Symphony of 5G-A and AI: How Xi'an's Datang Everbright City Rewrites the Future of Cultural Heritage with Digital Technology

When Historic Districts Become Technology Testbeds

Xi'an, a city that carries the memories of thirteen ancient dynasties, is now staging a unique digital experiment. In the Tang Paradise – a cultural tourism landmark with tens of millions of annual visitors – Huawei, in collaboration with China Telecom Shaanxi and Shaanxi Cultural Industry Investment Group (SCG), has deployed a commercial 5G-Advanced (5G-A) network paired with the BoGuan multimodal large model tailored for cultural tourism. This is not just an upgrade in communication technology; it reveals a systemic approach to how future cities can deeply integrate digital infrastructure with cultural heritage.

Digitization of tourist attractions is nothing new, but most projects stop at QR code guides or simple Wi-Fi coverage. Xi'an's uniqueness lies in its attempt to resolve two fundamental contradictions: first, the connectivity experience under ultra-high density crowds – the Tang Paradise can see over 200,000 visitors in a single peak day, making it difficult for traditional networks to support high-bandwidth applications like video uploads and live streaming; second, the revitalization of cultural heritage – how to make static history "conversational" and "creative," not merely "viewable."

5G-A: Laying Digital Pipelines for the Urban Cultural Fabric

The key to solving the first problem is the 5G-A network. Compared to standard 5G, 5G-A uses three-carrier aggregation (3CC) technology to boost peak downlink speeds to 3.5 Gbps and uplink speeds to 600 Mbps, roughly ten times the previous rate. In terms of deployment details, the project has built 46 NR sites (31 of which are 5G-A sites), 219 cells, and 179 RRU units within the Tang Paradise area, achieving continuous coverage with "5G-A as the core, 5G as coordinated supplement."

Notably, this high-density deployment is not a simple stacking of technology. The preservation of the historic district's appearance requires network equipment to be "invisible" – combining macro and micro base stations while minimizing visual impact. This reflects a common challenge in smart city infrastructure: technology must adapt to the existing spatial fabric, not destroy it in reverse.

The enhanced uplink capability directly transforms the content production model in tourism scenarios. Tourists' live streaming no longer lags, with peak uplink speeds reaching 900 Mbps, meaning each streamer can upload high-definition material at speeds close to local editing. This capability is reshaping the "check-in" economy – tourism live streaming evolves from an occasional behavior into a predictable industrial flow.

The BoGuan Large Model: A Leap from Connectivity to Cognition

The network is just the foundation; the AI layer truly gives the scenic area "intelligence." The BoGuan model, co-developed by SCG and Huawei, is a multimodal large language model specifically designed for cultural tourism and heritage preservation. Its training dataset exceeds 1.2 PB, covering 31 million images, 4.4 million minutes of video, 2.18 million minutes of audio, 510 3D models, and 960 million structured text entries.

Unlike general-purpose chatbots, BoGuan's training corpus focuses on cultural assets: it "understands" the polychrome techniques of the Terracotta Warriors, the mortise-and-tenon structures of Tang Dynasty architecture, and the pattern logic of northern Shaanxi paper-cutting.Unlike general-purpose chatbots, Boguan's training corpus focuses on cultural assets: it "understands" the painting techniques of the Terracotta Warriors, the mortise-and-tenon structures of Tang Dynasty architecture, and the pattern logic of northern Shaanxi paper-cutting. This vertical depth enables it to provide more professional services in tourism scenarios.

Specific applications include:

• AI Travel Companion: Integrated into the "Travel Shaanxi" app, it supports natural language interaction, helping tens of millions of users plan itineraries and obtain in-depth information about attractions. As of March 2026, the user base has exceeded 4 million.
• Smart Image Camera Mini Program: Blends tourist photos with AI-generated historical scenes. For example, a tourist taking a photo at the ruins of the Tang city wall can have AI restore the bustling street scenes of the Tang Dynasty's golden age, generating a personalized "time-travel" image.
• Intangible Cultural Heritage Digitization: Traditional artisans use the model to accelerate the creative process while preserving the soul of manual craftsmanship. The model can also generate digital cultural characters and local themed short dramas, providing a low-cost pathway for cultural IP development.

These applications reveal a trend: AI is no longer just used to optimize existing processes, but to create a new type of "human-culture" interaction. Visitors shift from passive observers to active participants in cultural narratives.

Infrastructure + AI: The Prototype of a City-Level Cultural Operating System

The case of the Tang Paradise is essentially a systematic integration of a city's public digital infrastructure (5G-A network) with an industry-specific AI platform (Boguan). This dual-layer architecture of "connectivity + intelligence" is becoming a prototype for the core components of future smart cities.

From a broader perspective, this reflects the evolution direction of urban technological infrastructure: the first layer is an ultra-high-speed, low-latency, high-concurrency physical network; the second layer is an AI operating system tailored to specific domains (such as tourism, transportation, and energy). The network provides data flow, while AI is responsible for understanding, generating, and decision-making. The combination of the two enables large-scale, real-time, and personalized urban services.

For other cities worldwide, Xi'an's practice offers two insights:

1. Digitalization barriers in historic districts can be overcome. The macro-micro coordinated solution of 5G-A proves that high-performance networks can be deployed even in areas sensitive to historical landscapes.
2. AI's industry adaptability is more important than model scale. Boguan's success lies not in the number of parameters, but in its corpus's deep understanding of cultural assets. This avoids the superficial "jack-of-all-trades" answers typical of general-purpose models.

Of course, this model also faces long-term challenges: data privacy (how to manage visitor location and preference data), technological sustainability (the tension between hardware upgrade cycles and long-term preservation of cultural heritage), and the digital divide (whether elderly tourists can equally access services). These issues may receive more attention in Xi'an's next phase of experimentation.

Conclusion: The Future of Cultural Tourism Technology Lies Beyond Technology ItselfChen Weimin, general manager of Huawei's Shaanxi office, stated during the demonstration: "Artificial intelligence is no longer just a stack of technologies; it is a key force capable of activating millennia-old cultural heritage and reshaping travel experiences." This statement hits the core: the value of technology lies not in flashy parameters, but in how it changes the relationship between people and history.

When 200,000 tourists simultaneously upload videos, interact in live streams, and generate AI images in the same neighborhood, while the network remains smooth and services remain personalized, what we witness is not just a tourism upgrade, but a city system using digital infrastructure to retell its own story. In the future, more cultural landmarks may replicate this model — but what truly matters is not the speed of 5G-A or the computing power of AI, but whether the city is willing to regard technology as part of its cultural heritage, rather than an external intruder.