Changsha Digital Whale Technology
- Chinese name
- 数字鲸鱼
- Pinyin
- Registered name
- 长沙数字鲸鱼科技有限公司
- Unified Social Credit Code
91430105MACC53YH0Wregistered in Hunan 湖南- Website
Hyperreal and film-grade studios · Historical-figure revival · Exhibition and museum production
Changsha Digital Whale Technology (长沙数字鲸鱼科技有限公司) is the Changsha studio that built the Lady Xin Zhui (辛追夫人) three-dimensional digital human for Hunan Museum (湖南博物院), the most widely covered historical-figure digital human China produced in 2024. It was incorporated on 29 March 2023, is a natural-person company with registered capital of 100,000 yuan, and its legal representative is Zhao Junjun (赵俊骏). Its registered industry is research and experimental development, and its business scope covers artificial-intelligence platforms and application software, animation and game development, and exhibition services for digital creative products.
The Xin Zhui build is its defining work, and the attribution behind it is unusually firm. Hunan Museum released the figure on 17 May 2024 in two versions — a seated full-body rendering of Lady Xin Zhui at roughly thirty-five, and a head portrait at roughly fifty — with formal public release on 18 May. Xinhua’s own photograph of the thirty-five-year-old version carries the credit line “新华社发（长沙数字鲸鱼科技有限公司制作）”, naming the company as the producer of the image. People’s Daily Online, Guangming Online and the Hunan Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau separately describe the company as the party that performed the digital reconstruction, and each quotes its general manager, Zhang Rihui (张日晖, rendered 张日辉 by Huasheng Online), on the method. None of that attribution rests on the company’s own account of its work.
What the studio supplied was the digital modelling, not the forensic science. The cranial-facial reconstruction underneath the figure was led by the forensic specialist Yuan Zhongbiao (袁中标) and rests on X-ray head scans taken in the 1970s, when the Mawangdui tomb body was first examined. Zhang describes modelling precision of 0.01 millimetres, sufficient that skin texture and individual pores are visible, and the use of motion capture taken from a live performer to drive posture and expression. The oldest version was reconstructed first, at approximately the age at which she died; AI image generation and large models were then used to build the younger figures from it. Contemporary coverage bills the result as the first virtual digital human anywhere built from a two-thousand-year-old preserved wet corpse.
The figure went into service quickly. On 20 May 2024 it was deployed as a dynamic animation on electronic display screens at Wenchangge (文昌阁), and the museum described plans to extend it into an interactive AI agent capable of real-time dialogue and artefact explanation — a guide rather than a portrait. That agent was reported as expected in the second half of 2024; coverage in July 2026 still describes it as forthcoming, so the interactive version should be read as announced rather than delivered.
Two facts about the legal person sit oddly against the profile of the work and are recorded here rather than smoothed over. The registered capital is 100,000 yuan and the registered address at 芙蓉中路一段468号1502房 in Kaifu District is a 集群注册 — a shared cluster address of the kind used by very small companies rather than a studio floor. A business-irregularity record (经营异常) was added against the company on 8 July 2026. Neither fact bears on who built the Xin Zhui figure, which is attested independently; both bear on what kind of entity holds the credit.
The company has no Weibo account. A verified account under the name 数字鲸鱼 exists and belongs to an unrelated blockchain platform; no account has been found for the Changsha company under any form of its name.