Though a little bit late, the Palace Museum, the country's largest museum and biggest treasure house, has taken its first step into the digital world.

Early this week, the Palace Museum opened its website (http://www.dpm.org.cn) to the public after three years of preparations. Co-operating with the Chinese Academy of Science's Sinosoft Group, the museum finished laying optical fibre lines, built a 1,000-MHz LAN computer and developed a software system to manage its collection.

"We opened the website to serve three different groups of people," said Tan Bin, vice-president of the Palace Museum. "They include ordinary readers, amateur lovers of cultural relics, and scholars and researchers."

The website provides information on 14 major topics and includes an overview of the Palace Museum, a guide to the Forbidden City, explanations of the relics in the collection and an online museum. The site also offers an "Expert Forum" where scholars can exchange ideas.

The first phase of the website construction involved more than 4,000 photographs with 480,000 expository characters and research papers amounting to 5.63 million characters.

As the world enters the Internet age, Chinese museums have to face the challenge of changing their old-fashioned manual management strategies. The routine methods that most Chinese museums presently use in the protection, exhibition and study of cultural relics no longer work in modern society.

According to Zhang Wenbin, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the Palace Museum stores nearly 1 million cultural relics. Only 1 percent of them are displayed for the visitors on a year-round basis. The Palace Museum is home to 163,000 square metres of Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) architecture, but there is not yet a complete and precise database covering the ancient buildings.

As the largest museum in the world, with an area of 720,000 square metres, it contains nearly a million art treasures from the past 5,000 years of Chinese culture.

Because of this immensity, it is nearly impossible for any visitor to see everything inside the imperial palace. The website is designed to help people map out an ideal route to take through the palace by providing them with information about the different galleries and buildings contained in the palace .

(China Daily 07/20/2001)