Gulian Digital Media
- Registered name
- 古联公司
- Unified Social Credit Code
911101063530150482registered in Beijing 北京- Website
- 5662677884
Historical-figure revival · Hyperreal and film-grade studios · Classroom and campus
Gulian Digital Media (古联（北京）数字传媒科技有限公司) is the digitisation arm of Zhonghua Book Company (中华书局), the classical-texts publisher founded in 1912, and it is where that publisher’s digital human work is actually built. It was incorporated on 7 August 2015 out of what had been the book company’s ancient-texts resource development department, and it is wholly owned by its parent — a 法人独资 limited company registered in Beijing’s Fengtai District with registered capital of 138.5 million yuan. Its general manager is Hong Tao (洪涛).
The company’s ordinary business is databases: the Chinese Classic Ancient Books Library (中华经典古籍库), an overseas Chinese-medicine texts library, a national ancient-books catalogue, and the 籍合网 platform that carries them, which was named to a national recommended-database list. By 2026 that corpus was being described as more than 66,000 titles and eleven billion characters. This matters to the record because it is the raw material the digital humans are built from rather than a separate line of work.
In August 2022, for Zhonghua Book Company’s 110th anniversary, Gulian released what was billed as the country’s first 3D hyper-realistic digital human of a historical literary figure — Su Dongpo (苏东坡). The build used the classical-texts corpus to construct a character database, a knowledge graph and what the team called a “Su Dongpo digital brain”, the intent being period-appropriate cognition rather than a face that reads a script. The figure went on to appear on CCTV-1’s 2023 China Poetry Conference, and the project was listed by the National Press and Publication Administration among its 2023 publishing science, technology and standards innovation demonstration projects, filed under the series name Digital Humans of Chinese Sages (中华先贤数字人) with Gulian as the declaring unit.
The second build is the one that connects this record to Shanxi. In July 2024 Datong Daily Media Group (大同日报传媒集团) signed a custom development and derivative services agreement with Gulian, alongside a strategic cooperation agreement between the Datong municipal publicity department and Zhonghua Book Company. The product, unveiled in January 2025, was a three-dimensional hyper-realistic Hua Mulan (花木兰) rooted in the city’s Northern Wei heritage and engineered as an interactive agent integrating natural-language interaction. Contemporary coverage calls it the country’s first hyper-realistic Mulan digital human.
A caution on attribution: a government case list records the declaring unit, not necessarily the builder. Here the maker call does not rest on that listing. Independent trade press — the China Press, Publication, Radio and Television Journal and the China Publishing Network among them — separately name Gulian as the company that built these figures, and the Su Dongpo release credits a named co-developer, 北京谛听视界文化科技有限公司, for the production side.
The company keeps a verified Weibo account under the name of its flagship database, 中华经典古籍库, whose verification line carries the registered name verbatim. It also appears in public procurement in its ordinary character: a 2025 Beijing Capital Library digital-resource award notice lists it by name, code and address across several database packages.