China’s First Heluo Culture AI Model Debuts: Making the Root-Seeking Journey to “Hometown Henan” a Conversational Experience

On 10 July 2026, China’s first artificial intelligence large model devoted to Heluo culture was officially launched and presented in Zhengzhou, Henan. Built under the guidance of the Publicity Department of the Henan Provincial Party Committee, led by Zhongyuan Publishing & Media Group, and co-constructed with Xinhua’s Henan bureau, Henan Daily and Henan Radio & Television, the vertical AI model has been described by the media as a “digital brain” for a millennium of cultural lineage. For genetic genealogy and root-seeking culture, its most striking feature is turning surname tracing and genealogy retrieval in “Hometown Henan” into a conversational intelligent experience.

Construction of the model began in September 2025; in less than a year, roughly one billion characters of material were sorted, digitized and structured — the Zhongyuan Culture Compendium, the General History of Henan, successive local chronicles and classics of revolutionary culture moved from paper pages to data, from storage shelves to the cloud. The model has so far mapped 15 core cultural threads, pooled more than 77 million vector data points and launched 56 specialized agents, forming China’s first high-quality dataset focused on Heluo culture.

To counter the notorious “AI hallucination” problem of general-purpose models, the project established a double verification mechanism: every answer must be traced back to authoritative source materials, and output is verifiable — making academic resources “playable by everyone, usable everywhere”. This mechanism matters especially for genealogy research: lineage information in family registers and local chronicles must never be fabricated, and a traceable knowledge base is precisely what a cultural large model stands or falls on.

In the “Heluo Exhibition Hall” scenario, the on-site “Heluo Cultural Gene Map” combines more than two million cultural gene entities with AI capabilities, visualizing thousands of years of Henan’s cultural lineage. The kinship-roots section maps 170 major surnames originating from Henan and more than 3,000 genealogies, supporting intelligent surname tracing and root-seeking route recommendations — making “Hometown Henan” a tangible cultural experience. A visitor need only say a surname or a phrase passed down by the grandparents, and the AI retrieves and matches the genealogy and chronicle data, suggesting possible ancestral origins and migration paths.

The “Heluo Academia” scenario offers researchers AI-assisted writing, intelligent reading and digital restoration of cultural relics, providing intellectual support for the study, preservation and transmission of Heluo culture. For scholars of family history and surname origins, turning thousands of years of chronicles and genealogical documents into a searchable structured knowledge base means that much painstaking page-by-page archival work can now be pre-screened with AI assistance.

“Heluo Creation” provides government agencies and cultural institutions with AI-assisted official document writing, intelligent proofreading and micro-animation production tools, empowering content creation across the whole workflow. “Heluo Tong” serves provincial residents and visitors to Henan through cultural agents such as “Memory of the Central Plains”, “Historical Figures” and “Cultural Classics”, plus an AI travel companion, making Heluo culture genuinely within reach.

Li Hong, deputy secretary-general of the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association, commented that the model has created an innovative scenario for publishing convergence, built a high-value professional corpus, and established an independent and controllable technology route. It is not only a major achievement of Henan’s cultural digitization, but also offers a valuable “Central Plains sample” for the publishing industry exploring deep “AI + content” integration.

From surname tracing to genealogy retrieval, from chronicle research to root-seeking route recommendations, the launch of the Heluo Culture AI Model marks the entry of East Asian genealogy culture into a new stage of “intelligent knowledge” after “document digitization”. For genetic genealogy research, such vertical models fill precisely the cultural dimension that DNA testing cannot cover: DNA answers who your descendants are, while genealogy combined with AI answers which road your family travelled. When the two paths corroborate each other, root-seeking is no longer just data in a laboratory, but a cultural homecoming connecting thousands of families.