Elementary students embark on a field trip to the Phoenix Printing Practice Base in Nanjing on Oct 11.

More than 500 elementary students embarked on a field trip to the Phoenix Printing Practice Base in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on Oct 11.

The activity was jointly organized by Modern Express and Phoenix Xinhua Printing Group.

At the practice base, students gained a deep understanding of the thousand-year history of printing, experienced high-tech printing and binding equipment, and made their own "ancient books".

Students wear VR glasses and start a cultural adventure in the virtual world.

From exploring the origins of printing to the evolution of traditional Chinese printing techniques, the children learned about the changes in Chinese printing technology at the Phoenix Printing Culture Museum. Through a moving version of the masterpiece Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, an iconic artwork from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), they also learned about the printing of paper money in the Song Dynasty.

In the immersive experience hall, the children donned VR glasses and embarked on a cultural adventure in the virtual world. Guided by the Golden Phoenix, they experienced ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, ancient Indian Harappan script, and Chinese oracle bone script, learning how printing has helped preserve Chinese characters.

Students observe the entire process of how a book is created.

How do the characters in a virtual space become readable books? The answer can be found in the smart workshop. There, four-color and eight-color printing machines, systems for offline detection of unclear printed pages, and automatic guided vehicles that identify obstacles to transport printing paper were all on display.

To understand how a book is made, students had to bind a book themselves. In the ancient book-making session, they used both traditional and modern book-making techniques they had learned to create their own ancient books.