A bright future:Cultural and creative products

 A good example

With 8,700 kinds of creative products and more than 1 billion yuan ($154 million) revenue in 2015, the Place Museum attracted a lot of customers and visitors.

Shan Jixiang, director of the museum, said they will design more high quality cultural and creative products that can let people feel more culture of the museum.

"We want them to bring home the museum's culture," Shan said.

He also introduced their "secrets of success" at the press conference. They took the people's need as orientation and developed more practicable products that can be widely used in daily life, such as phone shells, laptop bags, flash disks, notebooks, spectacles, chopsticks, ties and quilts.

Their products are based on the academy research of the handcrafts of cultural relics in the museum. For example, some patterns and designs are inspired by the emperor's clothes and paintings.

Phone shells, cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum. [Photo/taobao.com]

And they tried to create more fashionable products according to the culture trend. For instance, the "Palace Museum Cats" series were based on the life of wild cats living in the Forbidden City.

High technology and Internet were also efficiently used. The english website and the website targeted at young adolescents got great promotion with a brief catalogue of all the cultural relics of the museum. They also designed an app of the famous painting "Han Xizai Ye Yan Tu" (Han Xizai's Night Banquet), in which characters in the painting become three dimensional and people can hear the music and watch the dances of the time.

Moreover, the museum also developed theme products related to each exhibition.

And with the help of e-commerce, the museum sales on Taobao and WeChat, which provides an easier way for people to purchase creative products. Additionally, the museum held a series of cultural and educational activities and let younger generations know more about Chinese culture. In 2015, 280,000 activities were held. And the museum also designed many traditional Chinese toys based on public suggestions.