Museums join online marketplace

"A good design does not mean simply printing a pattern from a painting onto a product. Many museums do it in this way, though," Wang, 31, said. "We should combine modern design and traditional patterns."

For instance, Wang and her colleagues made more than 4,000 pictures inspired by buildings, animals and plants at the Summer Palace after visiting it hundreds of times, and finally chose to draw illustrations based on these.

Wang referred to the Empress Dowager Cixi, a significant presence for decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries who spent lots of time living at the Summer Palace. As a result, the garden has been used to promote items associated with her lifestyle in certain areas, such as fashion, cosmetics and pets.

"Cixi was a die-hard dog lover ... she had lots of dogs in the garden and she gave each of them a salary," Wang said.

Cixi's favorite colors were pink and blue. Most of the porcelain vases in the garden featured a combination of the two colors, which Wang said were "a strange mix of colors for people in her era".

But she said that through modern design full use of both colors can be made to make signature products for the Summer Palace - for instance, a vase-shaped pink-and-blue cushion.

Wang describes herself as a passionate lover of traditional Chinese culture. She thinks museum items should also be used to spread culture and make young people see that "traditional culture can be cool and chic".

That is also the approach taken by designer Xu Chenkang when working with his client, the National Museum of China.

Xu, deputy general manager of the culture and creative products trading department with the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, decorated Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in eight Chinese cities in February with designs from a scroll painting. This depicted people in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) taking part in different activities to celebrate the Lantern Festival on the streets. The painting is in a collection at the National Museum of China.

In 2016, the museum cooperated with the Shanghai Free Trade Zone to develop cultural and creative products. Xu invited designers from China and abroad to work on the museum's collection, which covers 5,000 years of China's history, ranging from jade and porcelain to bronze and paintings.

"It's a vast collection. Antiques from a single dynasty are enough for designers to get inspiration," Xu said.

Through these efforts, sales at the museum's online shop on Tmall doubled last year. Thousands of night lamps from the museum's porcelain collection shaped like antique vases were sold.