In the early 1950s, Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang stood before a niche on the southern wall of the Ten Thousand Buddhas Cave at the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, Henan province.

For a long moment, he gazed at a statue of a bodhisattva whose face had long been destroyed. Yet, what he saw was not ruin, but a spirit of grace that reminded him of the line "Startled swan, roaming dragon" from Cao Zhi's (192-232) Ode to the Goddess of the Luo River.

That year, the statue inspired Mei's opera, The Goddess of the Luo River.

Today, more than seven decades later, groups of young students make their way to the grottoes site, where they wear virtual reality headsets and enter the cave where the statue stands. They see not only the fragmented beauty that moved Mei, but also a digital restoration of a face erased by time.

These experiences are just a glimpse of what awaits study tour participants at Longmen Grottoes, one of China's largest cave temple complexes and a UNESCO World Heritage site that represents "the pinnacle of Chinese stone carving art".

"We don't just bring cultural relics to life," says Ma Jialun, a representative of the cave site. "We want every participant to become a carrier of civilization."