Short videos bring past to life

An ambience of mystery sets in as Wang Yini starts a video recording of her exploration of a museum in Baoji, Shaanxi province.

She enters a tunnel 24 meters below ground at the facility, which preserves the mausoleum of the wife of Li Maozhen, ruler of the Qi State during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-960) period.

It doesn't take long before Wang, who is in her 20s, reaches a wall of chunks of stone blocking the way.

"It is the entrance of the tomb, easily three floors high, and it was built in a very unconventional way," says Wang, who's originally from Jilin province.

"There is no horizontal beam at the top, so if you remove any one of the stones, the wall will collapse in one split second and fall on you," she says, adding that the goal was to ward off grave robbers.

Wang points out the ancient defensive mechanism's shortcoming — it only works once. She turns around and takes viewers back on a route dug by the archaeologists to the other side of the wall.

She then reveals a second trap: two more stone doors embedded behind the wall.

"There are no hinges, so they can't be rotated, providing another layer of security," she says.

The short video has received about 1.3 million thumbs-up from users of the short-video platform Douyin. It is one of the most popular videos by Wang, who is widely known by her fans as Shui Xing, or Mercury.

Over the past three years, Wang has taken her more than 3.6 million followers on virtual trips to museums and historic sites around the nation, including the Mogao Grottoes, which hold a trove of ancient Buddhist art in Gansu province, and the Sanxingdui archaeological site of Bronze Age culture in Sichuan province.