If you're a regular reader of China blogs you will have caught some mention of IBM's new virtual Forbidden City. If not, a good place to start is Ogilvy China's Digital Watch, where, in a post titled "Forbidden City without the damn crowds!" Kaiser comments:

Over the weekend I played around a bit with “Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time,” the virtual recreation of that massive, stately palace complex at the heart of Beijing that was home to 24 emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. This was a joint project between IBM and Beijing’s Palace Museum. Predictably, given IBM’s extensive involvement with Linden Labs’ Second Life, it borrows liberally from SL. Your avatar — you can be deck yourself out in various Qing-era garb, to be a eunuch or a civil servant — can interact with others in a limited way, chatting and the like. There are also tour guides you can follow around and explain what you’re looking at. Gorgeous and chock-full of information, it’s available in English and both simplified and traditional Chinese. Hopefully they’ll open up more of the side apartments to the palace; currently, it’s mainly the (admittedly stunning) courtyards and pavilions of the main central axis, but that’s plenty for now.

Good summary. Imagethief also downloaded the app (it's a slightly hefty 250 or so MB in the Mac version) and had a wander around. It was good fun. But even though this is an connected app in which you can encounter other people, I was unsatisfied. Personally, Imagethief feels the best thing about the Forbidden City is the damn crowds. As a structure it's awesome. As a museum it's mediocre at best. As a people-watching location, it's simply world class. Between the foreign tourists and the vast busloads of Chinese tourists from the provinces the Forbidden City in high season is spectacular place to appreciate the great wash of humanity in all its eccentricity. Really, short of bringing back the 20,000 eunuchs (or however many there were), you can't do much better.

Unfortunately the online one is still a bit of a ghost town, even with a thousand people online. Nevertheless, short of getting on a plane and flying to Beijing (ever trickier in these straitened times), it's a good way to get a sense of the place.

Oh, and no virtual Starbucks either. I'm disappointed. That would have really put a bug up people's noses.

 

Hello? Anyone?