China Provincial-level Tourism Authorities

23 Provinces:

• Anhui Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (安徽省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Hui‑style architecture, Huangshan tourism, and opera preservation. 

The Anhui Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, headquartered at 666 Longtu Road in Hefei and led by Director Zhou Mingjie (周明洁), has emerged as one of China's most active provincial cultural-tourism regulators in embedding digital humans into policy, flagship programming, and public service. In February 2026 the Department jointly issued the Action Plan on Accelerating Technology-Empowered Cultural Tourism Development (《关于加快推进科技赋能文旅发展行动方案》), which explicitly calls for advancing virtual digital human concerts, immersive cinemas, and dome theaters as core elements of Anhui's immersive cultural tourism infrastructure, and in April 2026 it solicited applications for province-wide "AI + Culture and Tourism" pilot projects encompassing drones, robots, and digital humans, with the Department's Science and Technology Education Division (科技教育处) overseeing selection. The Department launched the Anhui Province AIGC Cultural Tourism and Broadcasting Application Competition (安徽省AIGC文旅广电应用大赛) in September 2025 under the theme "Painting Beautiful Anhui with AI," with a dedicated intelligent agent and digital human (智能体/数字人) track alongside short video, music MV, and IP image tracks; the competition concluded in December 2025 with 780 entries, producing notable digital human works including Anhui Broadcasting and Television Station's "Super Xiaowan" (超级小皖) intelligent agent, Hefei Normal University's "Wuhu Jiuzi" digital human (芜湖鸠兹数字人), and the first-prize "Ivory Storyteller" (《象牙说书人》) that uses AI digital human technology to revive Huizhou pingci storytelling as a virtual short-video host. In January 2026 the Department hosted its inaugural Technology-Empowered Cultural Tourism Creative Sharing Session in Hefei, where nine units presented on AIGC, multimodal large models, and digital humans, and in December 2025 it co-organized the Anhui Audiovisual Cultural Tourism Integration Development Conference in Huangshan. The Department has consistently embedded digital humans in its flagship annual "520" Anhui Cultural Tourism Benefit Consumption Season, with a virtual digital human portraying the "Keli Keqi" (科里科气, "tech-savvy") persona of Hefei at the 2024 launch, the metaverse-and-digital-human-themed 2025 edition in Wuhu, and the Anqing AI cultural tourism promoter digital human "An'an" (安安) at the 2025 third edition; the Department also showcased silicon-based intelligent digital human interactive units at the Anhui Activity Day of the Osaka World Expo in June 2025. Affiliated initiatives extend the same priorities, with the Anhui Provincial Library deploying AI digital human, intelligent voice, and AR-guide services from 2023, the Department-guided "Wanmei Yanxue" (皖美研学) research-tourism platform operated by Anhui Publishing Group featuring the digital human guide "Xiao Yan Teacher" (小妍老师), and the 2025 Xiang-E-Gan-Wan Intangible Cultural Heritage Joint Exhibition co-hosted by the Department featuring the intangible-heritage digital human "Xiao Yu" (小玉) as a virtual interpreter. 

• Fujian Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (福建省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Hakka Tulou, maritime heritage, and Mazu culture. 

The Fujian Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, led by party group secretary and director Zhang Yuansheng (张源生), has positioned itself as one of China's more active provincial culture and tourism authorities in deploying digital human technology, anchored by its signature mascot Xiao Fuduoduo (小福多多), a digital tourism recommendation officer that debuted at the 7th Digital China Construction Summit in Fuzhou in May 2024 and was subsequently upgraded ahead of the 8th Summit in April 2025 into a trilingual (Mandarin, English, Cantonese) AI promoter powered by a large language model and capable of explaining scenic site histories and recommending optimal routes. The department's digital human work is structured around an annual Fujian Provincial Digital Cultural Tourism Application Scenarios programme administered by its Science, Technology and Education Division (科技教育处), which since 2024 has formally designated digital humans alongside smart customer service, smart tour guides, analytics and early warning, creative assistance, knowledge organisation, and cultural communication as priority application categories, with a July 2025 declaration notice (川GZTZ document on its official portal wlt.fujian.gov.cn) opening project submissions for the 2025 cycle. Demonstration and exemplary cases recognised under this programme include the 3D children's version of Fuduoduo deployed as an AI customer-service digital human at the Fujian Provincial Children's Library, the "AI Tour Quanzhou Ancient City" smart tourism mini-programme integrating an AIGC large model with a 3D virtual digital human, and the "Chuanqi Wuyi" immersive digital theatre, several of which were further selected as 2025 metaverse typical cases by national authorities and publicised by the department in May 2026. Beyond exhibition deployments, the department co-hosts the recurring Fujian Provincial Digital Cultural Tourism Work Promotion Conference under guidance from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's Science and Technology Education Department, jointly with the provincial Cyberspace Affairs Office, Digital Office, and local governments, and maintains a long-running strategic relationship with NetDragon Websoft (网龙), whose VR "Phantom Riding Wuyi" experience, digital human AI tour promoter, and Rokid AR products have anchored the department's "Digital Cultural Tourism Demonstration Zone" at successive Digital China Construction Summits; deputy director Lin Shouqin (林守钦) has represented the department at metaverse and digital-twin events since at least 2023, while vice director Lin Yu (林宇) led a September 2025 inspection of Xiamen University's Min-Tai Intangible Cultural Heritage Digitisation and Intelligent Processing Laboratory, where naked-eye 3D digital human renditions of operatic excerpts were demonstrated, signalling the department's continuing extension of digital human applications into red culture education, intangible heritage transmission, library services, museum interpretation, scenic area guidance, and overseas promotion of the "Maritime Silk Road Starting Point — Refreshing Fujian" international tourism brand. 

• Gansu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (甘肃省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Dunhuang heritage and desert tourism. 

The Gansu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial-level government agency overseeing cultural and tourism affairs in Gansu, China — a province whose portfolio includes the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, and the broader Silk Road heritage corridor — and it has emerged as one of the more active provincial culture-tourism bureaus pursuing digital-human applications. Its 2021 "14th Five-Year Smart Cultural Tourism Development Plan" already named a "Greater Dunhuang Silk Road Digital Person" as a flagship initiative within a Dunhuang heritage protection and innovation base, and the agency has since translated that policy into a steady cadence of programs: it partnered with Alibaba's Taobao Life to launch what was promoted as the first online scenic-spot "metaverse Dunhuang Museum," a 3D recreation of more than ten Sui–Tang Dunhuang mural scenes envisioned to incorporate digital-human guides, panoramic capture, and spatiotemporal virtual imaging; it co-hosted the 2023 Western China Cultural Tourism Integration and Tourism Commodity Trade Fair in Lanzhou (July 28–30, 2023), where exhibitors showcased cultural-tourism metaverse solutions integrating digital-human tour guides, XR scenes, and immersive park experiences; in July 2023 it convened a province-wide Smart Scenic Area Construction Conference pushing the rollout of metaverse projects in key scenic areas, museums, and performance venues; and it co-organized the 2023 Computing Power Technology Conference in Lanzhou (with Gansu's Department of Industry and Information Technology and Lanzhou University), whose main forum included a "Natural Person · Robot · Digital Human Integration and Co-dance" track framed around advancing a "Digital Gansu." More recently, an "Immersive Metaverse and Digital Human Solution" submitted under its sponsorship (developed with China Unicom subsidiaries) was placed on the national Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2024 candidate list of Smart Tourism Solutions, and the department supported "Song of Gansu" (《甘肃的歌》), an AI-assisted work by Linggan Xian AI Studio and five local musicians that won a Golden Pixel Category-3 award at the National Radio and Television Administration / Kuaishou "Creative Vision · Kling AI" creation competition; at its 2025 Smart Cultural Tourism Showcase in Wuwei, deputy director Wang Zhigang emphasized strengthening cooperation with Gansu Telecom, Gansu Mobile, and DeepSeek-class large-model applications to deepen digital-human and XR/MR experiences across Gansu's scenic areas and museums. 

• Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (广东省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Cantonese culture and Greater Bay Area tourism. 

The Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, headquartered in Guangzhou, is the provincial government body overseeing cultural affairs and tourism across Guangdong — China's most populous and economically powerful province. In the digital humans space, the Department has emerged as one of China's most active provincial-level sponsors of the "AI + Cultural Tourism" (人工智能+文旅) agenda, operating under the State Council's "AI+" Action Plan and Guangdong's own policy measures on tourism upgrading and AI/robotics industry development. In June 2025 it jointly launched a province-wide call with the Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology (and Science & Technology Department) for typical-case studies and incubation projects in AI-powered cultural tourism, explicitly soliciting projects involving digital humans (数字人) and embodied-intelligence robots. The two departments received 79 submissions and, after expert review and on-site investigation, selected 15 typical cases and 8 incubation projects, which were unveiled on September 12, 2025 at the 2025 Guangdong Cultural Tourism Promotion Conference in Guangzhou — the province's first centralized showcase of AI applications in the cultural tourism sector. Selected projects span digital human tour guides, virtual livestream hosts, intelligent customer service avatars, and embodied humanoid guides — including Shenzhen UBTech's "Embodied Intelligent Guide Ambassador," which combines humanoid robotics, AI, and national image dissemination for all-weather multimodal tour narration, alongside platforms like NuwaAI's real-time conversational digital humans demonstrated at the same event. The Department's senior leadership has been visibly engaged: Vice Director Zeng Xiaofeng (曾晓峰) spoke at an April 2025 industry event on real-person 3D digital humans for tourism, while Vice Director Zhao Hong (赵红) led the August 2025 press briefing announcing the conference. Collectively, the Department positions itself less as a builder of digital humans than as a convener, policy framer, and demand-side aggregator — using case selection, conference platforms, and consumption-voucher subsidies to push Guangdong's tech vendors (UBTech, Yuanxiang/XVERSE, NuwaAI, Lifeng, etc.) into scenic spots, museums, and livestreaming channels across the province. 

• Guizhou Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (贵州省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Miao‑Dong culture and karst landscape tourism. 

Guizhou Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government body overseeing cultural affairs and tourism in Guizhou, a southwestern Chinese province known for karst landscapes, ethnic minority heritage, and the "Colorful Guizhou" (多彩贵州) destination brand. In the digital-human space, the Department has positioned itself as one of China's more aggressive provincial adopters of AI-driven tourism marketing. Its flagship project is "Huang Xiaoxi" (黄小西), a virtual digital avatar officially unveiled at the 19th Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference in Anshun in April 2025 — the name is a portmanteau drawn from three signature scenic areas (Huangguoshu Waterfall, Libo Xiaoqikong, and Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village) and the character was developed under the Department's direction by Moutai Cultural Tourism Co., a subsidiary of the famous baijiu group. Huang Xiaoxi serves as a 24-hour AI tour guide offering itinerary planning, attraction information, food-ordering, and entry-policy guidance, and was relaunched in a bilingual/multilingual form (Chinese, English, Korean, Thai) inside the "Guizhou Travel" international tourism portal at the 20th conference in March 2026, where the avatar was also extended into a full "Huangxiaoxi mascot family" and given physical/embodied appearances alongside AI robot dogs at the venue. The Department pairs the digital human with the "AI游贵州" (AI Travel Guizhou) WeChat mini-program, which uses large-model algorithms to integrate tourism resources across the province's nine prefecture-level regions and recommend personalized routes based on attractions, transport, and traveler stamina. Earlier related work includes a Wang Yangming–themed digital human (built around the Ming-dynasty philosopher who lived in Guizhou) developed by a local enterprise under provincial guidance, and a digital-human host for the "Colorful Intangible Heritage" (多彩非遗) digital archive launched in late 2023 — together making the Department a useful case study in how a relatively lower-GDP Chinese province is using digital humans as a low-cost, scalable layer for destination branding, multilingual visitor service, and intangible-heritage promotion. 

• Hainan Provincial Department of Tourism, Culture, Radio, Television and Sports (海南省旅游和文化广电体育厅) — Oversees tropical island tourism and cultural‑sports integration. 

The Hainan Provincial Department of Tourism, Culture, Radio, Television and Sports is a constituent department of the Hainan Provincial Government, established on September 29, 2018 through the merger of the former Provincial Tourism Development Commission and the former Provincial Department of Culture, Radio, Television, Publishing and Sports, with headquarters in Haikou and a mandate that spans tourism, culture, radio and television, cultural heritage, and sports — including, per its published duties, guiding and advancing science and technology innovation across the sector and overseeing informatization and standardization building for the tourism, culture, broadcasting and sports industries. In the digital-human space specifically, the department's footprint is more about being the policy-and-platform owner for Hainan's smart-tourism push than about operating a flagship digital-human IP of its own: its highest-profile recent national recognition came in December 2024, when the Ministry of Culture and Tourism named "Hainan Worry-Free Travel" (海南放心游) — its mobile complaint-and-pre-compensation platform integrating tourism public services across 18 cities and counties — to the 2024 Top 10 Cultural and Tourism Digital Innovation Demonstration Cases, an AI-enabled governance platform rather than a virtual-avatar product (worth flagging because the user-supplied snippets juxtaposed the department with "数字人," but on that same Top-10 list the actual digital-human entry was "National Natural History Museum Digital Human and AR Guide", not a Hainan project). That said, digital humans do show up around the department's remit at the operator level — third-party market reports describe Hainan tourism shopping centers introducing AI customer service, digital-human shopping guides, frictionless payment and intelligent recommendations to bridge online guidance with offline experience — positioning the department as the provincial-level convener and regulator of these deployments rather than their direct developer. 

• Hebei Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (河北省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Hebei’s Great Wall heritage, museums, and cultural‑tourism development. 

The Hebei Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial-level government body overseeing cultural affairs and tourism across Hebei, and it has positioned itself as an active promoter of digital-human (数字人) and AI-driven applications in the "smart cultural tourism" (智慧文旅) space. Under the leadership of Party Secretary and Director Zhang Cai (张才) — who has publicly emphasized treating technology as a key lever for digitizing, networking, and intelligentizing the cultural tourism industry — and Deputy Director Li Xinjie (李新杰), who has highlighted the use of online performance and virtual spaces, the department has built out a province-wide "Culture and Tourism Digital Management Service Platform" with China Unicom that incorporates digital-human hosts, virtual tour guides, and immersive AI experiences. Jointly with the Hebei Provincial Bureau of Data and Government Services, the department runs the annual selection of "Hebei Provincial Cultural and Tourism Digital Innovation Practice Cases," with the 2025 round confirming 16 winning projects; notable digital-human examples among them include the Zuoyou Mountain Valley "Huaxia Backbone Pavilion" (AI Digital Science & Technology Museum) in Qinhuangdao, where visitors hold "cross-time-and-space dialogues" with AI digital-human renditions of scientists like Qian Xuesen and Yuan Longping, as well as the Hebei Provincial Library's AI Digital Human Joint Service. The department also backs the market-operated Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei scenic-area joint ticket, which uses an AI digital-human "digital tour guide" to generate itineraries and handle on-trip food, lodging, transit, sightseeing, shopping, and entertainment for ticket holders across 203 attractions in the tri-city region. 

• Heilongjiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (黑龙江省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Harbin’s ice‑snow tourism and Russian‑influenced heritage. 

The Heilongjiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, headquartered in Harbin at 197 Zhongshan Road and currently led by Director and Party Secretary He Jing (何晶) with Deputy Directors Jiang Xingcheng (蒋兴成), Shen Guangchun (沈广春), and Qi Bin (齐斌), has emerged as one of the most active provincial-level deployers and policy architects of digital humans in China's cultural tourism sector. The Department maintains its official portal at wlt.hlj.gov.cn and operates the smart cultural tourism mini-program "Yijian Wan Longjiang" (一键玩龙江), into which it has embedded the digital human tour guide "Xin Da Piaoliang" (欣大漂亮) to provide accommodation booking, information inquiry, scenic-area guidance, and intelligent question-and-answer services, with the platform integrating the DeepSeek-R1 large language model in March 2025 and subsequently launching dedicated AI deep-tour and digital human guide functions; the Department's own generative AI service "ZhiYouLongJiang" (智游龙江) was filed with the Cyberspace Administration of China in April 2025 under registration number Heilongjiang-ZhiYouLongJiang-20250415S0003. In December 2024 the Department recognized digital human and AR guide deployments among the 2024 cultural and tourism digital innovation demonstration cases, and in January 2025 it tendered a 1.44 million yuan smart-guide digital human development project through China's government procurement system. The Department co-issued the February 2025 measures to cultivate new growth points in cultural and tourism consumption, which explicitly named digital humans, metaverse applications, light-and-shadow shows, and digital twins as new-quality cultural tourism projects to be introduced through the provincial cultural tourism industry science and technology innovation center, and the same provisions were carried into the Heilongjiang implementation plan for the deep deployment of "Artificial Intelligence + Culture and Tourism" issued in late March 2026, which calls for the development of character-type, service-type, and virtual avatar digital humans alongside AI assistants and AI multilingual translation, the promotion of AI immersive interactive experiences, virtual narration, cloud exhibitions, and digital intangible heritage, and partnerships with Ma Diandian Cultural Tourism Group and other domestic enterprises on AI animation, AI film post-production, and AI toy research. Operationally, the Department has rolled out digital human applications across signature venues and campaigns, including the AI digital human docent "Xue Baobao" (雪宝宝) at the renovated Snow Town Cultural Exhibition Hall in November 2025, a chat-capable digital human docent supporting bronze-knowledge-graph queries at the December 2025 overseas-returned cultural relics special exhibition in Harbin, and the digital human industry base that co-organized the Heilongjiang 2025 Digital Light and Shadow Art Season in Daqing in September 2025 under the supervision of cultural and tourism industry division head Guo Yanhai (郭彦海); its 2025 report to the provincial government further documents the upgrading of the provincial cultural tourism big data center to aggregate 15 million tourism-related data records and the development of the "Zhiyou Longjiang" question-answering system and digital human guide as core elements of the province's smart tourism architecture. 

• Henan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (河南省文化和旅游厅) — Manages ancient cradle‑of‑civilization sites and Shaolin culture. 

The Henan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (hct.henan.gov.cn), headquartered in Zhengzhou under Party Secretary and Director Huang Dongsheng with deputy directors including Li Yanqing, Zhou Yaoxia, Ma Guangji, Wang Fei, and Ren Wei, has positioned digital humans as a central instrument of its "Walking Henan, Reading China" (行走河南·读懂中国) brand strategy and of its broader campaign to convert the Central Plains' dense cultural heritage into contemporary, high-quality digital expression. The department began laying this groundwork in July 2022 with the launch of the Metaverse Creator Competition, undertaken in partnership with NetEase Yaotai and themed "Vying for the Central Plains, Creating Yuyuzhou," and in August 2023 unveiled at the Henan Smart Cultural Tourism Conference its flagship metaverse space Wenlü Yu Yuzhou (文旅元豫宙), a hyper-realistic environment aggregating ten major provincial IPs—including Laojun Mountain, Shaolin Temple, the Longmen Grottoes, the Yellow Emperor's Hometown, and Northern Song Dongjing City—within which virtual digital humans function as guides, companions, and interactive narrators; the platform won the gold prize for virtual scene design at the 2023 TopDigital Innovation Marketing Awards. In September 2023 the department published an in-house explainer framing digital humans as "new envoys" for transmitting traditional culture, and in November 2024 it staged the Henan Digital Cultural Tourism Achievements Exhibition in Luoyang, foregrounding digital humans alongside VR and immersive experience installations such as the Daliang Gate space. During 2024 it also rolled out the Henan Intangible Cultural Heritage Digital Human (河南非遗数字人) as part of a broader non-heritage digitization program, and signed a cross-provincial cooperation framework with Shandong's counterpart ("豫见齐鲁山河有约") that includes shared digital human and digital culture applications. In May 2025, on China Tourism Day, Deputy Director Zhou Yaoxia spoke at the launch of the Laozi digital human (老子数字人) at Hangu Pass in Sanmenxia, billed as the country's first AI-large-model-driven digital human of a philosophical figure and developed by SenseTime in collaboration with the Sanmenxia Cultural Tourism Group and the Lingbao Municipal Government to enable interactive dialogue on the Tao Te Ching at its place of authorship. Looking ahead, the department has co-drafted with the Henan Provincial Market Supervision Administration a public-consultation measure on cultural-tourism IP protection that expressly encourages virtual digital humans and metaverse performance as priority new business formats, and the 2026 Henan Provincial Science and Technology Development Plan, with the department named as a user unit, has tendered research projects on "digital human–intelligent agent" clusters for lifelong learning and on MR immersive narrative design for cultural heritage sites; in March 2026 the department, jointly with Luoyang Normal University's Public Culture Research Center, issued a province-wide call for "AI + Culture and Tourism" application cases that names digital humans alongside drones and robots as priority service-enhancement technologies. 

• Hubei Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (湖北省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Yangtze River culture and Wuhan’s cultural institutions. 

The Hubei Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government agency responsible for cultural affairs, cultural heritage, and tourism development across Hubei Province, and has emerged as one of the more visible provincial culture and tourism authorities in China's digital human ecosystem through a sustained portfolio of branded virtual spokespersons, museum-based interactive AI characters, and themed festival deployments. The department first entered the digital human field in early 2023 when it unveiled "Hu Bei'er" (胡贝儿), a hyper-realistic metaverse-style virtual digital spokesperson for Hubei culture and tourism, debuted at the "Nine-Headed Bird" Cultural and Tourism Creative Annual Ceremony with then-Director Li Shuyong (李述永) and Vice Governor Shao Xinyu (邵新宇) in attendance, and shortly after co-organized the second China (Wuhan) Culture and Tourism Expo where a hyper-realistic virtual digital human was integrated with Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot) to create an interactive AI cultural host, a national first at the time. Under Deputy Director Chen Wubin (陈武斌), the department subsequently anchored the September 2023 "Metaverse·AI Fantasy Art Journey" at Wuhan Mixc City, which combined AIGC, large language models, AR/VR/XR, intelligent digital humans, and humanoid robots, and the December 2023 Hubei Provincial AI Technology Exhibition co-organized with People's Daily Online featuring AI digital human performances and metaverse dance. From 2024 onward the department, working with the Hubei Provincial Museum, fielded AI digital humans modeled on the historical figures Qu Yuan (屈原) and Zhaojun (昭君) for visitor interaction, and during the 2025 Lantern Festival launched the "Zhiyin Guoman" virtual band led by digital humans "Chu Yin" (楚音) and "Chu Tie" (楚铁), whose appearances were derived from four signature provincial museum artefacts (the Tiger-Throne Bird-Frame Drum, the Sword of Goujian, the Zeng Hou Yi Chime Bells, and a Shijiahe jade figure) and whose dialogue capabilities were powered by the DeepSeek large language model in a collaboration with Huazhong University of Science and Technology's Optical Interaction Service Technology MCT Key Laboratory led by Professor Cai Xinyuan (蔡新元). The department subsequently took "Chu Yin" and a fleet of twelve digital technology applications to the 2025 ITB Shanghai International Travel Expo as the centrepiece of the "Zhiyin Hubei, Beautiful Yangtze" (知音湖北 大美长江) brand, deployed the Yangtze River-themed digital human "Bao Bao" at ITB China in June 2025, served as co-host of the October 2025 International Wudang Tai Chi Cultural Festival in Shiyan whose opening ceremony was guided by the AI digital human "Tai Chi Wa" (太极娃), and most recently in March 2026 introduced the "Jingjing" (荆荆) and "Chuchu" (楚楚) digital humans alongside humanoid robot and AR interpreter showcases at the 2026 "Spring Date Cherry Blossom Viewing" series press conference under current Party Secretary and Director Ke Ke (克克). The department also supervises the Hubei Digital Culture-Tourism Research Institute (湖北省数字文旅研究院) hosted at Hubei University's Tourism School and works in alignment with the Wuhan Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism's 2025–2027 Wenlü Metaverse Innovation Development Action Plan, which explicitly encourages digital human cultural-tourism scenario applications and the development of municipal virtual image spokespersons. Hubei Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism: provincial culture-tourism authority deploying digital human spokespersons for Jingchu cultural heritage promotion. 

• Hunan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (湖南省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Zhangjiajie tourism and Xiang culture. 

The Hunan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, the provincial government body responsible for cultural affairs, tourism promotion, and intangible cultural heritage administration in Hunan Province, has used digital human technology since 2022 as a public-facing instrument for cultural-tourism branding and immersive promotion of the province's scenic and heritage assets. At the 18th China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair in December 2022 the Department deployed the digital virtual human "Xiang Xiaomei" (湘小妹) as its official promotion ambassador, using her as the through-line presenter for Hunan's "Five Famous Cards" (五张名片), digital cultural relics, intangible-heritage cultural-creative products, and red tourism, paired with naked-eye 3D video sequences of Zhangjiajie, Shaoshan, Changsha, the southern sacred mountain Hengshan, and the Chengtoushan archaeological site to give fairgoers an immersive walk-through of Hunan's destination "metaverse." In September 2024 the Department, with technical support from the Hunan Provincial Government Service and Big Data Centre, introduced a second, AI-driven interactive digital human, "Hengheng" (衡衡), who served as co-host of a televised cultural-tourism gala in Hengyang, generating real-time dialogue, singing, and dancing rather than pre-recorded segments and directing audiences toward three signature Hengyang tourism routes; the same gala saw "Hengheng" appear via cross-screen integration to extend the Department's promotional reach. Its work also intersects with adjacent provincial initiatives, including the July 2025 call from the Hunan Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology and the Hunan Provincial Radio and Television Bureau for 2025 metaverse typical cases covering digital humans, digital-human products, parks, and standards, situating the Culture and Tourism Department within a broader Hunan inter-departmental coordination framework on virtual-being applications. 

• Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (江苏省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees classical gardens, canal culture, and major cultural cities. 

The Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism has emerged as one of China's most active provincial-level cultural authorities in integrating digital humans into public cultural and tourism services, positioning Jiangsu as a national pacesetter for AI-driven文旅 transformation. Under the leadership of Party Secretary and Director Yang Zhichun (杨志纯) and Deputy Directors Qian Ning (钱宁), Li Chuan (李川), and Tuofeng (拓峰), the department issued the landmark Jiangsu Province "Artificial Intelligence + Culture and Tourism" Action Plan (2026—2028) in early May 2026, the first provincial-level action plan of its kind in China, specifying six major application scenarios and twenty key tasks that explicitly designate digital human livestreaming, digital human interaction, and intelligent agent workflows as core technologies for transforming the provincial cultural tourism industry. The department's flagship public service platform "Suxin You" (苏心游), upgraded in summer 2025, features the signature digital human "Susu" (苏苏) as its public-facing recommendation officer, while the Yangzhou-focused "Xia Yangzhou" (下扬州) mini-program—nationally recognized as the first intelligent service platform fusing AI cultural tourism large models with digital human technology—deploys digital characters "Yang Xiaoliu" (扬小柳) and "Yang Xiaoyang" (扬小杨) to provide voice guidance and electronic mapping services with particular attention to elderly travelers. Beyond consumer-facing applications, the department spearheaded the May 2024 launch of the nation's first provincial "Cultural Tourism Industry Brain" (文旅行业大脑), approved third-batch key laboratories such as the 3D Digital Art Presentation Technology Cultural and Tourism Key Laboratory in September 2024, and partnered with Jiangsu Provincial Department of Public Security and Department of Finance to jointly issue regulatory guidance in January 2025 governing commercial performances by digital human personas under the Regulations on the Administration of Commercial Performances. The department has also incorporated digital humans into major flagship events including the Grand Canal Cultural Tourism Expo, the "Shu Jian Su Yun · Home Door View Exhibition" provincial tour (where the "Susu" digital human announces museum activities), the Jiangsu Rural Tourism Festival, and the 2023 National Smart Tourism Development Conference held in Nanjing, demonstrating a sustained institutional commitment to embedding digital human technology across cultural heritage, tourism services, museum interpretation, and rural revitalization domains throughout the province. 

• Jiangxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (江西省文化和旅游厅) — Manages revolutionary heritage and porcelain culture. 

The Jiangxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, a department-level (正厅级) constituent body of the Jiangxi Provincial People's Government that also carries the provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau (省文物局) designation, is the principal authority steering digital human deployment across Jiangxi's cultural tourism ecosystem and is currently led by Party Secretary and Director Mei Yi (梅亦). Its flagship initiative in this domain is the "Cloud Tour Jiangxi" (云游江西) digital cultural tourism integrated platform, formally approved by the Jiangxi Provincial Development and Reform Commission on 7 August 2025 with the department serving as the project unit, to be hosted on the provincial e-government cloud and architected around six functional modules of which digital human management (数字人管理) sits alongside an intelligent recommendation engine, organizational engine, user behavior analysis engine, knowledge base engine, and large model engine, jointly intended to optimize province-wide cultural tourism resource scheduling and provide data-driven scientific support for regulatory oversight and public service decision-making. Building on an earlier policy direction set by the 2022 "Hundred Cities, Hundred Nights" cultural tourism consumption season, which already called for cultivating digital content production capabilities including digital human tour guides and AR model creation, the department has progressively embedded digital humans into provincial flagship campaigns: the November 2024 "Poetry Tour Jiangxi" (诗旅江西) cross-media promotion centered on the Tengwang Pavilion scenic area's virtual "Wang Bo" digital human, which recites Tang dynasty verse to visitors, grades their own recitations, and performs guided commentary; and the 2025 "Joy Tour Jiangxi" (乐游江西) nationwide short video crowdsourcing initiative co-promoted with CCTV, which explicitly listed digital human videos alongside AIGC video, VLOG, and animation as accepted submission formats. The department further aligns its digital human work with national policy by implementing the five-ministry Metaverse Industry Innovation Development Three-Year Action Plan through XR guides, digital performance arts, and "cloud tourism" formats, and in June 2025 its officials publicly committed to advancing the "Digital + Cultural Tourism" engineering program by leveraging large models, AIGC, and digital humans as priority technologies for building Jiangxi into a culture and tourism powerhouse, with the Tengwang Pavilion virtual Wang Bo deployment cited in the department's March 2025 formal reply to Proposal No. 0377 of the 13th Jiangxi Provincial CPPCC as an exemplar of the province's virtual digital human application in scenic area service delivery. 

• Jilin Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (吉林省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Changbai Mountain tourism and ethnic Korean cultural preservation. 

The Jilin Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, headquartered at 1486 Renmin Street in Changchun and led since February 2023 by Director Sun Guangzhi (孙光芝)—a member of the 14th National People's Congress—with Deputy Director Jin Zhenlin (金振林) serving as the principal figure shaping the agency's AI and digital human agenda, has positioned itself as one of China's most aggressive provincial cultural-tourism authorities in deploying virtual humans as a regional branding instrument. On 2 February 2024 the Department launched what it and national media described as China's first ice-and-snow culture virtual digital humans, "Chuyi" (初一) and "Xuanlong" (玄龙), unveiling them in the inaugural virtual-human ice-snow promotional film 《长白天下雪，雪域见奇遇》 (Changbai Snow Falls, A Snowland Encounter) anchoring the new provincial winter-tourism IP "Changbai Tianxia Xue" (长白天下雪, "Changbai Tops the World in Snow"); the two characters—Chuyi cast as a benevolent snow deity and "powder-snow ambassador" and Xuanlong as a water-dragon guardian of the Changbai Mountain forests—were produced by Blue Universe (蓝色宇宙), the digital-human subsidiary of Shenzhen-listed BlueFocus Intelligent Communications (蓝色光标, 300058), using "three-dimensional ultra-realistic" (三维超写实) modelling with LiveLinkFace, FaceGood and FaceWare facial-capture rigs. The full-media campaign built around the two digital humans was selected in May 2024 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as one of the Top Ten National Tourism Promotion Cases of 2023 from more than 140 entries, giving the project significant national visibility. The Department then deepened the deployment from a marketing asset into an operational AI service: on 19 May 2025, coinciding with China Tourism Day, it launched the Intelligent Interactive Holographic Cabin (智能交互全息仓) at the Jilin Provincial Museum, in which Chuyi and Xuanlong are powered by an "AI smart-brain" stack combining mainstream Chinese foundation models—Baidu's ERNIE Bot (文心一言) and ByteDance's Doubao (豆包)—with a self-developed cultural-tourism vertical small model covering Changbai Mountain's four seasons, the formation of Jilin rime (吉林雾凇), and Korean-ethnic-village customs, enabling real-time bilingual AI guided-tour dialogue with visitors. In parallel, the Department co-launched on 17 March 2025 the "Zhihui Jilin · AI Empowerment Plan" (智绘吉林·AI赋能计划) and the People's Daily Online "Mengxuan Lingjing" (梦幻灵境) Changchun AI Exhibition Center, with Deputy Director Jin Zhenlin officiating, and it has integrated AI digital human conversation into the "One Phone, Tour Jilin" (一机游吉林) mini-program, which the Department initiated and entrusted to Jishi Media (吉视传媒) and a leading OTA partner, linking 106 scenic spots, more than 5,000 accommodations and over 100 cultural venues with VR scenes and AI dialogue. Strategically, the agency's digital-human work has been institutionalised in higher-level provincial policy: the Jilin Provincial Government's Implementation Opinions on Accelerating AI Innovation and Development, issued in 2025, explicitly direct the upgrading of the "Changbai Tianxia Xue" virtual digital humans and the expansion of their guidance, interaction and application scenarios as a flagship "AI + Culture and Tourism" deliverable. Director Sun Guangzhi has reinforced this trajectory publicly, telling Tang-historian Professor Meng Man during the March 2025 NPC sessions that the Department would use AI digital humans to recommend Jilin's premium routes built around natural ecology and historical culture, while operational documents from the Department further indicate plans for a digital-human-driven micro-drama series 《粉雪记忆》 (Powder Snow Memories) and continued collaboration with China Unicom under a joint laboratory whose digital-human-led smart cultural-tourism projects were shortlisted in the National Data Bureau's 2024 "Data Element × Tourism" competition—together making the Jilin Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism a leading provincial case in China of a tourism regulator that has moved from commissioning a single branded virtual idol to operating an integrated AI digital human service layer across museum, mobile, and policy domains. 

• Liaoning Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (辽宁省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes coastal tourism, Manchu heritage, and industrial‑culture revitalization. 

The Liaoning Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, headquartered at No. 45-11 Beiling Street, Huanggu District, Shenyang (reachable at 024-24866954), is the provincial-level competent authority for cultural affairs, public cultural services, heritage administration, and tourism governance across Liaoning in northeastern China, and in the digital human domain it operates primarily as a regulator, platform-builder, and convenor rather than a technology developer. Its flagship initiative is the Liaoning Smart Cultural Tourism Platform (辽宁智慧文旅平台), publicly unveiled at the 2023 Northeast Asia (Shenyang) Cultural Tourism Creativity Expo, where intelligent robots acted as narrator-guides explaining the platform to visitors, an early on-the-ground signal of the department's intent to mediate cultural-tourism services through anthropomorphic AI agents; the platform leverages cloud computing, visualization, and 5G to cover the full pre-trip, in-trip, and post-trip cycle through information lookup, online guiding, online booking, and public services, anchoring the "one mobile phone, tour Liaoning" (一部手机游辽宁) vision formalized in the September 2023 provincial policy "Several Policy Measures on Supporting High-Quality Development of the Cultural and Tourism Industry," which directs cultural-tourism enterprises to develop original digital cultural content using film, animation, gaming, esports, and digital technologies, with one-time subsidies of up to one million yuan for nationally recognized works and a 500,000-yuan reward for newly designated national-level smart tourism scenic areas. Under departmental coordination, two Liaoning entries were selected for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2024 list of outstanding digital cultural-tourism innovation cases — the Liaoning Provincial Library's "Red Six Lands" Documentary Hall Smart Cultural Tourism Map, integrating 3D modeling and somatosensory interaction with VR, image, and voice modalities, alongside the Red Six Lands Pavilion Virtual Roaming System developed by Shenyang Siasun Virtual Reality (新松虚拟现实), in which, as a tourist testimonial described, an AR object-recognition table coupled with a two-dimensional map summons a photoreal digital human guide (逼真的数字人讲解) to narrate exhibits while users roam panoramic digital halls; Deputy Director Zhao Hui (赵辉) framed such deployments as part of technology-empowered new cultural-tourism scenarios offering visitors novel sensory experiences. The department also convenes industry-policy-academia dialogue on the digital terrain — its Science and Education Division (科技教育处), headed by Xie Zhonghua, hosted a September 2024 forum on "New Quality Productive Forces in Culture and Tourism" at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, drawing in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Communication University of China, and enterprises including Dalian Zhixiang Information and Dalian Botao Culture to discuss the rapid AI-driven conversion of cultural resources into data and assets — and continues to issue framework instruments such as the December 2025 "Several Measures of Liaoning Province on Cultural-Sports-Tourism Integration to Boost Consumption," adopted by the provincial standing meeting to implement central directives on consumption stimulus, within which municipal bureaus (most prominently the Shenyang Municipal Culture, Tourism and Radio-Television Bureau, which in February 2025 staged a DeepSeek-themed "AI + Cultural Tourism" training session foregrounding intelligent guiding, cultural activation, and precision marketing) and private operators deploy virtual hosts, AI livestreamers, and digital-human narrators across the Liaoning scenic-area network. 

• Qinghai Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (青海省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Tibetan‑Mongol cultural regions and Qinghai Lake tourism. 

Qinghai Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government agency responsible for culture, tourism, cultural heritage protection, and the digital transformation of the cultural-tourism industry across Qinghai Province in northwest China. Since launching its "Digital Culture-Tourism" (数字文旅) initiative around 2020 — including a department-led research mission to Hainan and Guizhou in December of that year to study smart-tourism best practices — it has positioned itself as one of the more digitally forward provincial culture-tourism bureaus, partnering with China Unicom to build the Qinghai Digital Culture-Tourism Big Data Platform (which integrated cultural venues, museums, intangible heritage, and tourism data and was later recognized in China's 2024 "Data Elements×" competition). In the digital-human space specifically, the department has moved from infrastructure to applied content: its 2025 Qinghai Cultural Tourism Carnival (Sept–Oct 2025) prominently featured digital-human ancient-modern dialogue short videos as part of its public-facing programming, and its "Microdrama+" Action Plan Implementation Scheme (issued 2025) explicitly encourages creators to adopt AIGC, VR, AR, and digital-human technologies to elevate the artistic expression and online reach of short-form cultural-tourism content. The department also operates an in-house Information Center — concurrently known as the Qinghai Ethnic-Language Animation Development Center (青海省民族语动漫发展中心) — which gives it native production capacity for multilingual avatar-based content tailored to Qinghai's Tibetan, Mongolian, and other ethnic audiences, making it a natural provincial buyer/deployer of digital-human solutions for tourism guiding, intangible-heritage storytelling, and bilingual visitor services.

• Shaanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (陕西省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Qin‑Han heritage and Silk Road culture. 

The Shaanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government authority overseeing cultural and tourism affairs in Shaanxi — a region anchored by heritage assets such as Xi'an, the Terracotta Warriors, and Mount Hua — and has positioned digital humans as a flagship vehicle in its broader push to build a "trillion-yuan-level" digital cultural tourism industry. In April 2023, the Department co-hosted the Shaanxi Digital Cultural Tourism Integration Development Forum, where Deputy Inspector Qiu Xuanluo (邱轩洛) unveiled "Chen Xiaoxiang" (沉小香), a digital human IP designed to represent Mount Hua, framing such avatars as a way to give "top-tier IPs new life in the digital world" and turn Shaanxi's cultural tourism into a hotspot for consumption, image-building, and economic uplift. The agency's strategy — articulated in official communications including a June 2025 piece on its portal (whhlyt.shaanxi.gov.cn) titled "Letting Chinese Technology 'Light Up' Chinese Stories" — explicitly groups virtual digital humans alongside domestic games and the metaverse as new carriers for narrating Chinese culture to younger, global audiences. The Department has continued operationalising this, co-organising the 2025 China Library Annual Conference in Yulin, which showcased a "Yulin Tourism Recommendation Officer" digital human built on a self-developed AI cultural-tourism large model that fuses cave-dwelling and book motifs and supports real-time conversational guidance to attendees, illustrating the Department's pattern of pairing landmark Shaanxi IP with conversational AI avatars to drive interactive, technology-enabled tourism experiences. 

• Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (山东省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Confucian heritage and coastal tourism. 

The Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial-level government agency overseeing cultural and tourism affairs across Shandong, and has emerged as one of China's more proactive provincial bodies in embedding digital humans into the cultural-tourism stack. It signaled this direction in September 2022 by launching its "Cultural Tourism China Metaverse" (文旅中国元宇宙) initiative, which included dedicated sub-tracks on digital humans, digital twins, and AR/VR/XR, and has since institutionalized vendor selection through its "Digital and Intelligent Cultural Tourism · Co-creating the Future" (数智文旅·共创未来) technology achievement recommendation catalog — recent 2026 inductees include Suzhou Kuyue's full-chain 60-fps no-wearable motion-capture digital human interactive solution and Shandong Digital Culture Group's five-product matrix in which digital humans sit alongside metaverse and digital-twin offerings. The Department also acts as the provincial gateway for the national Ministry of Culture and Tourism's "AI+" pilot programme, with cities such as Jinan permitted to recommend up to two pilot cases (covering digital human/robot guides, AI itinerary planning, ticketing, interpretation and crowd monitoring) up to the provincial level. Deployments are already operational rather than purely experimental: digital human tour guides were rolled out across the province's 200 monitored scenic areas during the 2026 May Day holiday — a period in which those sites received 26.15 million visitors and 1.27 billion yuan in revenue — and the Department co-hosted the 3rd Jinan International Biennale ("Human Intelligence Era," Dec 2024 – April 2025), which included an interactive "Lu Yun" (鲁韵) installation that generated personalized digital humans for visitors as a vehicle for promoting Qi-Lu culture. This activity sits within a broader provincial ecosystem in which Shandong added more than 76,000 new metaverse- and virtual-human-related enterprises in 2024, tying Zhejiang for second place nationally. 

• Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (山西省文化和旅游厅) — Manages ancient temple preservation and historic city tourism. 

The Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism has positioned itself as one of China's more active provincial-level tourism authorities in deploying digital humans as a core pillar of its "digital intelligence + culture and tourism" (数智+文旅) strategy. Its flagship initiative came in March 2023, when it unveiled the province's first hyper-realistic virtual digital human, "Qingniao" (青鸟, "Blue Bird"), at the Digital Culture and Tourism Brand Innovation Conference in Taiyuan — an event guided by the Resource Development Department of the national Ministry of Culture and Tourism and co-hosted with the Taiyuan municipal government, with Qingniao itself developed by Shiyou Technology (世优科技) in partnership with Zhisheng Media (智胜传媒) to serve as Shanxi's official virtual tourism ambassador and "star promoter." The department has since broadened the program well beyond a single avatar: in August 2024 it released the first batch of provincial "Digital Cultural Tourism Innovation Cases," and by September 2025 it had showcased twelve flagship cases featuring assets such as a Hua Mulan 3D hyper-realistic digital human, the Tianlongshan Grottoes digital restoration exhibition, the Shuozhou digital cloud experience hall, and the digital revitalization of Dingxiang Hongfu Temple, alongside a "Digital Intelligence Empowering Cultural Tourism Co-Creation Plan" coordinated with sister provinces and new-media platforms. The department has also leaned into adjacent trends — partnering with AR vendors (such as Shi+AR / 视+AR at the 2024 conference), designating smart scenic areas, and capitalizing on the Black Myth: Wukong tourism surge — framing digital humans not as standalone novelties but as IP-building tools that, together with VR/AR experiences and digitized heritage sites, are meant to reposition Shanxi's dense stock of ancient architecture, grottoes, and murals for a younger, tech-native travel market. 

• Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (四川省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Sichuan cuisine, panda tourism, and Tibetan‑Qiang regions. 

The Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, led since late 2024 by Director and Party Group Secretary Chen Guanghao (陈光浩), who concurrently serves as Deputy Director of the Provincial Propaganda Department, is the provincial-level government authority responsible for cultural, heritage, and tourism affairs across Sichuan, and has become one of the most active provincial culture-and-tourism regulators in deploying digital humans as instruments of policy, branding, and industry development. The Department anchors its digital human strategy to the "Anyi Sichuan" (安逸四川) provincial cultural-tourism brand, one of the four international cards alongside "Land of Abundance," "Panda Home," and "Ancient Shu Civilization," and its flagship digital human "Anyi" (安逸) — a panda-shaped "time-space companion digital human" built on a cultural-tourism large model — was unveiled at the 2024 Sichuan Digital Cultural Tourism Development Conference held in Ya'an in September 2024, where it engaged in real-time on-stage dialogue with a human host and was thereafter rolled out by the Department's affiliated Sichuan Culture Hall as an AI mascot whose promotion and scenario expansion is now a line item in the Department's published 2025 budget. Beyond "Anyi," the Department has co-sponsored or guided a steady stream of historical-figure digital humans deployed across the province's cultural-tourism scenarios, including the Li Bai digital human launched in 2023 with CCTV.com under the "Reading Li Bai, Touring China" (读李白游神州) campaign, the "Su Shi Q&A" (苏轼问答) digital human shown by Sichuan state-owned cultural enterprises at the 20th Shenzhen ICIF, the online "Zhuge Liang" interactive digital human launched April 2025, the Du Fu digital human deployed at Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum during the 2025 National Day–Mid-Autumn holiday (where the introduction of the figure correlated with a 58.81 percent year-on-year increase in visitor reception), and an AI digital-human Li Bai featured in the 2025 "Ten Thousand People Appreciate the Moon" Mid-Autumn ceremonies in Jiangyou and the Mianzhu International Wine Expo. The Department serves as guiding authority for the Visual Fusion Scene Experience Technology Innovation Center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (视觉融合场景体验文化和旅游部技术创新中心), established August 2023 in Chengdu's Wuhou District with Chuantou Digital Technology as host unit and Sichuan University as co-construction partner, which lists AI cultural-tourism large models, virtual-real fusion interactive experiences, and "virtual-real symbiosis" digital twins among its five core application domains and produced the original "Anyi" panda digital human. The Department also operates within a broader policy architecture that explicitly elevates digital humans: it is a co-signatory of the Sichuan Provincial Metaverse Industry Development Action Plan (2023–2025), which targets idol avatars, digital-human performers, hosts, narrators, and game characters as priority application scenarios, and is one of twelve departments behind the Sichuan Cultural and Tourism Industry Chain Special Work Plan, which designates the digital culture industry as one of ten priority sectors. Through annual flagship convenings such as the Sichuan Digital Cultural Tourism Development Conference and the Sichuan International Travel Expo (the 11th edition held in Leshan in 2025 featured XR immersive experience and digital-human interaction in the Leshan pavilion), and through co-organized industry events including the 2024 Sichuan Cultural Tourism Market Integration Development Promotion Activities and the 2025 China (Chengdu) Animation and Game Consumption Season, the Department has positioned digital humans as a cross-cutting tool for non-heritage transmission, scenic-area interpretation, historical-figure storytelling, smart-tourism governance, and provincial brand projection both domestically and to overseas audiences. 

• Taiwan Tourism Administration, Ministry of Transportation (交通部觀光署) — Taiwan’s Tourism Administration (MOTC) manages scenic areas, tourism policy, and international marketing. 

The Tourism Administration, Ministry of Transportation and Communications is Taiwan's central government agency responsible for domestic and international tourism policy development and execution, with its official ambassador being OhBear, a cartoon Formosan Black Bear that has increasingly served as a vehicle for the agency's digital human and AI-driven visitor service initiatives. Under Director-General Chen Yu-hsiu (陳玉秀), the administration has positioned digital transformation as a central pillar of its tourism strategy, framed by the administration as the operational core of the Lai administration's "Tourism National Team" concept. At the 2024 Tourism Industry Digital Expo held December 3, 2024 at Taipei 101's ATT 4 Recharge venue, the opening ceremony was led by the 3D digital avatars (數位分身) of Minister of Transportation Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) and then-Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉), who guided attendees on an immersive virtual tour of Taiwan's thirteen national scenic areas and their representative animal mascots, with accompanying music co-produced by AI and human musicians and incorporating Indigenous elements. The agency expanded this approach at the 2026 Taipei Smart City Expo from March 17 to March 20, 2026, where the "Taiwan Tourism Digital Pavilion" deployed the OhBear AI Assistant (喔熊AI小幫手) to plan two-day, one-night personalized itineraries, alongside AI fortune-stick interpretation tied to five-element personalization, AI-generated scent and beverage profiling, immersive 3D naked-eye bird-watching displays, nineteen virtual cycling routes, and real-time AI multilingual translation for international visitors. Beyond exhibitions, the administration has operationalized AI-mediated visitor services through its AI Smart Counter (智慧櫃台) real-time translation system, first installed at Songshan Airport's tourist service center and at the Yehliu Visitor Center within the North Coast and Guanyin Mountain National Scenic Area, delivering English, Japanese, and Korean voice translation through a dual-sided transparent screen over 5G to support the agency's post-pandemic target of 12 million international arrivals. Director-General Chen has also publicly framed scenic-area assets as convertible "digital assets," pointing to the Tourism Administration's joint Digital Modeling and Twin Application Infrastructure Project (數位建模與雙生應用基礎建設計畫) with the Administration for Digital Industries, under which Yehliu's iconic Queen's Head and Princess rock formations have been converted into high-precision 3D models licensed to the gaming industry. In international markets, OhBear has been adapted into emerging digital and AI-adjacent formats, including a naked-eye 3D billboard unveiled in Times Square on November 24, 2025 as part of the Waves of Wonder campaign and an AI-powered photo booth at the Los Angeles Travel & Adventure Show 2026 that generated personalized Taiwan travel scenes for visitors as a digital keepsake. Collectively, these activities position the Tourism Administration as one of Taiwan's most visible public-sector deployers of digital human, digital twin, and generative AI technologies in a destination-marketing and visitor-services context, with its mascot-driven brand architecture providing a coherent narrative wrapper for what is in practice a multi-vendor, cross-agency stack of AI translation, 3D capture, virtual reality, and avatar-based ceremonial communications. 

• Yunnan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (云南省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees multi‑ethnic cultural preservation and eco‑tourism. 

The Yunnan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism has functioned as the principal governmental sponsor and coordinating authority behind Yunnan's digital human initiatives in cultural tourism, positioning the province as an early experimental site for virtual ambassadors, metaverse platforms, and large-model applications in the sector. In April 2022 the Department issued guidance on optimizing the cultural and tourism business environment that explicitly referenced digital humans and NFT-based digital assets as targets for development in urban management and public services, providing an early policy basis for subsequent deployments. On May 19, 2022, coinciding with China Tourism Day, the Department launched "Caiyun" (彩云) on its official Douyin account as the province's first virtual digital cultural tourism promotion officer (数字文旅推荐官), marking Yunnan's debut entry into branded virtual-being promotion. Under the Department's guidance, Yunnan's first cultural-tourism metaverse platform "Departing for Fun Yunnan" (出发趣云南) was unveiled in Dali in May 2023, followed in July 2023 by the launch of "AI Tour Yunnan" (AI游云南), described as China's first provincial-level tourism destination large-language-model application scenario, developed by Yunnan Tengyun Information Industry Co., Ltd. (云南腾云信息产业有限公司) in partnership with Tencent. The Department also oversaw the "Cultural Tourism Metaverse" (文旅元宇宙) project built by the Yunnan Provincial Cultural Center on the Yunnan Public Culture Cloud, which combines AI, digital humans, and cloud rendering to enable multi-user digital identity interaction, debuting at the China-South Asia Expo in August 2023. More recently the Department has partnered with Yunnan Unicom (云南联通) on the "Cultural Tourism Digital Human" and related "AI Time Door" cultural-relic AIGC interactive products showcased at China Unicom's 2024 digital intelligence cultural-tourism event in Kunming, where the Department's first-level inspector Chen Shuyun (陈述云) attended, and at the 2026 Digital China Innovation Competition, where the Unicom-Yunnan cultural tourism project providing services to the Department won nine awards. During the 2025 Spring Festival the Department also supported an AI-empowered "Intangible Cultural Heritage" Spring Festival program featuring a digital human counterpart of Bai ethnic singer Dapo Maji (达坡玛吉) performing alongside her physical self, illustrating the Department's continued use of digital humans as instruments for both tourism promotion and intangible cultural heritage activation. 

• Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism (浙江省文化广电和旅游厅) — Manages Jiangnan heritage, water‑town tourism, and cultural‑media development. 

The Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism is the provincial-level administrative body responsible for cultural affairs, radio and television regulation, and tourism development across Zhejiang Province, operating through its official portal at ct.zj.gov.cn. In the digital human domain, the department functions primarily as a policy coordinator, project sponsor, and supervising authority rather than a technology developer, and it has integrated digital human deployments into its broader push to advance smart tourism and digital cultural consumption in the province. In a November 2024 formal response to a Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference proposal, the department articulated a policy line favoring application of digital human and blockchain technologies in the tourism industry, setting a target of cultivating at least twenty provincial-level smart tourism immersive experience spaces by 2027 and committing to integrate augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence into scenic areas, resort districts, and cultural venues. The department was named alongside the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Radio and Television and counterpart provincial broadcasting regulators in the National Radio and Television Administration's November 2024 approval of ten major virtual reality and virtual digital human application demonstration projects. It guided Wasu Media (华数传媒) in the November 2024 launch of the "Poetic Painting Zhejiang" cultural tourism preferential card, a project that bundled scenic-area access across more than one hundred sites with digital human AI capability platform integration. The department co-hosted the Yangtze River Delta Performance Trade Fair alongside cultural and tourism authorities from Anhui, Shanghai, and Jiangsu, where AI digital human products for cultural tourism performance were featured. In August 2025, it jointly organized with the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee Propaganda Department and the China Academy of Art a retrospective exhibition marking the 110th anniversary of painter Mo Pu, which incorporated digital human generation among its curatorial techniques. Party Group member and Deputy Director Li Xinfang (李新芳) represented the department at the November 2025 "Digital Future" immersive cultural tourism supply-demand matchmaking event in Hangzhou, while Deputy Director Chen Rufu (陈如福) and International Exchange Division Deputy Director Liang Bing (梁兵) engaged with the Xianghu International Friendly Service Center, which provides twenty-five-language inquiry and AI digital human response services for foreign visitors around the APEC period. In January 2026, two Ningbo cases including Minghe Ancient Town's 3D digital human interactive applications were selected for the provincial digital cultural tourism list curated under the department's authority, reflecting its continuing role in identifying and elevating exemplary digital human deployments within Zhejiang's cultural tourism sector. 

04 Municipalities:

• Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism (北京市文化和旅游局) — Oversees national‑capital cultural institutions and heritage sites. 

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism is the city-level government agency overseeing cultural affairs, heritage, and tourism in Beijing, and it has emerged as one of the most active state actors driving digital human adoption in China's cultural-tourism sector. In January 2025 it co-issued the "Beijing Action Plan for Innovative Development of Science-and-Technology-Empowered Culture (2025–2027)" together with the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission, the Zhongguancun Administrative Committee, the Municipal Publicity Department, the Radio & TV Bureau, and the Cultural Heritage Bureau—a framework that explicitly calls for advancing Web3.0 research and multimodal generative AI to raise the interactivity of digital humans, and targets more than 10 benchmark technology-empowered culture application scenarios and over 100 new tech-product rollouts by 2027, including virtual-digital-human concerts, immersive cinemas, and digital-human narrators at heritage sites. Operationally, the Bureau backs deployment of AI digital humans across A-grade scenic areas, hotels, and commercial hubs for guided narration, ticketing, performance lookup, and crowd-flow alerts; supports flagship experiences such as the "Night Revels of Han Xizai" AI immersive exhibition fronted by a virtual host modeled on the Tang painter Gu Hongzhong; and—through its publicity arm, the Beijing Tourism Operation Monitoring Center (operator of visitbeijing.com.cn)—co-organizes showcases such as the "Beijing Big Audiovisual" zone at the China International Fair for Trade in Services, where AIGC tools let visitors generate their own digital-human avatars. It also partners with the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology on the 2025–2027 industrial tourism plan, which was itself launched with a digital-human-narrated policy explainer, signaling the Bureau's positioning of digital humans as a strategic interface between Beijing's cultural assets and the next generation of domestic and international tourists. 

• Chongqing Municipal Commission of Culture and Tourism Development (重庆市文化和旅游发展委员会) — Manages mountain‑city tourism and Yangtze River culture.

The Chongqing Municipal Commission of Culture and Tourism Development is the provincial-level government body overseeing cultural affairs and tourism for Chongqing, and in the digital-human space it stands out for operating a dedicated "Digital Human Broadcast" channel (数字人播报) on its official portal at whlyw.cq.gov.cn, where AI-driven virtual presenters deliver spoken-video interpretations of newly issued cultural and tourism policies. Rather than using digital humans for tourist-facing marketing or attraction guides, the Commission has integrated them into its routine policy-disclosure workflow (政策解读), publishing "virtual digital human versions" (虚拟数字人版) alongside the text of regulations such as the Chongqing Measures for the Revitalization and Utilization of State-Owned Cultural Heritage Buildings, the Implementation Rules for Subsidies on Large-Scale Commercial Performances, and the 2025 Benchmark for Discretionary Administrative Penalties in the Cultural Market. This makes the Commission a notable example of digital humans being deployed for government transparency and accessibility — translating dense regulatory text into a more approachable audiovisual format — and it is positioned within the broader national push, recognized in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2024 digital-innovation case catalog, to apply real-time high-fidelity AI avatars across the cultural-and-tourism public sector. 

• Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism (上海市文化和旅游局) — Oversees creative industries and international tourism. 

The Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism (SMACT) is the municipal-level government agency responsible for regulating and promoting Shanghai's cultural industries, tourism, cultural heritage, and broadcasting/performance licensing, and over the past two-plus years it has emerged as one of the more active Chinese cultural-affairs bureaus in adopting and promoting digital human technology across both its internal operations and the wider city's culture-tourism sector. On the administrative side, SMACT was an early adopter under Shanghai's "One-Network Unified Government Service" (一网通办) initiative, deploying a "digital human assistant" (数字人帮办) system at its political-affairs service center in late 2023 to guide applicants through high-frequency procedures such as radio broadcasting licenses, cultural relic restoration approvals, performance brokerage agency registration, and tour guide certificate issuance. On the industry-development side, SMACT co-authored the 2023 Shanghai Action Plan for Building a New Track for the Culture-Tourism Metaverse, jointly with the city's Economic & Information Technology Commission and Science & Technology Commission, which explicitly identifies digital human applications, virtual-interaction spaces, and digitization of calligraphy and painting as priority technology domains. The bureau has since continued to operationalize that plan: it co-issued a 2025 "challenge" notice soliciting metaverse demonstration scenarios that combine AR real-time navigation, VR virtual tours, digital human guides, smart docents, and interactive Q&A into a replicable smart-service model, has signaled support for Shanghai-dialect ("沪语") digital human products in response to municipal political-consultative proposals, and in March 2026 issued a notice soliciting "AI + Culture and Tourism" pilot projects that explicitly name drones, robots, and digital humans as eligible service-efficiency tools — with districts such as Songjiang now using SMACT-aligned frameworks to push digital human tour-guides and holographic performance into local cultural-content industries. 

• Tianjin Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism (天津市文化和旅游局) — Manages port‑city heritage and cultural districts. 

Tianjin Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism is the municipal government agency overseeing cultural affairs, tourism development, and heritage preservation in Tianjin, and has emerged as an active adopter of digital human technology to enhance cultural tourism experiences across the city. The bureau has championed several high-profile digital human deployments, most notably the "Liang Qichao" (梁启超) digital human launched in October 2024 in Tianjin's Italian-Style District (意风区), which uses 3D modeling and voice synthesis to recreate the historical reformer's likeness and voice so tourists can hear him "personally" recount his ideas and life story, paired with a scripted experience game Yin Bing Yi Mo (《饮冰遗墨》) to deepen historical immersion. Under the bureau's oversight, Tianjin Library developed the AI virtual librarian "Shu Xiang" (书香) — a digital human combining a cultural IP mascot with AI-powered Q&A as an "intelligent reading concierge" — which won an award at the bureau-organized 2024 Tianjin Cultural and Museum Creative Product Design Competition and was formally unveiled in April 2025. More broadly, the bureau integrates digital humans into its smart-tourism strategy alongside campaigns such as "Tianjin Welcomes You" (天津始'钟''响'你), participates in national-level smart tourism initiatives (it appeared in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2024 Top Ten Smart Tourism Solutions list under immersive metaverse and digital human categories), and partners with industry players like China Tourism Group, whose AI digital human "Xiao Lv" (小旅) was showcased at events the bureau attended — positioning Tianjin as one of the more digital-human-forward municipal cultural tourism authorities in northern China. 

05 Autonomous Regions:

• Guangxi Department of Culture and Tourism (广西壮族自治区文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Zhuang culture and karst landscapes. 

The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government authority overseeing cultural affairs and the tourism industry across Guangxi, and it has emerged as one of China's more active provincial tourism administrations in deploying virtual digital humans. Under its guidance, Guangxi Tourism Development Group built the Liu Sanjie Digital Human (刘三姐数字人), unveiled in March 2023 and promoted as China's first provincial-level hyper-realistic cultural-tourism digital promotion ambassador, an AI-driven figure derived from the folk heroine Liu Sanjie that combines speech synthesis, facial modeling, and image processing to act as a virtual guide, intelligent customer-service agent, and conversational tourism assistant, and now established enough to carry its own Baidu Baike entry. The ambassador anchored a run of high-profile promotional appearances, including a debut at the Canton Tower in Guangzhou and a showing at the Guangxi-Chongqing joint cultural-tourism promotion in April 2023, and it has continued to resurface in later programming such as a February 2026 Spring opera gala. Beyond the avatar itself, the department has advanced a wider smart-tourism agenda through the "One-Click Tour Guangxi" service platform, a February 2024 leadership inspection by department party secretary Gan Lin of the Guanglü Yuanjing immersive-content space, and the September 2025 rollout in Beihai of what was billed as Guangxi's first smart cultural-tourism scenario matrix, with this work sitting inside a broader regional ecosystem in which Guangxi has signaled large-scale investment to cultivate cultural-tourism metaverse formats and, by 2026, pushed AI into China-Vietnam cross-border tourism and ASEAN-oriented AI cultural-tourism competitions run by sister bodies such as the Guangxi Expo Bureau. 

• Inner Mongolia Department of Culture and Tourism (内蒙古自治区文化和旅游厅) — Oversees grassland culture and Mongolian heritage. 

The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government body overseeing cultural heritage, museums, and tourism across Inner Mongolia, and it has positioned digital humans and immersive digital technology at the center of its strategy to shift the region's cultural tourism from a resource-dependent model toward an innovation-driven one. Its flagship digital human deployment is Hongge'er (鸿格尔), an AI digital docent installed at the new Inner Mongolia Museum (内蒙古博物院) and powered by DeepSeek-based deep-learning capability to answer visitor questions and serve as a virtual "treasure-hall member." The Department also built the North Frontier Intangible Cultural Heritage Digital Museum (北疆非遗数字馆), which uses virtual reality and digital-twin technology to create virtual sub-halls presenting intangible heritage categories and their inheritors, and it has extended AI digital-human narration to affiliated institutions such as the Ordos Museum (鄂尔多斯市博物院), alongside the use of digital-human videos to interpret public policy documents for citizens. Complementing these efforts, the Department operates the i-You Inner Mongolia (i游内蒙古) all-region smart cultural-tourism platform, integrating digital services across hundreds of scenic spots, libraries, museums, and hotels, and it frames this digital and AI adoption through region-wide initiatives such as the "Artificial Intelligence Plus" action plan and the Inner Mongolia Cultural Industry Expo's "digital empowerment" theme. 

• Ningxia Department of Culture and Tourism (宁夏回族自治区文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Hui culture and desert tourism. 

The Ningxia Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial-level government authority governing cultural and tourism affairs across the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and within the digital human field it has acted primarily as a sponsor and orchestrator of avatar-driven destination marketing rather than a technology developer. Its flagship initiative is the "Yuanyou Ningxia" (元游宁夏) metaverse cultural tourism platform, launched in late September 2024 around the "Ningxia Twenty-One Scenic Spots" theme and built under the Department's guidance by Ningxia Shengtiancai Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (宁夏盛天彩数字科技股份有限公司), which bundled VR, AR, naked-eye 3D and digital human products with a roadmap toward offline immersive spaces, digital human performances, and AI-guided touring. The Department has paired official channels with virtual personas, including a Mid-Autumn co-creation between its "Magical Ningxia" (神奇宁夏) Douyin account and the virtual influencer "Tianyu" (天妤), and has used a recurring "host plus digital human" format to present winter tourism products at Northwest China regional promotions. It has also deployed digital human narration in higher-profile settings, such as the May 2025 establishment of the Beijing-Ningxia tourism alliance, where a digital human recounted Ningxia's history, and a digital "Su Dongpo" appeared at an associated cultural expo, while its smart-tourism work continued under the "Zhiyou Ningxia" (智游宁夏) banner into 2026. Earlier groundwork dates to the 2020 launch of an online VR virtual touring platform and a 2023 implementation plan that called for digital human commentary and AR guided tours to expand panoramic tourism. 

• Tibet Department of Culture and Tourism (西藏自治区文化和旅游厅) — Manages Tibetan Buddhist heritage and plateau tourism. 

The Tibet Department of Culture and Tourism is the regional government authority overseeing cultural affairs and tourism across the Tibet Autonomous Region, and in recent years it has positioned digital and intelligent technologies, including digital humans, at the center of its public service and tourism strategy. Through its "Digital + Culture and Tourism" program the department has built a Digital Tibet channel and a public culture cloud platform reaching more than 2.5 million users, and it has driven construction of the "Digital Potala" (数智布达拉) new cultural-tourism integration innovation zone as the flagship of its smart tourism push. Its most direct digital human application appears in rural cultural-tourism pilots, where Qonggyai County in Shannan developed an AI digital human named Dawa Drolma (达娃卓玛) alongside an 8D flight cinema and MR panoramic experiences to make heritage content interactive and immersive for visitors. The department has also moved to formalize the field by calling for applications under the national "AI + Culture and Tourism" pilot framework, which explicitly covers intelligent guided narration, automatic translation, smart customer service, robots, and digital humans for tourism services, and it has supported related innovations such as the "New Concept Dramyin 2.0" instrument and a Tibet Digital Culture Association established in 2025 to coordinate cross-sector digital culture and tourism collaboration. 

• Xinjiang Department of Culture and Tourism (新疆维吾尔自治区文化和旅游厅) — Manages Silk Road tourism and Uyghur cultural heritage.

The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial-level government body responsible for administering cultural affairs, cultural heritage, and tourism development across the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In the digital human context, the department functions primarily as a policy-setting, coordinating, and capacity-building authority rather than a developer or operator of avatar technology itself, advancing the broader "smart cultural tourism" (智慧文旅) and "digital cultural tourism" (数字文旅) agenda under which virtual digital human applications in Xinjiang typically sit. Formal portfolio responsibility for digital cultural-tourism construction (文旅数字化建设) rests with Deputy Director Yu Jie (余洁), who supervises the Science, Technology and Education Division (科技教育处, head Tang Taizhi 汤太志), the Industry Development Division (产业发展处, head Tang Wen 汤文), and works alongside the Resource Development Division (资源开发处, head Duan Yuming 段玉明) that holds the explicit mandate to "develop smart tourism" (发展智慧旅游); at the implementation layer, the department's day-to-day AI lead is Li Meng (李勐), director of the Xinjiang Cultural and Tourism Publicity and Exchange Center (新疆维吾尔自治区文化和旅游宣传交流中心), who operates the "Travel Xinjiang" (游新疆) platform (with platform operations head Li Hui 李辉) where the department's AI digital-human features actually live and who has been the most explicit department-affiliated voice on integrating large models into Xinjiang tourism. The department's documented activity in this space centers on workforce development and ecosystem coordination, including training programs that brief regional cultural and tourism practitioners on the latest digital governance policies, technologies, and development trends, and partnerships that link the department with higher-education institutions and enterprises — notably the Smart Cultural Tourism Industry-Education Integration Consortium (智慧文旅产教融合共同体) co-founded with the regional education department drawing in 38 Xinjiang universities — to build a talent pipeline for digitally enabled tourism. Within that framework, and guided by the department's Three-Year Action Plan for High-Quality Development of Digital Cultural Tourism (2024–2026) (《新疆维吾尔自治区数字文旅高质量发展三年行动方案（2024–2026年）》) and Cultural and Tourism Industry Cluster Development Plan (2025–2030) (《新疆维吾尔自治区文化和旅游产业集群发展规划（2025–2030年）》), the department serves as the regional sponsor and regulator under which any tourism-oriented digital human deployments — such as virtual guides or interactive heritage presenters at Xinjiang scenic areas and museums — would be promoted, standardized, and integrated into the autonomous region's wider smart tourism public-service infrastructure, with execution typically routed through Li Meng's Publicity and Exchange Center and the state-owned Xinjiang Cultural Tourism Investment Group (新疆文化旅游投资集团) family of companies rather than handled directly by the department itself.

02 Special Administrative Regions:

• Hong Kong Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau (香港文化体育及旅游局) — Oversees Hong Kong’s cultural development and global tourism strategy. 

Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau is a policy bureau of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, headed since December 2024 by Secretary Rosanna Law Shuk-pui (羅淑佩), with responsibility spanning culture, the arts, sports, film, creative industries, and tourism. While the bureau is not itself a developer or operator of virtual humans, its digital-human relevance lies in its leadership of AI-driven smart tourism, where it works with the Hong Kong Tourism Board (旅遊發展局) to build conversational and personalized visitor tools on the Discover Hong Kong platform, including a real-time travel map and an AI-powered itinerary-planning feature, with Law publicly promoting a shift from intelligent trip planning toward individualized smart services for travelers. This positions the bureau as a government driver of the conversational AI and intelligent-agent layer that increasingly underpins digital human and virtual assistant deployment in Hong Kong's visitor economy, distinct from the city's separate virtual-celebrity and digital-human production efforts that fall under the innovation and technology portfolio rather than the cultural and tourism remit. 

• Macau Cultural Affairs Bureau & Tourism Office (澳门文化局 / 旅游局) — Manages Portuguese‑Chinese heritage and entertainment tourism.

The Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) and the Cultural Affairs Bureau (文化局) are two SAR government agencies that have moved digital humans from concept into deployed visitor-facing infrastructure as part of Macau's smart tourism and "tell the Macao story" agenda. The most concrete initiative is the Tourism Office's partnership with Macao Telecommunications (CTM) on the "Macao Tourism Intelligent Customer Service" (澳門旅遊智能客服), rolled out in phases: AI-powered text translation was extended to the Tourism Office's four tourist information centres in December 2024 via transparent translation screens that let frontline staff answer queries in real time, multilingual support was expanded to 12 languages in Q3 2025, and a fully-fledged digital human virtual concierge for international tourists was slated for Q4 2025 launch — positioning Macau alongside European city tourism boards that have begun using AI virtual spokespersons as destination ambassadors on platforms like TikTok. The Tourism Office has also experimented with digital humans as virtual hosts (虛擬主播) at flagship trade events — the 13th Macao International Travel Industry Expo (MITE / 旅博會) featured a digital-human emcee, and the 14th edition added on-site face-to-face digital human interaction alongside AI glasses and AI travel-companion demos. On the cultural side, the Cultural Affairs Bureau has been in dialogue with mainland internet and creative-industry figures (notably the 2023 "Internet Daka Macao Tour" delegation that met Director Mok Ian Ian / 梁惠敏) about building a dedicated "Macao image digital human" as a cross-platform IP for cultural storytelling and Chinese-culture transmission, and has used multi-modal digital tech — immersive interactive experiences in the "Historic Centre of Macao" World Heritage pavilion at the bureau's overseas roadshows (e.g. Lisbon 2025) — to project that heritage abroad. Together, the two bureaus represent a destination-marketing buyer profile: the Tourism Office prioritises operational digital humans for multilingual visitor servicing and expo activation, while the Cultural Affairs Bureau is exploring branded avatar / IP digital humans for heritage and creative-industry storytelling, with CTM as the principal local technology integrator on the tourism side.