Digital walls take bite out of grotto graffiti in Wuhan

The deployment of five digital graffiti walls has drastically reduced damage to the grottoes of the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, Hubei Province during National Day holidays, the park announced on Monday.

Tourists could express themselves by painting on three electronic touch screens in the main building of the tower since September 19, Wang Juan, a culture research center staff member at the park, told the Global Times on Monday.

Thanks to the digital attraction, the park has had fewer instances of graffiti on the pillars and walls of the main building, he said. Tourists could e-mail their graffiti instead, she added.

Before digital graffiti, at least 30 spots in the main building had been scarred by knives, according to a May 28 Wuhan Morning Post report.

Forty people had been hired to patrol the park and stop tourists defacing the walls, all to little effect, the park's authorities were quoted as saying by the Central China paper.

Staff members could only use mild persuasion on tourists, Wang explained, and were not authorized to punish them.

He hadn't noticed any digital wall, a tourist told the Global Times on Tuesday. "All I saw were tourists," Li Tao said.

Some might not have noticed the screens as there were so many tourists visiting during "golden" week, Wang said. Another two digital walls will go up in future, she explained.

A tourism expert praised the park's initiative.

"It's provided a channel for tourists to express their emotions rather than simply punishing them," said Liu Deqian, deputy director of the tourism research center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.