Old tales told anew

Digitized images from the new smartphone app, Night Revels of Han Xizai. Photos provided to China Daily

Palace Museum launches yet another smartphone app to help younger people understand Chinese history and culture better. Wang Kaihao reports.

Technology has made an ancient painting come alive.

Last week, Beijing's Palace Museum released its smartphone app, Night Revels of Han Xizai, in order to provide a vivid multimedia account of the five-part scroll painting by the same name. The painting is part of a collection that's housed among the museum's some 53,000 pieces of traditional Chinese paintings.

The painting was first created in the Southern Tang Dynasty (AD 937-975) that ruled what is today's southern and central China, and reflects how the highly placed government official Han Xizai tried to escape his home state when he realized the dynasty's end was near.

Historians believe that the current painting was created during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), and is commonly considered to be the best among its many replicas.

According to Yu Zhuang, chief designer of the museum's app that can work on Apple and Android products, the new release offers more than 100 explanatory notes in texts and videos, which are hidden in high-definition digital versions of the original work.