From Screen to Shanxi: How Digital Culture Is Changing the Way Travelers Discover China

ASIA INSIGHTS JOURNAL

10/15/2026

For many travelers, discovering China has traditionally meant following a familiar route. Beijing for the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. Shanghai for its skyline and historic waterfront. Xi’an for the Terracotta Warriors. Chengdu for giant pandas and Sichuan cuisine.

But a different kind of journey is beginning to take shape.

A 2026 Xiaohongshu travel trends report describes a shift from simply “checking in” to experiencing a more diverse China. Over the past year, posts about traveling in China increased fivefold, while travel footprints on the platform expanded to nearly 500 cities. Travelers are moving beyond major destinations into smaller cities and even county towns, looking for experiences shaped by particular interests rather than only the places already familiar to international audiences.

That shift creates a particularly interesting question in a country as large as China: with so many places to visit—and such a large gap between what exists and what international travelers know about—how does a lesser-known destination suddenly become visible?

Shanxi offers an unexpected answer.

The province is not usually part of the standard first-time itinerary to China. Yet after the release of Black Myth: Wukong, the connection between the game's landscapes and real temples, towers, sculptures, and ancient buildings across Shanxi drew new attention to places that many travelers may never have considered visiting.

The story is larger than the game itself.

It offers a glimpse into how a destination can move from being relatively unknown to becoming imaginable—and eventually visitable—when a contemporary story gives people a reason to look.

Photo: 黑神话Black Myth Weibo

When a Game Becomes a Way Into a Place

Imagine encountering a temple in a game and assuming that its dramatic rooflines, painted sculptures, and ancient-looking halls were created entirely by a digital artist. Then you discover that the building exists in the real world.

That moment of recognition is part of what made Black Myth: Wukong such an interesting cultural gateway.

The game drew heavily on real Chinese architecture and cultural heritage. For players outside China, some of the buildings they encountered may have initially been easier to recognize as part of a fictional world than as places that actually existed. Then the connection became clear: temples, towers, sculptures, and landscapes represented in the game had real counterparts across Shanxi.

A place that might never have appeared on a conventional travel itinerary suddenly had a story through which travelers could discover it.

But the most interesting change was not simply that more people became interested in visiting.

It was that they suddenly had a reason to know where Shanxi was.

For someone who had never heard of Foguang Temple, the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda, or many of Shanxi’s historic temples, the game supplied a point of familiarity. A player could first encounter a building through a fictional story, become curious about its real-world location, and then begin searching for the place behind the image.

The sequence is remarkably simple:

Game world → curiosity → search → journey

In this sense, Black Myth did not simply advertise Shanxi.

It made Shanxi discoverable.

What Travelers Find Beyond the Screen

The strength of this connection also depends on what travelers find once they arrive.

Black Myth could not have drawn on such a rich visual world without a physical landscape capable of supplying it. Shanxi preserves an unusually dense collection of historic architecture, sculpture, murals, temples, and towers spanning different periods of Chinese history.

For travelers, that means the game offers only the first layer of the experience.

At Foguang Temple, the East Hall, built in 857, offers a rare glimpse into Tang-era timber architecture. Elements associated with the temple have also found their way into the game's visual world, creating an unexpected bridge between a contemporary digital experience and architectural traditions more than a thousand years old.

For a player, that connection can become an entry point to a historical landscape encountered first through a game and understood only later through the history behind it.

The Yingxian Wooden Pagoda reveals another dimension of this heritage: the knowledge embedded in construction itself. Built in 1056, its sophisticated timber structure and interlocking system reflect historical understandings of materials, weight, balance, and structural forces.

Seen alongside the game's architectural imagery, the pagoda invites a different question—not simply what ancient buildings looked like, but how they were made possible.

At the Yungang Grottoes, the focus moves from architectural techniques to artistic and religious traditions. The site's Buddhist sculptures and cave environments offer a tangible reference for the visual language of sacred landscapes represented in the game.

Rather than treating these images as purely fantastical creations, visitors can begin to connect them with centuries of Buddhist art, iconography, and cultural exchange.

For an international visitor, this changes the meaning of a heritage site.

The question is no longer simply:

“Is this the building from the game?”

It becomes:

“What can this building tell me about the society that built it?”

The game provides the visual clue.

The real place provides the historical context.

Photo: Xiaohongshu

Why Travelers Are Following Stories, Not Just Maps

Shanxi also illustrates a broader change in how travelers are beginning to discover China.

The traditional destination-first model starts with a place:

I am going to China. Where should I go?

A newer model can begin somewhere else:

I am interested in this story, game, film, style, or cultural experience. Where can I find it?

The difference may seem small, but it changes the map.

The Xiaohongshu report describes travelers moving beyond major cities into smaller destinations and county towns while following specific interests such as Chinese-style dressing, Chinese television, hiking, cycling, and game-related heritage experiences.

Shanxi is one example. Another is Hengdian, where interest in Chinese television and film can become a reason to visit a place that might otherwise have remained outside a traveler's itinerary.

This matters because China is simply too large to be understood through a short list of famous destinations.

There are cities, towns, villages, temples, markets, landscapes, and cultural traditions that may be highly meaningful locally while remaining almost invisible to people planning a trip from abroad.

The challenge is therefore not necessarily a shortage of attractions.

It is an information gap.

A traveler in London or Los Angeles may immediately recognize the Great Wall. They may not know that Shanxi contains surviving examples of ancient timber architecture, Buddhist sculpture, and centuries-old temples scattered far beyond the major tourist routes.

Digital stories can narrow that gap.

Black Myth gave an unfamiliar province a familiar reference point. Elsewhere, a television series can make a filming location worth visiting. An interest in traditional Chinese clothing can lead a traveler toward a city they had never considered. Hiking or cycling can make a county town part of a China itinerary.

In this kind of travel, destinations do not always become famous first.

Sometimes they become discoverable first.

What This Tells Us About Cultural Heritage in a Digital Age

The Shanxi story points to a larger change in the relationship between media and place.

Digital media has long influenced what people watch, listen to, and discuss. Increasingly, it can also influence where people go and what they choose to experience once they arrive.

A game can become a geographic clue.

A fictional landscape can become a reason to visit a real one.

A digital image can lead to a historical question.

This is particularly important for cultural heritage because unfamiliar places often face a visibility problem. The historical value of a building does not automatically make it legible to an audience encountering it from another country, another language, or another cultural background.

Popular culture can provide an unexpected entry point.

A traveler may not begin with an interest in Chinese timber architecture. They may begin by noticing a building in a game.

They may not know what a Buddhist grotto is. They may simply recognize a visual style that they have already encountered on screen.

The digital experience creates curiosity first. The physical experience can then provide context, history, and interpretation.

A screen can be the beginning of learning, not the end of the experience.

Discovering China Through Unexpected Places

Shanxi is surprising not because its cultural heritage suddenly appeared, but because a new audience gained a reason to notice it.

The province had been preserving its temples, towers, sculptures, murals, and timber structures long before Black Myth: Wukong appeared. What changed was the connection between those places and people encountering them from somewhere else in the world.

That connection offers a useful way to understand the broader shift in travel to China.

As travelers move beyond “checking in” at famous attractions, they are increasingly building journeys around interests, stories, recommendations, and experiences that feel more specific to the places they visit. The Xiaohongshu report describes this as a movement toward deeper and more diverse experiences of China, including travel that reaches smaller cities and county towns.

For a traveler, the process can now happen in reverse.

Instead of learning about a place and then deciding to visit it, you may first encounter a story, then discover the place behind it, and only afterward begin to understand its history.

That is what makes Shanxi more than a new destination on the map.

It offers a case study in how places become visible in an age when travel increasingly begins with curiosity rather than a checklist.

The most interesting destination may not always be the one everyone already knows.

Sometimes it is the one that gives you a reason to look more closely.

Learning Connections

Media & Communication: How do video games circulate cultural imagery across national and linguistic boundaries? How can digital storytelling make an unfamiliar destination discoverable to international audiences?

History & Cultural Studies: How can contemporary media create new entry points to historical knowledge? What changes when travelers encounter Chinese heritage through a fictional world before encountering it through a museum or historical text?

Art & Visual Culture: How are architecture, sculpture, murals, and traditional visual motifs transformed into contemporary digital aesthetics? What happens when audiences recognize those visual traditions in the physical spaces where they originated?

Architecture & Engineering: What can surviving timber structures reveal about historical construction and engineering? How can sites such as Foguang Temple and the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda be understood as records of technical knowledge as well as cultural heritage?

Tourism & Cultural Policy: How can digital attention support deeper engagement with lesser-known heritage sites while respecting conservation limits? What does it take to turn sudden visibility into sustainable cultural participation?

For educators and students, Shanxi offers a particularly useful learning environment because the journey can begin with something contemporary and familiar and lead toward questions that are much older.

A game can open the door.

A place can provide the context.

And a deeper journey can turn a destination that once seemed unfamiliar into a way of understanding China.