In 1860 British and French forces burned down the Yuan Ming Yuan—the Old Summer Palace—in Beijing. Now, 153 years later, that Qing-Dynasty site has come back to life, thanks to Bright Ideas’ digitalization.

The Old Summer Palace was a gift from the Qing emperor ­Kangxi to his son and successor Yong­zheng. After several expansions, the site would end up comprising 350 hectares. Because Yong­zheng loved gardens, he was the first emperor to forsake the Forbidden City and frequently hold court in the Old Summer Palace. Consequently, it earned the moniker “the park of all parks.”

In the works for three years and at a cost of NT$50 million, Bright Ideas Design’s Discover the Old Summer Palace gives exhibition-goers a chance to experience the Old Summer Palace without having to visit its ruins in the Beijing suburbs.

The 12 original bronze Chinese zodiac heads that were part of a fountain clock at the Old Summer Palace have been scattered around the world. Thanks to transparent display panels and digital technology, their functions and history are clear for all to see.

When visitors walk into the exhibition at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, the first thing that captures their attention is a model of the Wan’an Fanghe, a swastika-shaped compound in the Old Summer Palace that was Yongzheng’s favorite residence.

As one examines its details, the model of the compound suddenly seems to catch fire, thanks to special 3D effects worked on angled glass in front of the model. The scene is meant to remind the public that the vast palace grounds they are about to experience were in fact long ago destroyed by fire.

Next, an animated film of about 10 minutes gives a basic introduction to the rise and decline of the Old Summer Palace through the reigns of six emperors. The animation is projected across three separate screens that are merged into one. The multi-screen theater experience allows the audience to experience visuals of more than 180º.

“Recalling Jiang­nan: Images of the Old Summer Palace (Corridor of the Four Seasons)” is a tunnel-like space at the exhibition. Yong­zheng’s successor Qian­long returned from an inspection tour of southern China with fond memories of the West Lake in Hang­zhou, so he had a similar landscape constructed on the grounds of the Old Summer Palace. As one passes through the corridor at the exhibition, constantly changing images of gardens and forests appear on its walls to reveal the poetic glory of nature in different seasons.

The space uses Kinect motion-sensing technology. When exhibition visitors pass by, the four seasons are revealed to be changing over time. For instance, during winter, the floor appears to freeze over, with fish swimming beneath it. When members of the public step onto the cracks on the surface of the ice, the fish jump up above the water’s surface, bringing joy to children and adults alike.

A swastika-shaped palace residence bursts into flames. In fact, it’s just a model on which 3D projection technology has been used to recreate the burning of the Old Summer Palace.

Bright Ideas’ strong suit is combining technology, culture and art.

“Our strength isn’t just in creating or adopting new technologies,” says Lin Fang-yin, Bright Ideas’ president. “It’s also in the way we respect and faithfully reproduce the ancient artifacts that we are spotlighting.” Making the best use of technology to tell cultural artifacts’ stories is paramount.

It was a life setback that put Lin, who studied Chinese at National Taiwan University, on a path to found Bright Ideas. After graduating, she enrolled in NTU’s art history graduate program, setting her sights on an academic career. But constantly burying her head in books put her eyes under a strain that would damage her retinas. This turn of fate essentially put her life on hold for three years.

Due to a series of surgical procedures and treatments, she was forced to live with limited vision for a long period. She discovered that excessive reliance on vision had dulled her other senses. She had long understood the importance of images, but now she was forced to make greater use of hearing and touch. Those experiences would plant the seed of launching a business that combined art and multimedia.

When Bright Ideas was founded in 1999, the company had only five employees. Now, 14 years later, it has 80. With a focus on multimedia, the firm started by taking commissions from museums. After accumulating experience and building a name for itself, it then moved on to create its own products, including animation as well as toys and other cultural merchandise.

In 2006 Bright Ideas attended the Beijing International Cultural & Creative Industry Expo, hoping to explore the potential of the mainland Chinese market. The firm discovered that there had been active development of culturally important Chinese historic sites in recent years, but many of them, such as the Old Summer Palace and the Chang Chun Yuan in Beijing, had little in the way of remains left to show visitors. Consequently, Bright Ideas recommended reconstructing those sites digitally.

From first proposing their idea to the mainland authorities responsible for administering the Old Summer Palace, Bright Ideas spent four years negotiating before they could seal the deal.

“It’s because it has been destroyed that we can highlight our strengths,” explains Lin. Artifacts from the Old Summer Palace have been scattered around the world, and the site itself is utterly in ruins. Consequently, it is impossible to show the real thing. Yet this seeming limitation gave Bright Ideas’ skills at digital exhibitions a chance to shine.

“Gaining the trust of the responsible mainland authorities was the hard part,” says Lin with a smile. “Credit my husband for overcoming that hurdle.” The authorities across the strait neither understood nor trusted Taiwanese businesses, and because cultural artifacts involved sensitive issues of historical interpretation, the mainlanders were long resistant to letting Bright Ideas show the exhibition outside of China. In order to gain their trust, Guo Zheng­xiong, Lin Fang-yin’s husband and Bright Ideas’ chairman, moved to Beijing in 2010 for a long stay, not returning until the exhibition opened in Tai­pei. The company also invested NT$50 million in R&D to demonstrate the strengths of digital exhibition.

One of the bright spots of the exhibition was the 1.5-meter-high and eight-meter-long interactive installation on Qian­long’s southern inspection tours. Thanks to digital projection, infrared detectors and other technology, the audience can explore the painting, getting a glimpse of the life of a common citizen of a market town in that era.

The digital installation about Qian­long’s southern inspection tours features four scenes, on the themes of day, night, water and land. In each, Qian­long drives his chariot into the image from its right edge, slowly proceeding along the main road. The people along the way successively stand back to make way for him. When the chariot disappears off the left edge of the image, it represents the completion of one scene. Each scene has four or five interactive elements. A visitor needs only to move a hand in front of one of the interactive points for three seconds, and a person in the image will come to life and begin to tell a story. It’s all very lively and fresh.

“Scroll paintings provide multiple perspectives, and they are unique to Chinese art,” says Lin. In Western art a single painting can only tell a single story, but in a scroll painting each section tells its own story. An interactive digital exhibition is well suited to demonstrate the unique qualities of the genre.

Bright Ideas’ many years of creating cultural products has caused major technology firms to see the potential in digital cultural exhibitions and to help with this one. For instance, the 4K-resolution ultra-high-definition displays were supplied by Chi­mei, and the transparent display panels were supplied by AUO.

The area of the exhibition named “Recalling Jiangnan” uses motion detectors so that when visitors pass by, flowers bloom at their feet. The effect delights adults and children alike.

Taiwan’s art collectors spared no effort to lend the exhibit Old Summer Palace artifacts that they had bought internationally. These will serve as the core of the touring exhibition that will move on to Beijing, London and New York. They include antique photographic glass plates of the Old Summer Palace, a brass enamel qilin, and an imperial dragon robe worn by Yong­zheng. In addition to displaying the actual items, the exhibition also features digital reproductions of them. Collectors have exclaimed that some of the artifacts look better on the UHD displays than they do in real life.

As for the well-known bronze heads of the 12 Chinese zodiac figures, they were components of a fountain clock in front of the Old Summer Palace’s Haiyan Hall. For the duration of each of the 12 two-hour periods into which a day was traditionally divided, a column of water would shoot from the mouth of the corresponding zodiac figure. Thanks to the assiduous efforts of Chinese collectors to find these bronzes and purchase them on the international market, to date seven have returned to China.

To recreate the scene of the 12 heads shooting columns of water, Bright Ideas put reproductions of the bronze heads in glass display cases, with transparent front covers on which are projected animations of the water jets. This combination of the virtual and the real presents a convincing impression of the fountain clock in operation that both surprises and delights.

With the goals of leveraging R&D and taking its work overseas, Bright Ideas will bring Discover the Old Summer Palace to a show in Beijing before moving it to museums elsewhere in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Focused on digital content, Bright Ideas has been working hard to develop the economic potential of museums and exploit opportunities around the licensing of intellectual property rights for touring exhibitions. Its overarching ambition is to establish a new business model for Taiwan’s cultural industry.

At the interactive panel depicting the Emperor Qianlong’s southern inspection tour, exhibition-goers need only to extend their hands to have the installation tell its hidden stories.