Guizhou Digital Human Timeline

In May 2022, the China International Big Data Industry Expo (数博会) convened in an online-only format from Guiyang, and for the first time in the expo's history a dedicated metaverse forum was placed on the agenda, drawing high-profile institutional and corporate voices to discuss the integration of big data, blockchain, AI, and interactive virtual experience. Guiyang Mayor Ma Ningyu addressed the forum, Tsinghua University professor Shen Yang proposed a taxonomy of three types of metaverse beings — natural people, avatars, and humanoids — and NetEase Vice President Ruan Liang described the company's AI-powered virtual host capabilities. Although COVID restrictions meant no physical digital human demonstrations were staged, the forum established Guizhou's first public institutional alignment with the emerging digital human and metaverse sector.

By September 2022, the province's first permanent digital human production facility had opened. Guizhou Angela Visual Technology Co. (贵州省安洁拉视觉科技有限公司), founded by Dong Bo, inaugurated the "Metaverse Digital Virtual Human Shooting Base" (元宇宙数字虚拟人拍摄基地) at Guiyang Impression City, equipping a studio with more than eighty cameras arranged in a 360-degree volumetric capture array. The facility allowed a person to generate a lifelike three-dimensional digital human avatar in approximately ten minutes for a few hundred yuan, and served clients in education, consumer digital asset creation, and brand partnerships with Guizhou liquor companies. By April 2023 the camera array had been expanded to more than one hundred units, reflecting growing demand and the facility's standing as the province's sole dedicated volumetric capture venue.

The opening of 2023 brought Guizhou's most high-profile digital human launch to that point. On January 1, Kweichow Moutai formally released the "Xunfeng Digital World" (巽风数字世界) metaverse application, developed through its joint venture Xunfeng Technology (Guizhou) Co. (巽风科技（贵州）有限公司) — a partnership in which Moutai Tourism held a 51 percent share and NetEase held 49 percent, with the platform registered and conceptually anchored in Renhuai and Moutai Town, Guizhou. The application digitally recreated Moutai Town using digital twin technology and introduced three virtual characters into public use: Xiao Xun (小巽), the platform's main mascot modeled on the mythical creature Bai Ze; Yifeng (铱风), Moutai's first digital-twin human rendered to resemble Chairman Ding Xiongjun; and Sanshi (三石), a digital twin of NetEase founder Ding Lei. The application registered 1.82 million users in its first five days, signaling unexpectedly strong consumer uptake for a spirits brand's metaverse initiative. Within days of the platform's debut, Xunfeng Technology hosted a virtual launch event inside the application for Moutai's Year of the Rabbit zodiac wine, during which digital avatars of Ding Xiongjun and Ding Lei delivered virtual speeches alongside Xiao Xun, Yifeng, and Sanshi, and the event released 29,999 rabbit zodiac digital collectibles, illustrating the platform's strategy of blending product launches with virtual character appearances and blockchain-based digital assets.

In February 2023, Moutai extended this digital-physical model by launching the 24 Solar Terms Spring series wine through the Xunfeng platform. The product required consumers to first mint a corresponding digital collectible within the platform before being able to purchase the physical bottle, linking the physical wine to a blockchain-verified digital asset in what the company described as its first "digital-physical fusion" product release.

In March 2023, the Guizhou Provincial Big Data Development Leading Group issued the "2023 Work Points for Building the Digital Economy Development Innovation Zone," naming metaverse as a priority new-track industry alongside AI, blockchain, and 5G, and calling for a "Double Thousand Doubling" action plan for emerging digital industries. The policy positioned Gui'an New Area's growing computing infrastructure as the technical foundation for provincial metaverse development, formalizing a strategic alignment between Guizhou's data-center economy and its ambitions for virtual environments.

In May 2023, two developments strengthened Guizhou's institutional base for digital human work. Guizhou Cultural Performing Arts Group (贵州文化演艺集团) established a new subsidiary, Guizhou Digital Wisdom Cultural Technology Co. (贵州省数智文化科技有限公司), with a mandate to develop virtual digital humans for cultural and tourism applications, using the "Piaoliang" (票亮) ticketing platform as a foundation for virtual anchors, guided tour narration, and digital cultural creative products. That same month, the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2023 convened in Guiyang under the theme "Digital-Real Integration, Computing Starts the Future," hosting more than three hundred guests at its AI and Industry Metaverse forum and featuring 328 exhibiting enterprises alongside the release of twenty leading technology achievements.

In June 2023, Wanda Group launched what was described as China's first AI guide at a tourist scenic area, deploying the virtual guide Xiao Dan (小丹) at Danzhai Wanda Township (丹寨万达小镇) in Guizhou's Qiandongnan Prefecture. Built on large language model technology with technical support from Fengping Intelligence (风平智能), a Beijing-based AI company, Xiao Dan provided visitors with scenic spot introductions, customized travel route planning, and personalized recommendations in an embodied, conversational format.

In July 2023, Beijing Qingping Tianyi Technology established Guizhou Qingping Joy Culture Media Co. (贵州清平乐文化传媒有限公司), a Guizhou-registered subsidiary focused on AI virtual human live broadcasting services. That same month, Guizhou Digital Wisdom Cultural Technology began publishing the Digital Person Wang Yangming (数字人王阳明) — an AI virtual digital human rendered in real-time and modeled on the Ming Dynasty philosopher who experienced his famous "Enlightenment at Longchang" while exiled in Guizhou — sharing Yangming School of Mind philosophy in a self-narrated first-person format online. The initiative would go on to generate nearly ten million yuan in revenue within the company's first seven months of operation, demonstrating the commercial viability of culturally grounded AI characters rooted in Guizhou's historical identity.

In September 2023, Guizhou E-commerce Cloud Company (贵州电子商务云) deployed Huawei Cloud's Pangu Digital Human Model (盘古数字人大模型) for rural livestream e-commerce in Danzhai County, Qiandongnan Prefecture. The system enabled ethnic minority villagers who faced barriers related to dialect and language to generate personalized AI digital avatars from a five-minute video, achieving 95 percent or higher lip-sync accuracy and enabling around-the-clock product livestreaming. The deployment was presented as a case study at Huawei Connect 2023, positioning Guizhou's rural e-commerce context as a proving ground for enterprise-scale AI avatar generation.

In October 2023, the Guizhou Long March Culture Digital Art Center — branded "Red Ribbon" (红飘带) — began trial operations inside Guizhou. The center combined AI virtual interaction, holographic imagery, full-dimensional mechanical motion, and three-dimensional immersive sound to create a digital performing arts experience centered on the Long March, representing one of the province's most ambitious fusions of AI-driven virtual characters with large-scale cultural performance.

In November 2023, activities involving Guizhou-linked digital characters took place outside the province. Moutai staged a physical event for its 24 Solar Terms Winter series wine in Sanya, Hainan, featuring a Xiao Xun digital virtual human holographic booth at the venue while online participants gathered within the Guizhou-based Xunfeng platform alongside virtual characters Yifeng, Tishuai (梯帅), and Dongyu (东玉). In the same month, a virtual digital person dressed in ethnic minority attire and presenting Guizhou tourist attractions was showcased at the New Generation Information Technology exhibition at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, representing Guizhou-branded content deployed at a national trade platform outside the province.

In February 2024, Guizhou issued its first provincial policy document to explicitly mandate virtual digital human development. The Guizhou Provincial Big Data Development Leading Group Office published the "Key Work Points for Building the Digital Economy Development Innovation Zone in 2024," whose Article 27 called for actively developing virtual digital humans and promoted metaverse applications across e-sports, education, industrial manufacturing, smart cities, government services, and community governance.

In March 2024, Guizhou Daily's "Dangdai Xianfeng" (当代先锋网) platform published a feature on Guizhou Digital Wisdom Cultural Technology and the Digital Person Wang Yangming, describing the company's expansion into AI virtual digital humans for e-commerce livestreaming and scenic area tour guidance, including AI-generated image capabilities and digital human applications in virtual hosting, guided tours, and consultation services.

In August 2024, the tenth China International Big Data Industry Expo convened in Guiyang, drawing more than 21,600 attendees and 414 companies including Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, and 77 overseas firms, with digital humans and large language models figuring among the signature exhibited technologies. Cloud Kunpeng (云上鲲鹏) and Guizhou University of Finance and Economics jointly won the "2024 Data Expo Outstanding Technology Achievement Award" for a Political Affairs AI Digital Human All-in-One Machine (政务智能一体机), an integrated device combining AI digital human interactive capabilities for government consultation services in Guizhou.

In October 2024, exactly one year after its trial launch, the Red Ribbon Guizhou Long March Culture Digital Art Center formally opened to the public, having by that date staged more than 8,300 performances and received approximately one million visitors. It was subsequently selected as one of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2024 Top Ten Digital Innovation Cases.

In November 2024, Guizhou Ant Dongfang Technology (贵州省蚂蚁东方科技有限公司), a Guizhou-based company, presented its Smart Guide AI Digital Human Tour Guide system at the 2024 World Internet Conference "Internet of Light" Expo held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang — an event outside Guizhou. The system integrated VR, large language models, GPS, and Bluetooth beacon positioning to deliver full-domain tourism services, and its exhibition at Wuzhen introduced the company's Guizhou-developed product to a national industry audience.

In December 2024, two distinct digital-human-adjacent initiatives took shape with Guizhou connections. miHoYo announced that the Genshin Impact video game characters Xiao (魈) and Lan Yan (蓝砚) had been appointed as virtual cultural ambassadors for Guizhou Province — styled "Colorful Wind-Seeking Envoy" and "Guizhou Fun Explorer" respectively — with Lan Yan depicted as a rattan weaving artisan mirroring Guizhou's intangible cultural heritage traditions; though the campaign distributed nationally, it was guided by the Guizhou Provincial Cyberspace Administration and represented an unusual deployment of pre-rendered synthetic game characters as provincial cultural proxies. In the same month, Baidu E-Commerce collaborated with Zunyi Supply and Marketing E-Commerce Cooperative (遵义供销电商) through Baidu's "Huibo Star" (慧播星) digital human livestreaming platform, with Zunyi merchants forming one of the first batch of participants, and plans announced at that time called for over one hundred digital human livestream rooms and more than one thousand Guizhou agricultural products to be made available online.

In January 2025, the Genshin Impact Guizhou cultural ambassador collaboration was formally released at the 2024 Guizhou Internet Communication Annual Conference, where the Guizhou Provincial Cyberspace Administration publicly announced the initiative and positioned the game's virtual characters as digital instruments for provincial tourism promotion.

In February 2025, Guiyang's Confucius Academy (孔学堂) hosted an offline intangible cultural heritage experience event themed "Mountains and Waters Have Spirit," organized jointly by the Guizhou Provincial Cyberspace Administration, miHoYo, and Huanqiu.com, featuring rattan weaving and Miao batik demonstrations tied to the virtual character Lan Yan. Also in February 2025, the Zunyi partnership with Baidu's Huibo Star platform demonstrated early commercial results, with digital human livestreaming selling nearly ten thousand jin of "Pink Crystal Honey Pomelo" in a single month. During this same period, Baidu Marketing supported the deployment of a digital human tourism ambassador styled "Yao Mei Dai Ni You Guizhou" (瑶妹带你游贵州) for Guizhou local businesses, presenting a virtual character in the role of provincial travel guide.

In March 2025, Guizhou Niusiling Smart Grazing Cloud Platform created the Wu Guobang AI Digital Human (吴国邦AI数字人), an AI-driven virtual person connected to the platform's agricultural smart grazing operations in Guizhou. In the same month, a meeting of the China Information Association Digital Governance Professional Committee's fifth member assembly held in Guizhou featured a digital human demonstration using voice synthesis and facial driving technology, positioning AI-embodied virtual persons as instruments of official digital governance communication.

In April 2025, two landmark digital human deployments were unveiled in Guizhou within days of each other. At the 19th Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference in Anshun, the "Yima You Guizhou 3.0" (一码游贵州) platform officially launched Huang Xiaoxi (黄小西) — an AI travel assistant whose name compressed the initials of Guizhou's three iconic destinations, Huangguoshu Falls, Xiao Qikong, and Xijiang Miao Village — rendered through Unreal Engine and powered by iFlytek's Spark large model for intelligent interaction. Huang Xiaoxi debuted wearing traditional Guizhou ethnic attire incorporating Miao embroidery and silver jewelry elements, and was designed to provide itinerary planning, booking, AI tour guidance, and travel journal generation for visitors to the province. Days later, Guiyang Broadcasting and Television Station (贵阳广播电视台) launched Guizhou's first AI dual anchor for its flagship Guiyang News Broadcast (贵阳新闻联播): Xiao Yi (小伊), a digital anchor cloned from real host Ma Linyi, and Xiao Meng (小萌), cloned from real host Li Meng, both produced using iFlytek AI voice synthesis, speech recognition, lip-sync prediction, and image processing technologies, and described at launch as Guizhou province's first news program AI dual anchors.

In May 2025, digital human deployments entered Guizhou's cultural institutions and public events in parallel. The Guizhou Provincial Geological Museum in Guiyang integrated digital humans, virtual tourism environments, and digital twin technology, including a Keichousaurus-inspired digital human docent developed with involvement from Virdync (虚拟动力), a Guangzhou-based digital human company, providing personalized explanatory services to museum visitors. In the same month, Moutai Cultural Tourism brought Huang Xiaoxi to the T² Music and Art Festival in Guiyang's Duocai Guizhou City, extending the AI travel assistant's public presence from government tourism platforms into commercial entertainment events.

In June 2025, two further applications demonstrated Guizhou's expanding use of digital humans beyond tourism. The Guiyang Marathon introduced digital human presences under a "Future is Here" smart technology concept, using AI-embodied virtual figures as part of the event's experiential presentation. Also in June 2025, the Guizhou Provincial Department of Transportation (贵州省交通运输厅) published a "Digital Human Interpretation" (数字人解读) video explaining the province's highway differentiated toll policy implementation plan, using a digital presenter to communicate official policy documentation to the public for the first time.

July 2025 saw a cluster of digital human events across the province. The RAICOM robot development competition, organized by the Guizhou Minzu Museum and Guizhou Qiannan University of Science and Technology and drawing more than two thousand participants, included a dedicated virtual interactive design category for digital human work. A digital culture ecological summit hosted by Ruixing Chain at Guizhou Penglai Xian Hotel featured digital human interaction as a central element, and Bangyan Technology released its digital human platform Nuwaai in the same period. A team from Tsinghua University's "Zhihui Qian Cheng" (智汇黔城) initiative visited Guiyang and experienced AI digital humans at the Huawei Cloud data center, reflecting growing national academic attention to the province's AI deployment landscape.

In August 2025, the China International Big Data Industry Expo returned to Guiyang under the theme "Data Fuels Industrial Momentum, Intelligence Opens New Chapters," hosting 375 exhibitors and more than 16,000 participants. At the "DATA Night" (DATA之夜) gala on the expo's opening evening, digital humans representing Wang Yangming and the mythical creature Bai Ze (白泽) appeared on stage and conducted live dialogue with the human host — the most prominent public performance of digital human characters at any Guizhou event to that date. Digital human tour guides developed by Guizhou Ant Dongfang Technology were deployed throughout the expo venue to assist visitor navigation, while travel platform Mafengwo unveiled its "AI Travel Guizhou" initiative featuring embodied AI tour guides as destination agents. During this same month, AI digital human tour guides were introduced in Guizhou libraries and museums more broadly for personalized explanation services.

In December 2025, Guizhou Tourism Digital Network (贵旅数网) presented a significantly expanded version of the Huang Xiaoxi intelligent product system, articulated around two components: a consumer-facing "Guizhou Tourist Encyclopedia" (贵州旅游百事通) functioning as a travel concierge, and a business-facing "Digital Butler" (数字管家) providing around-the-clock hotel service. The expanded system incorporated DeepSeek and other large language model technologies, covered 99,000 local tourism resource tags, and addressed AI hallucination problems through a dual-track verification approach combining data validation with logic inference.

In January 2026, Kweichow Moutai established a wholly owned subsidiary, Guizhou Ai Maotai Digital Technology Co. (贵州爱茅台数字科技有限公司), with a reported registered capital of six billion yuan, registered in the Guiyang High-Tech Development Zone under legal representative Wang Xiaopeng. The company's business scope encompassed internet livestreaming technology services, blockchain technology, integrated-circuit chip and product sales, industrial internet data services, internet news services, and network cultural operations — placing Moutai's digital ambitions in a dedicated corporate vehicle for the first time. Also in January 2026, the Wang Yangming Memorial Hall in Xiuwen County reopened after a major renovation covering 1,760 square meters with a 15 million yuan investment, with more than half of its content delivered digitally; highlights included the first-ever digital recreation of Wang Yangming at age 37 and a Wang Yangming digital human among eight major interactive exhibits, alongside immersive films, glasses-free 3D displays, and an experiential Enlightenment Space.

In February 2026, the Guizhou Provincial Department of Transportation published a second Digital Human Interpretation video, this time presenting and explaining rural road improvement policy documents through a digital presenter, continuing the practice of using AI-embodied virtual persons for official government communication that the department had inaugurated the previous June and consolidating digital humans as a routine instrument of Guizhou's public policy outreach.

[Mar 2026]