Thanks to its 51,000 sculptures built around 1,500 years ago inside mysterious caves, the Yungang Caves attracted three million tourists in 2023. A record attendance for this site in northern China, classified as Unesco World Heritage. As reported CNN Wednesday June 12, 2024, this success recently pushed officials to install a controversial device.
A video shared on various Chinese news sites and social media shows timers being hung above a row of women’s toilet cubicles. The pixelated LED display shows the word “empty” in green and Chinese when the cabin is empty, and indicates the time since the door was locked in red when it is occupied.
Debates on the networks
According to Nanchang Evening News, an official journal, this timer has been operating since May 1st and is above all a security measure, which would, for example, make it easier to detect a medical emergency occurring inside a toilet cubicle. A member of the site’s staff also said that tourists did not have a limited time to use the toilets, and that no expulsions would be carried out.
While some visitors see this initiative as a technological advance, which saves them from having to knock on the door, others have expressed their discomfort with this surveillance during an intimate moment. The debates sparked by this new measure were numerous on Chinese social networks. “Why don’t they just spend this money to build more toilets? »for example, asked an Internet user.
