Lately, I’ve been thinking about how culture is created and passed on. If we stop treating “culture” as something reserved for museums, stages, or classrooms, it’s really just the ongoing storytelling of how our past shapes our present and future. And modern China is exceptionally good at turning that story into something you can walk into, soak in, dress up as, and quite literally buy a ticket for.
So let me take you away from breaking news for a moment and hop on a little virtual journey with me. Yes, buckle up for my fourth and final installment of my China travel blog posts. (I truly need to finish writing these before I book my next trip to China.)
Last October, my husband and I visited Xi’an, the ancient capital of 13 Chinese dynasties, best known for its Terracotta Warriors. This time though, I skipped the warriors and went straight for romance.
As a kid, I memorized the great Tang poet Bai Juyi’s (白居易) famous poem, Song of Everlasting Sorrow (長恨歌), the tale of Emperor Xuanzong (唐玄宗) and China’s most famous lychee-loving beauty, Consort Yang (楊貴妃) of the Tang dynasty. Imperial love, lychees rushed across the empire, hot spring baths, and ultimately a devastating rebellion that ended her life. It’s dramatic, beautiful, and morally questionable (she did start as his daughter-in-law, after all), the kind of story that quietly follows you into adulthood.
Twelve centuries later, we checked into a hot spring resort built around that very legend at Huaqing Palace, once the bathing retreat of the royal lovers just outside Xi’an. One night we watched a giant outdoor spectacle inspired by the same poem and royal love story: mountains as backdrop, dancers skimming across illuminated water, a million-dollar stage retelling an 8th-century love story for thousands of coughing, selfie-taking modern viewers (Xi’an’s air quality was not feeling particularly poetic that evening). It didn’t quite capture the quiet ache of Bai Juyi’s words, but it did something equally powerful: it made classical literature part of everyday leisure.
It struck me how the tragic poem I studied in high school had been transformed into a full-on themed experience you could sleep in, eat from, and applaud at the end of the night.
Then I decided to become Consort Yang myself.
Huaqing Palace is now a high-end Hotspring Hotel
Performance of The Song of the Everlasting Sorrow
Well, minus the marrying-your-father-in-law part.
If you’ve been to China in the last few years, you’ve probably seen hanfu dress-up studios everywhere. For about $60 total, two people get full Tang dynasty outfits, hair, makeup, and a rapid-fire photo shoot. My Consort Yang outfit weighed about eight pounds and required a small engineering team of stylists. My husband was ready in five minutes; translating posing instructions for him took longer than the actual photography.
Local malls covered with Hanfu dress up shops
Take your pick of hanfu
It took a small team to get my makeup and hair done
Let’s Play Hanfu
We stepped into the lantern-glowing streets of Datang Everbright City (大唐不夜城), where seemingly every other person was also in historical costume. Embarrassing? Not at all. The only true challenge was using a public squat toilet dressed like imperial royalty. Our photographer carried folding stools so we could rise above the sea of tourists for each shot. Within an hour, our images were edited into cinematic perfection. No, we absolutely do not look like that in real life. This is China’s cultural tourism engine at full speed: A massive, rapidly expanding sector, with the broader tourism and hotel industry projected to reach USD 427.74 billion in 2026. Here, culture isn’t just preserved; it’s encouraged to be reenacted and documented in endless selfies and videos. It comes with trade-offs. At times the storytelling feels industrialized, optimized for scale and nostalgia, and largely aimed at those who already know the tales by heart.
But it does something incredible— it invites millions to actively step into their own history instead of only observing it. What might feel academic or historic elsewhere becomes playful, wearable, and social in China.
Coughing through the smog, wobbling on a stool in embroidered silk, and laughing at our over-edited portraits, I realized I wasn’t just touring a historic city. I was briefly inside a story I once only knew as text on a page. And maybe that’s the real magic of cultural creativity at its best: it turns memory into experience, and experience into curiosity for what came before and what comes next.
Venus Sun
Senior Director of Experience
Lan Su Chinese Garden
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