Shanxi Digital Human Timeline

Multiple authoritative sources describe Shanxi's first hyper-realistic virtual digital human as debuting in March 2023, confirming the province was a late entrant to a field that many of its peers had entered years earlier. Shanxi Broadcasting did not produce virtual anchors during the 2020–2022 wave when other provincial stations did, and no Shanxi-headquartered company appeared in national digital human rankings during that period.

Around 2022, the earliest documented experimentation with digital human technology at a Shanxi institution took place at Shanxi Museum (山西博物院), where a cloud exhibition titled Listening to the Phoenix employed a digital human combined with a mini-program format to narrate the story of the Jinhou Bird Zun, a Western Zhou bronze ritual wine vessel and the museum's signature treasure. This was a digital storytelling tool rather than a named virtual character, but it established the museum's familiarity with digital human technology and a meaningful connection to the artifact that would later inspire Shanxi's first named virtual persona. Around the same time, Shanxi Zhisheng Media Technology Co., Ltd. (山西智胜传媒科技股份有限公司), a Taiyuan-based media advertising company founded in March 2004 with close to one hundred million yuan in annual revenue and an eighteen-year partnership with Shanxi Broadcasting, was listed on China's National Equities Exchange and Quotations under stock code 873872 in August 2022. A subsequent municipal government article would later confirm that the development of Qingniao, Shanxi's first virtual digital human, had been initiated by Shanxi Zhisheng Media Technology around this same period.

In March 2023, Shanxi's first named virtual digital human made its public debut. At the 2023 Digital Cultural Tourism Brand Innovation Conference, held at the Taiyuan Jinyang Lake International Conference Center and organized under the guidance of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism with the Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and Taiyuan Municipal Government as hosts, the character Qingniao (青鸟) was introduced to a national audience as Shanxi's cultural tourism virtual star promoter. The character's design derives from the small bird perched on the back of the Jinhou Bird Zun, and sources at the time described Qingniao as both Shanxi's first hyper-realistic virtual digital human and the first of its kind in China's broader cultural tourism industry. Qingniao was jointly created by Shiyou (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. (世优（北京）科技股份有限公司), a Beijing company founded in 2015 that had by that point produced over twelve hundred digital humans for clients including CCTV, Huawei, and Alibaba, and Shanxi Zhisheng Media Technology, which held the character's intellectual property and provided content direction. Shiyou (Beijing) Technology provided the full technical stack, encompassing modeling, rigging, rendering, and real-time motion-capture driving, while Shanxi Zhisheng Media Technology's role as a Shanxi-based media company gave the project its provincial institutional grounding.

In October 2023, a second Shanxi cultural tourism virtual persona went online. Jin Yiyi (晋依依) was made available through Shanxi Tourism's official accounts, carrying the same title of Shanxi cultural tourism virtual star promoter as Qingniao. The name Jin Yiyi draws on the character Jin, an abbreviation for Shanxi, while the given name expresses the idea of embodying Shanxi's spirit and relying on the beauty of its landscapes. The character's visual design incorporated a burnished blue butterfly silver headpiece, a silver-gilded endless-knot-pattern hair pin sourced from a Shanxi Museum collection piece, and embroidered pouches bearing patterns drawn from a fresco at Hongdong Guangsheng Temple. Shiyou (Beijing) Technology was involved in Jin Yiyi's technical construction, though the full development chain remained partially ambiguous in available sources. Later that same month, at the Sixth Shanxi Cultural Industry Expo held at the Shanxi Xiaohe International Convention Center from October 19 through October 23, Shanxi Chenhan Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (山西辰涵数字科技股份有限公司), a Taiyuan company founded in 2010 with a core focus on digital cultural heritage including digital museums, cloud exhibitions, and cultural relic digitization, hosted a live demonstration in which a performer wearing seventeen wireless sensors drove Jin Yiyi's movements in real time through motion capture. A Shanxi Chenhan Digital Technology staff member described Jin Yiyi at the event as the virtual image ambassador for Shanxi cultural tourism, and the demonstration drew significant press attention as a public proof of the character's technical underpinnings.

In January 2024, Qingniao appeared at the Shanxi Cultural Tourism Spring Festival Carnival, held at Taiyuan Outlets, continuing its role as a provincial cultural tourism ambassador during the holiday season. That spring, the Datong strand of Shanxi's digital human story began to take shape. In April 2024, a digital human modeled on the historical figure Hua Mulan was unveiled in Beijing at the Zhongguancun Forum. This character was a distinct and earlier project from the one that would later attract national attention; it was created jointly by Datong Digital City Investment and Construction Co., Ltd. (大同市数字城市投资建设有限责任公司) and JD Cloud (京东云), and represented JD Cloud's Yanxi (言犀) voice platform's first cultural tourism service digital human. The figure was presented wearing warrior armor, capable of speaking bilingual Chinese and English, and designed to serve as a smart tour guide for Yungang Grottoes and Datong's ancient city walls. Powered by the Yanxi voice model trained on over fifty thousand hours of voice data and enriched with Datong-specific cultural knowledge, the character officially joined Datong's cultural tourism operation at the time of its announcement.

In May 2024, a separate initiative focused on a different, artistically ambitious version of a Hua Mulan digital human was set in motion in Datong. A cultural creative design competition under the guidance of the Datong Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Department attracted over two hundred entries, from which thirteen winning works were selected through a combination of public voting and expert review, establishing the creative foundation for what would become a three-dimensional hyper-realistic Hua Mulan digital human. This competition-driven strand developed in parallel to and remained institutionally distinct from the earlier JD Cloud version.

In July 2024, two events advanced Shanxi's digital human landscape in different directions. On July 11, at a Shanxi provincial government press conference in Taiyuan, Vice Mayor Li Yongqiang announced two mascots for the 2024 Shanxi Tourism Development Conference: a pair of characters named Jin Jin (晋晋) and Yang Yang (阳阳), whose names together reference Taiyuan's ancient name Jinyang. Jin Jin is a boy character in blue-green tones referencing the architecture of Jinci Temple, while Yang Yang is a girl rendered in warm tones; both were presented primarily as mascots and would later be deployed with digital human interactive capabilities. On July 19, a formal signing ceremony was held in Beijing at which two agreements were concluded: a strategic cooperation agreement between the Datong Municipal Propaganda Department and Zhonghua Book Company Ltd. (中华书局有限公司), a subsidiary of China Publishing Group (中国出版集团有限公司); and a development agreement between Datong Daily Media Group (大同日报传媒集团) and GuLian (Beijing) Digital Media Technology Co., Ltd. (古联（北京）数字传媒科技有限公司), a wholly owned subsidiary of Zhonghua Book Company. These instruments formalized the institutional partnerships behind the three-dimensional hyper-realistic Hua Mulan project, with China Publishing Group Vice President Zhang Hong, Zhonghua Book Company Executive Director Xiao Qiming, and Datong Standing Committee Propaganda Minister Wang Minghou among those in attendance.

Later in July 2024, Jin Jin and Yang Yang were deployed with digital human interactive capabilities at the Splendid Taiyuan event at Taiyuan Ancient City, where they appeared at the event's news center and engaged with audiences. In August 2024, the second annual Digital Cultural Tourism Brand Innovation Conference was held at Taiyuan Botanical Garden, where the Follow Wukong Through Shanxi campaign was launched in connection with the nationwide interest generated by the video game Black Myth: Wukong. The conference also released the first batch of Shanxi provincial digital cultural tourism innovation cases and premiered an AI promotional film titled JinJian China. That same month, Yuanyuan Technology (元圆科技), a subsidiary of Tianyu Digital Technology (Dalian) Group Co., Ltd. (天娱数字科技（大连）集团股份有限公司, stock code 002354.SZ) — which also operated the Shanxi Data Traffic Ecological Park (山西数据流量生态园) and ranked thirty-fifth among Shanxi's top one hundred private enterprises in 2023 — won the bid for the Shanxi Provincial Culture and Tourism Bureau's digital cultural tourism virtual human promotion project. The project tasked Yuanyuan Technology with creating virtual humans to explore Shanxi's cultural heritage through creative marketing and with building a Jin Metaverse (晋元宇宙) virtual space.

In September 2024, Qingniao represented Shanxi at the China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing, with Shanxi Zhisheng Media Technology's Vice General Manager Xu Chuyu attending. In October 2024, the Eighth Route Army Culture Digital Experience Museum (八路军文化数字体验馆) opened in Wuxiang County, Changzhi City, described as the first national digital experience museum themed on Eighth Route Army culture. The facility contains no physical artifacts, presenting all content in digital form across seven exhibition zones organized around the five conceptual dimensions of people, culture, place, events, and objects, spanning seventeen digital exhibition installations. The museum's AI digital guide, named Hongxing Yang (红星杨), wears a gray-blue Eighth Route Army uniform; the name derives from a famous tree in Wuxiang's Wang Jiaba Village planted by Commander-in-Chief Zhu De in 1940, whose cross-section reveals a five-pointed star pattern, and visitors call the guide Yangyang. The character averaged over three hundred visitor interactions per day and was backed by a knowledge base of approximately thirty million Chinese characters of Eighth Route Army historical data. The museum was co-directed by the Xinhua News Agency Shanxi Branch and Changzhi City government and built by Xinhua Net (新华网) Shanxi company and Wuxiang County government.

In November 2024, Taiyuan City Library (太原市图书馆) installed an AI digital human screen, providing visitors with AI voice interaction, smart question-and-answer services, book recommendations, book-finding assistance, and reading support, marking the first publicly documented use of digital human technology within a Shanxi public library setting.

In January 2025, the three-dimensional hyper-realistic Hua Mulan digital human developed through the partnership of Zhonghua Book Company and GuLian (Beijing) Digital Media Technology was publicly released at a press conference co-hosted by the Datong Municipal Propaganda Department and Zhonghua Book Company in Beijing. Sources described the character as China's first three-dimensional hyper-realistic Hua Mulan digital human and the first such digital human created as a city image brand. The project was built on Unreal Engine with high-precision three-dimensional modeling; the hair system alone underwent over three hundred rendering tests, and the AI system's lip-synchronization accuracy reached ninety-eight percent. The character was available in three costume variants — warrior armor, feminine dress, and an ancient-modern fusion design — and integrated natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and large language model technologies. At the same announcement, a Three-Year Plan for Hua Mulan Cultural Technology Industry Development was disclosed, underscoring the Datong municipal government's commitment to Hua Mulan as a sustained city branding vehicle. Later in January 2025, this Hua Mulan digital human was projected onto Datong's East City Wall Heyang Gate during the Spring Festival, an occasion described as the first instance of a national three-dimensional hyper-realistic Hua Mulan digital human displayed on a city wall.

In April 2025, the Hua Mulan digital human participated in a reader open day hosted by Zhonghua Book Company in Beijing, where it engaged directly with attendees by answering questions about Datong history, cuisine, landmarks, and Mulan cultural lore. That same month, Taiyuan City Library extended its AI digital human offerings with two additional AI assistants — Longqiqi (龙琪琪), an AI reading assistant, and Longtantan (龙探探), an AI librarian — both powered through DeepSeek integration.

In May 2025, the Hua Mulan digital human traveled to the Twenty-First China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair, held at the Shenzhen International Convention and Exhibition Center, where it was presented at the Shanxi exhibition area and was the only digital human and AI agent in that area. The Mulan Workshop (木兰工作室), operated by Datong Daily Media Group, conducted live-streaming from the event; visitors recited the classical Ballad of Mulan, sampled Mulan-branded vinegar, and interacted with the AI character directly. Commercial results from the event included over thirty-eight thousand yuan in on-site sales, over twenty-three thousand yuan in livestream sales, and approximately 3.3 million yuan in recorded intention orders.

In August 2025, Hua Mulan was selected as one of ten typical cases of cultural-technology integration at the Seventh Shanxi Cultural Industry Fair, co-organized by the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee Propaganda Department and Science and Technology Daily, with Datong Daily Media Group credited as the developer. Other selections in the same cohort included the Tianlong Mountain Grottoes digital restoration project and Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem cultural initiative. Also in August 2025, Jin Yiyi performed Shanxi opera selections and engaged in multi-modal audience interaction at the Seventh Shanxi Culture Expo through the Shanxi Chenhan Digital Technology booth. At the end of that month, the 2025 Digital Cultural Tourism Brand Innovation Carnival, held at Taiyuan Botanical Garden and organized by the Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, published twelve digital cultural tourism innovation cases spanning digital humans, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and extended reality. Cases included the Hua Mulan three-dimensional digital human, the Tianlong Mountain Grottoes digital restoration, a Shuozhou digital cloud experience hall, a Taihang digital hall at the Matian Eighth Route Army headquarters memorial, and an Eternal Guan Yu XR interactive film. The carnival also featured a collaboration with Shanghai Film Group centered on Shanxi-set adventures for the animated character series Langyangshan Little Monster (浪浪山小妖怪). This event provided the clearest publicly documented evidence that virtual digital humans had been normalized alongside immersive media technologies within Shanxi's cultural presentation infrastructure.

In September 2025, Shanxi Daily published a comprehensive overview of the province's digital human ecosystem, covering Qingniao, Jin Yiyi, and the Hua Mulan three-dimensional digital human alongside a fourth character then under development: Wang Wei (王维), being built by Yuanyuan Technology for Qi County on the basis of the young Tang Dynasty poet's image for the Wang Wei Art Museum (王维美术馆). The Wang Wei digital human incorporates an eastern aesthetic semantic library and an AI painting system enabling real-time generation of Tang Dynasty-style landscape imagery. The same coverage noted the development of a further character named Qiao Xiaomei (乔小妹), an AI digital human designed for the Qiao Family Courtyard (乔家大院) in Qi County, built on a cultural knowledge graph containing over twenty thousand core knowledge entries and trained through a Jinzhong cultural tourism large language model. By the end of the period covered through February 2026, Shanxi had compressed into roughly thirty months of activity what other Chinese regions had taken years to build, producing a named and institutionally anchored digital human ecosystem oriented almost entirely around cultural heritage, where every major character derived from a specific historical artifact, literary figure, or revolutionary heritage site.

[Mar 2026]