Dating to 486 BC, China’s Grand Canal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the longest artificial waterway in the world. For centuries it carried grain and goods from the fertile south to the imperial capitals of the north through an inland transport network known as caoyun.
Tongzhou, on the canal’s northern reach and today a major growth area of Beijing, was the waterway’s historic northern terminus, the point where cargo left the water for the final overland journey into the capital. It is on that same stretch of water that a new cultural production now brings the canal's thousand-year story to life.
The Yun Shang Xing Grand Canal Waterscape Poetry and Music Experience is the work of cultural tourism entity Tongzhou on the Canal, with celebrated Chinese artist Han Meilin as General Advisor and cross-disciplinary artist Liu Zhouming as Chief Director and Screenwriter. Han's connection to the site runs deep: his monumental “East” sculpture already stands in the neighbouring Tongzhou Canal Park.
The production reimagines how an audience experiences a live show. Instead of a fixed stage and a seated, static crowd, Yun Shang Xing places its spectators aboard a purpose-built panoramic cruise boat that travels roughly 3.5km of the canal over about 50 minutes. As the boat moves, the performance unfolds all around it, on the water, on smaller boats, across the bridges and along both banks, in six linked sequences known as the “Six Canals”. The sequences carry the audience from the bustling commerce of the caoyun era through the daily life of canal families and on into music, dance and poetry, so that spectators travel through the canal's history as they travel along its water. The organisers describe it as Beijing's first 360-degree waterborne performance of its kind.
Delivering that experience placed exacting demands on the sound. The audience had to be enveloped in synchronised sound that stayed coherent while the vessel was in motion, and the system had to remain visually discreet inside a design-led interior. The acoustic was unforgiving: large expanses of glass across the cabin walls and roof made the space highly reverberant, and the constant wash of waves against the hull added another variable.
Racpro’s solution centred on the L-Acoustics Soka colinear system, deployed as the main front and rear reinforcement throughout the cabin. The choice was equally aesthetic and acoustic. Soka's slim, upright profile sits flush against the boat's window frames, holding sightlines and the minimalist interior intact rather than competing with them. Acoustically, its directivity control projects energy accurately onto the listening positions while keeping it away from the glass surfaces, where reflections would have blurred the immersive audio experience.
Li Teng, assistant project manager of L-Acoustics Certified Distributor Racpro, said: “The hardest part was making a full-range system effectively disappear. In a moving cabin wrapped in glass, every reflection works against you. Getting even, enveloping coverage from a handful of cabinets that the audience never notices is exactly the result we were after.”
Low-frequency reproduction called for a different approach. Rather than defaulting to the corner placement that a confined space would usually suggest, Racpro used L-Acoustics Soundvision to model the cabin’s geometry across multiple frequency bands before positioning a single cabinet. The team then went beyond simulation, bringing demo units aboard and cross-referencing Soundvision’s predicted response against on-site measurements. That work placed two SB10i nearer the centre of the cabin, a position that eliminated the hull resonance that corner placement would have produced, and delivered even, enveloping low-frequency coverage across the full seating area. The complete system is compact: four Soka, two SB10i and two LA2Xi amplified controller covering the entire cabin. Yun Shang Xing is planned as a long-term fixture of Tongzhou and the wider Grand Canal Cultural Belt. It connects directly to a 1.3km waterfront commercial district on the canal's west bank and is positioned to grow into a venue for international cultural exchange and high-profile events, strengthening the sub-centre’s cultural offering.