The current popularity of museums in China is evidenced not only in the pervading difficulty in securing appointments for entry, but also in over-stretched guide services, not least the museum interpreters or docents who take visitors on a guided tour.

“Given the chronic crowds at museums, particularly in major cities, the traditional museum guides — freely provided on periodic basis, or paid service targeting a specific group — could no longer cope with the surge, and this gives rise to a new type of guides not officially provided by the museum,” said Duan Yong, professor and vice president of Shanghai University, who is also a senior museum expert.

These socially provided guides could be volunteers, but increasingly they become “operational services” provided by outside guides hired by individuals or study tour groups.

While some museums frown on the practice, Duan said this filled a need in cultural consumption and conformed to social and economic principles.

Xinmin Evening News reported last year that selected museums in Shanghai were experimenting with the practice of granting credentials to tourist guides after they had undergone 15 days of training and had finished reading 150,000 words of relevant literature. It also suggested the possibility of extending such training to interested residents, art students or other experts.

Duan’s endorsement of social guides is informed by his observations of similar services at some museums in developed countries.

“While in China interpretation is predominantly provided by dedicated, museum-provided guides, with volunteering service playing a secondary role, in the West, this job is predominantly assumed by volunteers,” Duan said.

This led to the issue of homogeneity, for all museum-provided guides follow the same script, rather than a copy adapted to individual needs. This mars the effect of the interpretation.

Since officially provided guide services could no longer meet the growing cultural needs of the people, a circular drawn up by the National Heritage Administration in 2023 sought to regulate the market by giving qualified guides credentials after a short period of formal training, effectively recognizing their legal status.

“The museums could provide credentials to the guides, likely at a cost, after regular training and review, so that those social guides become the ‘comrades and associates,’ rather than competitors or even antagonists, of official guides,” Duan said.

Duan also suggested that museum volunteer guide should be provided for free, to balance socially provided paid services. The paid services from within the museum could be supplied by docents or audio guide devices.

When asked about the qualities of a good guide, Duan cited three virtues. Firstly, a passion for the job. Secondly, a constant urge to learn more about what they are supposed to interpret, in terms of major substance, backgrounders and the all and sundry peripherals. Thirdly, a good guide knows how to provide a succinct narrative on a certain theme tailored to a specific audience, preferably in an interactive manner, though their engrossing narrative should be based on well-substantiated facts, not hearsay.

In light of these criteria, Wang Yong, 45, could look forward to a promising career as a freelance social guide. The engineer-trained Hebei Province native, after working as a consultant for exterior walls, become a guide quite by accident.

An ardent museumgoer from an earlier age, he would visit Beijing museums during summer holidays from his native town in Hebei while he was still a middle-school student.

After settling in Shanghai about 20 years ago, he began to visit museums in the city.

Once, he stood gazing at the “Portrait of Dr Paul Alexandre” by Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) at a gallery in Beijing for such a long time that he was compelled to listen to several guides’ narratives of the portrait, all similarly scripted, which he found to be inconsistent with what he had learned from “Gardner’s Art Through the Ages” by Fred Kleiner.

He made a thorough investigation of the paintings on display, and when the exhibition was held in Powerlong Museum in Shanghai some time later, he communicated through his WeChat Moments that he would visit the museum at a certain time and that whoever else wanted to join would be welcome.

With a growing approval of his style, some of his friends, then friends of his friends, and some unscheduled museum visitors, joined his tours.

This confirmed Wang in his conviction to embrace the new vocation in about 2019.

“From a higher perspective, with the soaring economic growth in China over the decades, a growing number of people are aspiring to have their cultural needs met,” Wang said.

“You don’t care about artistic issues on an empty stomach, do you?”

The initiative proved to be two-way. When visitors want to find a good guide, guides like Wang are also looking for an audience.

Wang said that, unlike him, a lot of the guides are former tourist guides who became museum guides after being steadily dissatisfied with what they made as tourist guides. Some advertise guide services on websites such as ctrip.com.

Some are former museum volunteers, who in their volunteer careers have built a pool of potential clients.

Some guides pretend to have personal connections with museums.

In spite of some irregularities, Wang seemed to have a more nuanced understanding of the claim that the uneven quality of social guides was a compelling case for regulation.

“For one thing, if you look around, none of the professions around us can truly claim to be of the same quality. Actually, different members of the audience are susceptible to different styles of explanations,” Wang said.

Commenting on the qualities needed in a good guide, Wang cited erudition and open-mindedness.

“For instance, you might give a narrative on a certain object in light of one book you read. When someone in the audience reminds you, politely, of another explanation he thinks more plausible, then you should accept it in an open-minded manner,” Wang said.

He added that China boasts one of the world’s oldest civilizations, and the field was infinitely complicated by the fact that we still know very little about a lot of artifacts unearthed. This means many objects are open to different interpretations, with one version likely to be superseded by another in light of new discovery.

This led to yet another issue. Some guides are accused of misinterpretation, though there are differences — while some are just being ignorant, others might be deliberately misleading.

So a museum-provided script might be necessary to an extent, but it should not exclude alternative interpretations in light of latest scholarship, or in view of different audience, Wang believed.

The deficiency of a homogeneous script could be redressed by freelance guides who had made an exhaustive study on a certain object, he said.