Dang Li
Shanghai Fengyuzhu Culture Technology Co., Ltd., Shanghai 200436, China.
*Corresponding author: Dang Li
Abstract
The “City Upon City” site in Kaifeng is an excellent archaeological site of the former capital of China. Five layers of cities are built underground to record the floods of the Yellow River, dynastic changes, and the repeated destruction and reconstruction of the city. The traditional site display is not very good at showing the stratified layers underground or presenting them in a scene. “Parallel Kaifeng” historical multidimensional space-time theatre at the Yellow River Suspended River Culture Museum will be the research object of this paper, and engineering practice, interdisciplinary research, and field investigation will be carried out to analyze the design concept, spatial construction, technical route, and narrative system of an interpretive model-based light-and-shadow theatre. According to the idea of “unchanged urban central axis”, five groups of independent and connected lifting models will be coordinated by a 360° panoramic LED system. The synchronisation error of the lifting system with the images should be less than 50ms; a story of “growth - prosperity - inundation - decline - rebirth” will be created, and archaeological authenticity, exhibition art, and technological innovation will be combined. A new model of “archaeological site + immersive performance + digital display” has been put forward in this paper to solve the problem of display for superimposed sites, and an actual case study and theoretical basis for the Yellow River cultural heritage have been provided.
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Copyright
© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper
Narrative Innovation for Archaeological Sites: A Study on the Design of the Light-and-Shadow Theater for Kaifeng’s “City Upon City” Site
How to cite this paper: Dang Li. (2026) Narrative Innovation for Archaeological Sites: A Study on the Design of the Light-and-Shadow Theater for Kaifeng’s “City Upon City” Site. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(5), 584-589.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.05.013