International Museum Day fell on 18 May, marking a global celebration highlighting the social value of museums and their role in cultural exchange. While the day offers museums a chance to increase public engagement, it also provides a lens through which broader audience trends can be observed. In 2025, we can clearly see the evolving behaviour of Chinese outbound travellers, who are rapidly reshaping how cultural institutions are experienced, shared, and remembered.

Recent data from the Chinese social media platform, RedNote, underscores this shift. The hashtag #MuseumsWorthVisiting has exceeded 2.445 billion views, while #MustVisitMuseums has garnered 196 million, and content around #InternationalMuseumDay reached 8.669 million views. Museums are no longer perceived merely as static exhibition spaces—they are now central to how Chinese travellers choose cities, build travel narratives, and express personal identity through content creation.

Photo: Tag #InternationalMuseumDay and related posts on RedNote

Behavioural Shift: From Sightseeing to Cultural Immersion

In cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu, museum reservations for major exhibitions regularly sell out, and China’s museums have embraced new technologies, while for outbound travellers, museums are increasingly becoming the first stop on international itineraries. This reflects a fundamental value shift—from checklist-style sightseeing to immersive, story-driven cultural engagement.

Photo: RedNote posts about ‘On Top of the Pyramid: The Civilization of Ancient Egypt’ – The special exhibition of Shanghai Museum in China. From July 2024 to September 2025, the exhibition attracted over 2 million visitors in total, setting a new global record for the highest attendance of a paid special exhibition dedicated to a single artifact. Related hashtags about the exhibition have garnered more than 40 million views on RedNote.

Gen Z and millennial Chinese tourists are particularly drawn to “cultural scenes” that offer a blend of storytelling, aesthetic appeal, and strong shareability. Museums, with their architectural design, curatorial narratives, and retail experiences, align perfectly with these desires. But expectations have also evolved: modern travellers now seek environments that are visually engaging, emotionally resonant, and digitally navigable. Museums are thus no longer just institutions of learning—they have become engines of visual culture and social content.

Global Response: How Museums Are Entering the Chinese Digital Landscape

As interest grows, museums worldwide are making efforts to reach Chinese audiences directly through local digital ecosystems. On RedNote, more than 90 museums—including leading institutions such as the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna—have established verified official accounts. These museums engage users through short-form videos, curator-led walkthroughs, exhibition previews, and user-generated campaigns.

Photo: Directory of museum accounts on RedNote

These efforts reflect a growing awareness that platform-based visibility is now as critical as physical accessibility. In the digital age, the first point of contact between a potential visitor and a museum is rarely the physical entrance—it is far more likely to be a piece of content seen on a smartphone screen. Chinese travellers, especially younger demographics, increasingly rely on social platforms such as RedNote, Douyin, and WeChat not only for destination discovery, but for experience validation, itinerary planning, and real-time engagement.

Being present and discoverable on the platforms that Chinese users trust and actively use has become essential to influencing travel decisions and shaping pre-arrival expectations. Visibility on Chinese platforms not only enhances brand recognition but also signals institutional openness, accessibility, and cultural relevance—factors that strongly influence whether a museum makes it onto a traveller’s short list.

Furthermore, presence alone is not enough—the style, tone, and frequency of content must align with native platform norms.  Engaging content—whether curator-led videos, storytelling posts, or user-generated campaigns—must be formatted and delivered in ways that encourage sharing, conversation, and emotional resonance.

Looking at the UK as an example. What is the Opportunity?

The UK is home to one of the world’s richest museum ecosystems, encompassing both iconic national institutions and vibrant regional museums. From the British Museum’s global narrative collections, to the V&A’s focus on design and material culture, and the history and stories of football and local spirit of museums in York, Manchester, and Liverpool, the UK offers cultural depth that deeply appeals to knowledge-seeking, globally minded Chinese travellers.

However, in an increasingly competitive attention economy, museums must actively adapt how they present and contextualise their value across different cultural markets. This means not only translating language, but also rethinking how stories, aesthetics, and curatorial choices resonate on the platforms and in the visual formats that target audiences actually use. For the Chinese market in particular, this involves understanding the conventions of digital-first communication such as mobile-first design, visual storytelling, and short-form narrative formats.

Looking Ahead: Museums as Connective Cultural Infrastructure

International Museum Day 2025 serves as a timely reminder: museums are not just guardians of the past, but active participants in shaping future cultural relationships. As outbound Chinese travel continues to recover and evolve, museums that align their narratives, access models, and digital storytelling with the expectations of this audience will be best positioned to thrive—not only as destinations, but as platforms of cultural resonance.

How can we help?

Guanxi has worked with a number of high profile museums around the world, helping them build their profiles to attract more Chinese visitors. If you would like to learn more about promoting your museum on Chinese platforms, please do get in touch.