalize intangible cultural heritage. Working with a small interdisciplinary team, we documented field rituals, interviewed inheritors, and designed interactive experiences grounded in ethnographic research. The project received the Editor's Choice — Top 5% award.
Visual Archive
高台花灯 / Gaotai Flower Lantern
花灯 · 夜晚 / Lantern at Night
请神仪式 / Inviting the Spirits
辞灯仪式 / Farewell Lantern Ceremony
The Problem
A national treasure that most people have never heard of.
Xiushan Flower Lantern carries centuries of Tujia, Miao, and Han cultural traditions. But its remote location, aging inheritors, and lack of digital presence have left it largely invisible to younger generations and the broader public. Existing preservation efforts are static and localized — they keep the form alive, but struggle to keep it relevant.
Research
What we found on the ground.
Literature Review
Reviewed academic sources on intangible cultural heritage preservation, folk art history, and the development of Xiushan Flower Lantern. Also studied how other heritage projects, including the Palace Museum's VR initiatives and cultural product strategies, approached digitization and public engagement.
Field Work
Traveled to Xiushan County in person, visiting the local museum's two flower lantern exhibition halls, the Flower Lantern Square, and live performances by the Xiushan Flower Lantern Troupe. We observed that while the tradition enjoys strong local recognition with landmarks and street names dedicated to it, the exhibitions lacked digital elements and failed to convey the deeper cultural meaning to outside visitors.
Interviews
Conducted in-depth interviews with Peng Xingmao, a Tujia ethnic inheritor who has practiced Xiushan Flower Lantern since age eight and became a national-level intangible cultural heritage inheritor in 2009. He shared insights on the lantern's unique hexagonal structure, its folk ritual roots, and the challenges of passing the tradition to younger generations. He now teaches at a vocational high school and is writing lantern performance textbooks.
Survey
Collected responses from over 1,000 participants to measure public awareness and interest.
Public Awareness of Xiushan Flower Lantern
Willingness to Participate in Lantern-Making
The core issue is not disappearance — it's disconnection.
What We Built
Five ways to close the gap.
Digital Storytelling
We created a public WeChat account called "The Rhythm of the Lantern" to serve as a centralized platform for information about Xiushan Flower Lantern. We published 5 articles covering the team's origin story, the history of Xiushan County, the lantern-making process, interview findings, and the broader state of intangible cultural heritage in China — making reliable cultural content accessible to anyone curious enough to look.
Promotional Video
We produced a mixed-reality promotional film combining real footage with virtual environments to tell the story of the lantern's origin, craftsmanship, and performance culture. The video was structured around six chapters — scenery, origin, making, performance, exhibition, and closing — and distributed across Douyin, Bilibili, WeChat Video, and media platforms to reach audiences beyond Xiushan's geographic limits.
Cultural Products
We designed a series of 12 cultural merchandise items rooted in the visual identity of Xiushan Flower Lantern — including tote bags, stickers, phone cases, postcards, rotating lanterns, ceramic mugs, blind boxes, and red envelopes. Each piece was built around the lantern's iconic hexagonal form and folk character motifs, and designed to be both aesthetically refined and practically useful, filling a gap that even Xiushan's own cultural center had left empty.
Exhibitions & Workshops
We took the lantern beyond Xiushan through two offline activations: a campus presentation introducing the lantern's history and form to students and faculty, and a street market stall in Jiulongpo District, Chongqing, where we showcased the lanterns and cultural products directly to the public and explained the cultural thinking behind the designs.
AR Mini Program
We developed an AR-based WeChat Mini Program to guide users through building a Xiushan Flower Lantern from scratch. The program provides a materials list, step-by-step written instructions, AR point scanning to check progress at key stages, and an animation preview of the completed lantern — turning a traditionally hands-on craft into something anyone could attempt, anywhere.
Outcome
Promotional Video
Public Account
Public Showcase
Across every platform and space we brought the lantern into, people wanted to know more.
Gallery
