Dunhuang Academy and Tencent Pictures turn five murals into 1-RMB dub-along films

Dunhuang's murals are restored with income from tourist tickets, and the pandemic closed the site. Tencent Pictures had shut down too, so two stopped businesses teamed up to make the murals earn their own restoration money from people stuck at home.

Turn five Dunhuang murals into animated micro-films users can voice themselves; friends pay 1 RMB to watch, and the ticket money restores the murals.

Tencent Pictures animated five classic mural stories as micro-films in the Dunhuang mini-program on WeChat, animating the restored figures rather than redrawing them. Users picked a character, recorded the lines, shared the film and invited friends to dub together; watching a dubbed film cost 1 RMB, with all proceeds going to Dunhuang's mural restoration fund.

At 1 RMB per viewing the project generated 6.2 million RMB in 'box income', all devoted to mural restoration. It gave two pandemic-stopped organizations a working social-entertainment model, entered the D&AD Awards archive and became a WARC effectiveness case study for cultural fundraising during lockdown.

The murals of Dunhuang, a Chinese desert site closed to visitors for much of the pandemic, are normally restored using income from tourist tickets. When COVID-19 shut the site, that funding stopped; Tencent Pictures, a film studio also forced to close, faced the same problem. Two paused businesses decided to make the heritage itself earn its restoration money.

Tencent Pictures produced five micro-films based on five famous Dunhuang mural stories — including the Nine-Colored Deer and the Five Hundred Bandits — animated from digitally restored murals rather than redrawn. They premiered inside the 'Cloud Tour Dunhuang' mini-program on WeChat, where users could watch and share them, choose a character, press record and dub the lines themselves.

The twist that made it a funding engine was the invite loop and the price: viewers could invite friends to dub a film together, and watching a finished, user-dubbed movie cost 1 RMB. A token ticket, a social event at home, and Chinese dialects turned a heritage film into something friends made with each other rather than merely watched.

The project generated 6.2 million RMB in 'box income' at 1 RMB per viewing, with all proceeds going to Dunhuang's mural restoration fund. It entered the D&AD Awards archive as an example of two pandemic-stopped businesses restarting through social entertainment, and WARC carried it as an effectiveness case study of cultural heritage raising its own repair money.

A 1 RMB viewing fee turned a donation into a cinema ticket, removing the charity awkwardness and making the act feel like entertainment.

Users did not just watch the cartoons — their own voices became part of the film, which made sharing the finished dub a personal achievement.

The restoration fund gave every yuan an obvious destination, so micro-payments added up to a purpose people could point to.

WeChat's reach and the invite-to-dub mechanic turned each user into a distributor, so the project spread without a media budget.

Lockdown left people at home with time and phones, exactly the audience an interactive mini-program could reach.

When the income engine stops — tourism, cinemas, tickets — turn the cultural asset into interactive content that a crowd pays a token to consume: the audience's play becomes the funding.

Dubbing the Movie closed the loop between entertainment and conservation: the 6.2 million RMB raised went to Dunhuang's mural restoration fund, giving a heritage site a digital income stream while tourists were absent. The work entered the D&AD Awards archive and was written up by WARC as an effectiveness case study, and the pattern — letting the public voice, share and pay a token for cultural content — became a reference for heritage fundraising during the pandemic era in China.