At the Luoyang Museum, the summer Little Museum Specialist series turns students into docents, restorers, cultural creative designers, and curators.

"Through immersive, task-driven activities, they evolve from visitors into inheritors," Yang explains.

For those interested in ancient mystic sacrificial rituals, the Luoyang Museum of Ancient Tombs takes them underground, with courses on murals and brick carvings that reveal ancient views on life and death.

The relatively new Han-Wei Luoyang Ancient City Site Museum, which opened last year, allows students to walk the Silk Road through a specially designed study guide that evokes a time when Luoyang was a Silk Road's eastern terminus.

It leads them through the museum's galleries with a series of tasks: locating artifacts that traveled from distant lands, including a Byzantine gold coin, Persian silverware and Western glassware; tracing trade routes on a map; and imagining the crowded streets of Tongtuo (copper camel) Street, the city's main boulevard, where foreign merchants once gathered.

Inside the museum, a digital exhibition brings that lost world into view. Developed by Harvard University's CAMLab, the immersive installation uses holographic projection and 3D modeling to reconstruct the ancient capital. The museum also offers hands-on experiences beyond the screen. Participants can try their hand at simulated archaeological digs or piece together replica eave tiles.

Beyond these core venues, specialized museums offer their own experiences. At the Sui-Tang Dynasties Grand Canal Cultural Museum, visitors become part of the waterway in an immersive theater program where they are cast as merchants or boatmen traveling the artificial waterway that once connected Beijing to Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

Visitors can also try their hand at Tang Dynasty (618-907) three-color glazed pottery at the Luoyang Sancai Art Museum, where skilled craftsmen guide them through the entire production process.