'The Voyage of Qinghua': a visual feast where ancient meets modern

"The Voyage of Qinghua – An Immersive Experience of Maritime Silk Road" exhibition opened on Wednesday in downtown Jing'an District, wowing visitors with a visual feast integrating the ancient and the modern.

The show, as part of the 2025 Shanghai Tourism Festival, uses digital technology as a brush to present the artistic charm of the blue and white porcelain of the Yongle (1403-1424) and Xuande (1426-1435) eras of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Visitors will be transformed into cultural relics, travel through time and space together with a personified blue-and-white elf and Ming Dynasty navigator Zheng He, experience the legendary story of the Maritime Silk Road, and feel the brilliant sparks of the collision between Eastern and Western civilizations.

The VR (virtual reality) exhibition is being held at BAIWORK Guang'er Warehouse by Suzhou Creek. The brick walls of the old building are engraved with traces of time as the light and shadow of digital technology flow.

Suzhou Creek is a "living fossil" of Shanghai's modern history, witnessing the city's commercial prosperity and cultural changes. As a historical building, the warehouse has stood by the creek for nearly a hundred years, and it provides a profound cultural background for the exhibition, allowing visitors to feel the charm of modern technology while touching the texture of history.

The exhibition, through three major areas – "Eternal Realm of Blue and White," "Elegant Gathering of Porcelain Charm" and "Boundless Blue Dome" – combines cutting-edge technologies, such as 5G, VR and light and shadow interaction, to create a cultural feast integrating vision, hearing and touch, allowing the ancient blue-and-white porcelain to be reborn in the digital age.

The evolution of the patterns of blue-and-white porcelain can be called a condensed history of Chinese painting and a mirror of social culture. The exhibition selects three representative patterns – intertwined lotus patterns, lock brocade patterns and cloud dragon patterns.

Through the design of mirror reflection and three-dimensional stacking, visitors can feel the artistic tension of the patterns in the interweaving of virtual and real.

The "Boundless Blue Dome" section is a large-scale 5G-A ultra-high-definition immersive VR experience area. Visitors will put on high-precision VR headsets, travel back to the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty, transform into the blue and white porcelain, and start an adventure journey spanning time and space.

The story is set against the background of Zheng He's marine voyages.

If you go:

Date: Through December 31, 10am-9pm

Admission: 148 yuan (US$20.8) for early bird (through September 14)

Venue: 3/F, BAIWORK Guang'er Warehouse

Address: 195 Guangfu Road, Jing'an District

静安区光复路195号