"Only those cultural relics displayed in front of the people are full of vitality and dignity. We will build a 5G Palace Museum so that people can know everything about it through their mobile phone," said the former Palace Museum director Shan Jixiang. Shan spoke about "The power of culture: making cultural heritage resources live" in Hangzhou, eastern China.

Since stepping down as director of the Palace Museum in April, retired Shan has transformed himself from a gatekeeper to a speaker of Chinese culture.

The Forbidden City is about to celebrate its 600th birthday in 2020, and Shan wishes to "hand over the magnificent Forbidden City for the next 600 years".

At the event on that day, Shan said that with the development of technology and surging demand for visitors, 5G technologies enabling the museum to protect its cultural relics is the direction of future efforts.

The goal of the 5G Palace Museum is to realize real-time monitoring of movable and non-movable cultural relics. The second is to allow visitors to use a mobile phone to visit the Forbidden City, said Shan.

As the Forbidden City is very large, many visitors who come for the first time may just follow the crowd, and they are not clear of the location of each building. By using the 5G technologies every viewer can know an exhibition's number, location, content and visitor numbers through their mobile phones, and they can also find the nearest toilet, and stock of cultural and creative products at any time.

The protection of cultural relics is not the only of the duty of the staff, everyone has the right to know, participate, supervise and benefit from it. Only when people love cultural relics and come to the Forbidden City will cultural relics be safe.