3D Scanning and Digital Archiving of Wuhan’s Century-Old Ministry of Foreign Affairs by TBNET

How can we accurately preserve the texture of time when century-old historic buildings meet advanced digital technologies, ensuring the irreplaceable urban heritage achieves digital immortality?

Recently, Tianbaonet (TBNET) successfully completed the digital archiving project of the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hankou. As a significant modern historical building in Wuhan, this century-old site was meticulously captured and digitally replicated through TBNET’s full-process technical services and high-precision 3D scanning solutions, creating a comprehensive digital twin. The results provide a robust professional foundation for cultural heritage preservation, restoration research, and digital exhibition.

The former Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hankou, located at 5 Yuanyuan Road, Jiang’an District, Wuhan, was originally built in 1905 and covers approximately 464 square meters. It is a typical three-story brick-and-concrete building in classical architectural style. Initially serving as the Jianghan Customs Supervisory Office, it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the National Government in 1927. From 1964 to 2019, it functioned as the Wuhan Municipal Archives.

During China’s historic effort to reclaim the Hankou and Jiujiang British concessions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs played a crucial role, with then Foreign Minister Chen Youren conducting significant diplomatic affairs here.

Having withstood over a century of weather and history, the building is now a provincial-level protected cultural site and a key part of the Hankou historic district. Its historical significance makes digital preservation particularly urgent. However, the building’s complex structure, rich details, and intertwined indoor-outdoor spaces presented multiple challenges:

• Complex spatial layout: Narrow stairwells, high vaulted ceilings, and hidden corners make full coverage with conventional equipment difficult.
• High-fidelity detail requirements: Architectural carvings, arch structures, and wall aging textures demand extremely precise replication, allowing zero tolerance for data errors.
• Cultural heritage protection priority: Data collection must avoid any contact or damage to the building itself, ensuring no interference with the historic site.

To tackle these challenges, TBNET designed a custom scanning workflow and deployed the Lixel L2pro handheld 3D scanner, efficiently completing full-scope data acquisition and high-precision modeling through standardized procedures.

For the complex indoor and outdoor layout—including towering facades, narrow stairwells, vaulted ceilings, and multi-story room arrangements—TBNET conducted pre-site inspections and devised a “global-to-local" scanning strategy.

The central courtyard was selected as the initialization point, capturing the main facade, surrounding garden connections, and the entrance porch. From this position, the scanner quickly captured the building’s overall structural features, establishing an accurate baseline for detailed scanning.

Key on-site procedures included:

• Selecting central points that cover the entire scene as scanner initialization locations.
• Scanning the general scene first to avoid zigzag patterns that could accumulate errors and distort point clouds.
• For multi-floor indoor layouts, keeping doors open and scanning slowly while pausing at doorways to capture features on both sides.

Ultimately, TBNET completed the full-scope high-quality scan in just 20 minutes, achieving a “single-station closed loop" with no rework required—a demonstration of exceptional efficiency.

Preserving historical buildings requires faithful restoration of their authentic appearance. From classical carvings and arches to wooden stair textures and century-old wall markings, every detail represents irreplaceable history. Using professional post-processing software, TBNET applied intelligent automated processing, point cloud enhancement, and filtering techniques to optimize the collected data, ensuring every detail was preserved digitally.

Highlights of the digital outcomes:

• High-resolution colored point clouds: Enhanced point cloud algorithms captured wooden carvings, arch structures, painted walls, and aging traces with exceptional precision.
• Photo-realistic 3D models: 3D Gaussian modeling technology generated accurate models for restoration simulations, permanent digital archives, and online digital exhibitions.
• Multi-scenario usability: The same dataset supports point cloud analysis, volume measurements, integration with digital twin platforms, and immersive virtual exhibitions—achieving “one acquisition, multiple applications."

High-precision and high-fidelity digital data provide a reliable foundation for heritage restoration, academic research, and digital museum construction, enabling immersive cultural experiences for the public.

The success of the Hankou project is one of many historic building digitization cases undertaken by TBNET. In every project, TBNET emphasizes not only the capabilities of hardware but also a complete technical service system:

• Field Acquisition: Scientifically planned scanning routes, strategic placement of control points, RTK/PPK accuracy, and standardized equipment operation to ensure point cloud continuity and precision.
• Data Processing: Noise reduction, block management, filtering optimization, and repeated precision calibration to achieve high-quality, usable data.
• Modeling and Delivery: 3D models exported in multiple formats (PLY, LCC, etc.) for digital twin platforms, VR/AR immersive exhibitions, restoration simulations, and academic research, ensuring full data lifecycle utility.

Beyond historic building digitization, TBNET’s mature 3D scanning services have been successfully applied across engineering surveying, power inspection, emergency mapping, industrial inspection, and other sectors, breaking industry barriers and empowering digital transformation worldwide.