On 5 August, the Southern Song Dynasty Exhibition Hall swings its doors open again after months of closure. The revamped space brings the dynasty’s imperial street, architecture, and waterways back to life—making 800-year-old city life clearer, easier to grasp, and a whole lot more engaging.

Tucked away at 199 Zhongshan South Road in Shangcheng District, the hall first opened in June 2006 with two exhibition wings, north and south. It’s one of Hangzhou’s key museums dedicated to telling the story of the Southern Song era through its physical remains.

This upgrade touches everything from hardware and content to digital enhancements, giving visitors a deeper, more vivid look at the imperial street, architectural ruins, and water engineering of the period—and a more professional, intuitive, and culturally rich experience of Song-era heritage.

Visually, the biggest change is in the glass. The museum has replaced its aging indoor and outdoor panels with low-reflection heated glass, dramatically improving clarity. Now, visitors can clearly make out the brickwork details of the Southern Song street remnants at the entrance—faithfully presenting the imperial avenue in its original texture and form.

But it’s not just about the hardware: the layout in both the north and south halls has been completely rethought.

The north hall focuses on three groups of Song-dynasty architectural remains. New educational panels have been redesigned with plain, accessible language to help visitors better understand what they’re seeing. There’s also a new interactive installation paired with projection mapping that lets audiences engage with the ruins in an immersive, hands-on way.

The south hall features stone water channels and sluice gates from the Southern Song through the Yuan dynasty. To help visitors grasp where the water came from, how the system was connected, and how the ancient locks worked, the hall now uses multimedia to dig deeper into the site’s story. By layering video and animation over the local terrain and Hangzhou’s broader water network, the exhibition vividly recreates the wisdom of the past—closing the sluice gates to store water in dry times and opening them to drain it during the rainy season—offering a full picture of Song-Yuan hydraulic engineering at work.

Throughout the redesign, the hall has also woven in Song-dynasty cultural touches. The grille backgrounds, for example, draw on classic Song paintings like Zhao Fu’s A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains and Liu Songnian’s Four Scenes of Landscapes and Waters. A centrepiece animated video, based on The Bustling Southern Song Imperial Street from the Zhejiang Art Museum collection, recreates the energy and street life of the era—fusing the ruins themselves with the broader Song cultural world.