Keeping the fires burning

Inside Shougang Park's No 3 Blast Furnace, a digital film named Salute to Steel is playing, projecting bright and roaring flames onto the furnace core, which has not burned for more than a decade.

In 2010, after more than 90 years of continuous operation, Shougang's steelmaking came to a halt. The sprawling industrial complex on the western edge of Beijing was relocated to neighboring Hebei province.

But people today are not leaving it idle. They are using artificial intelligence to reconstruct historical footage, projection mapping to turn the furnace walls into screens, and immersive surround sound to transform visitors from spectators into witnesses of a lost industrial age.

On April 15, three days before the International Day for Monuments and Sites, a group of heritage experts, retired steelworkers, and academics gathered at the RE Blast Furnace No 3 Digital Museum. The event, organized by the digital heritage committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites China, was timed to this year's global theme "Living Heritage".

Its purpose was to examine how digital technologies might support the active preservation and intergenerational transmission of industrial heritage — and to ask what it truly means for a heritage site to be "alive".

"Living heritage is not about the physical objects you can touch and measure. It is about the ongoing relationship between people and those objects," says Song Xinchao, chairman of ICOMOS China.

"Break that relationship, and the heritage dies, even if the building still stands, even if the furnace has not been torn down."

Over the course of its long history, China has witnessed many classic cases of living heritage — sites that never died because they were never abandoned by the people who used them.

Song urges relevant parties to draw inspiration from Dujiangyan in Southwest China's Sichuan province, an irrigation system built during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) that tamed the Minjiang River without a dam. Its designer, Li Bing, used the natural landscape to divert water, remove sediment, and control flooding. More than 2,000 years later, Dujiangyan still waters the fields of the provincial capital Chengdu.

"It has never been a ruin or a museum piece," Song notes. "It has simply worked, continuously, for over two millennia. That is living heritage."

He also considers the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, in Northwest China's Gansu province, a classic model. They are best known as a treasure house of Buddhist art — thousands of murals and sculptures carved into a cliff face along the ancient Silk Road.

But the grottoes are not only to be viewed from behind a rope, he elaborates.

Every year on the eighth day of the fourth month in the Chinese lunisolar calendar, local residents enter the caves to pray, a tradition dating back more than 1,000 years.

"The Dunhuang Academy, which manages the site, charges only a symbolic five-yuan (74 cents) admission on that day — not because it cannot charge more, but because the relationship between the caves and the surrounding community is itself a piece of heritage worth protecting," Song says.

The ritual keeps the caves alive in a way that climate control and security cameras never could, he adds.

In addition to war and the natural decay that threaten these heritages, Song warns that overcommercialization risks turning culture into a disposable product, and sealing heritage behind glass turns it into a museum specimen. Both approaches, he believes, can break the chain between people and place.