On Children’s Day in 2026, the Tianya community, a Chinese Internet intangible cultural heritage, was resurrected. This resurrection is actually not sudden. During the three years of closure, Tianya struggled to be unearthed every year. Tianya was shut down in early 2023 because of arrears of server fees of tens of millions to Hainan Telecom, and the arrears lasted for more than ten years.

A few months later, Song Zheng, the former executive editor who was already a non-staff member, spontaneously led a charity sale in the live broadcast room, hoping to raise 3 million yuan to pay for Tianya's ICU bed. Unfortunately, he overestimated the users' feelings for Tianya and only raised 200,000 yuan.

Later, there was data feedback that 70% of the viewers in the live broadcast room were men around 40 years old, and less than half placed orders [1].


In 2024, Tianya filed for bankruptcy, but quickly changed a new operating entity and asked for rebirth again. This time, it introduced strategic investment, advertising, and e-commerce, but nothing happened.

During 2025, Tianya once again released a signal that it was ready to go, and Mingsheng completed the construction of infrastructure such as technical restoration, data migration, and system upgrades.

After everything was ready, at the beginning of this year, Tianya announced that it would return like lightning on Children's Day, and simultaneously launched the "New Tianya Creation Member Product Service Package" worth 1,999 yuan and limited to 9,999 copies.

Once you join the membership, you will enjoy the honorary status of "Tianya Restarter" and will be permanently engraved as a founding member of New Tianya and enjoy the privileges and rewards of New Tianya's future governance.


At present, no one has revealed the size of the Genesis organization. The only information leaked by internal employees is:The first founding member is a post-00s generation.

The implication is, don’t rush to let Tianya live in the hearts of middle-aged people before rescuing it, maybe the new era will still need it.

Everyone misses it very much

As we all know, the general environment has reached a point where it is becoming increasingly difficult for the content community to work.

The early platforms such as Maopu, Renren, and Under the Banyan Tree have all passed away. Douban, Hupu, and Baidu Tieba, which are still alive, will no longer be rich and powerful in this life. The most promising companies in the village, Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, are still in the stage of commercialization exploration.

Tianya has been actively rescuing itself in the ICU for three years, and now it is determined to borrow another five hundred years from Wentian. I don't blame it for not understanding current affairs, it is really too glorious in the past.

In 2003, when there were only 79.5 million Chinese-speaking Internet users nationwide, Tianya already had 3 million registered users. After Google took a stake in Tianya, Tianya entered its peak period with over 130 million registered users and over 250 million monthly users, and was labeled as “the world’s largest Chinese community.”

Even in the three years since it was shut down in a physical sense, Tianya is still an inexhaustible treasure mine for the Chinese Internet.


The supernatural novel "Ghost Blows Out the Lamp" serialized in the "Lianpeng Ghost Stories" section has now become an IP empire of its own. It has been adapted into 17 film and television works in the past five years. "My Years as a Taoist Priest" in the same section was posted 14 years ago. Until this year, a short drama version is about to be launched on Hongguo.

"Those Things About the Ming Dynasty" in the section "Brewing Wine and Discussing History" was published in 2006 and became one of the best-selling history books in China. The author has been on the rich list of Chinese writers for seven consecutive years. The audiobook version has become a traffic source for Himalayas, with more than 1.4 billion views.

"A Real Estate Speculator's Ultimate Prediction", "Ten Years of Clarity", "It's Hard to Produce a Rich Son from a Poor Family" and other sacred posts are still frequently read today. The collection version is turned into a PDF and circulated on Xianyu. The directly transferred content also has a considerable amount of traffic, and there is often a magical comment at the bottom:

It was too late when I understood.


In addition, incidents such as the South China Tiger Crackdown, Shanxi Black Brick Kilns, Edison Chen's nude photos, and Han Han's ghostwriting, which have been recorded in the history of Internet public opinion, all took place here.

There are so many factors that when the Tianya community was shut down in 2023, in addition to the official statement that the redemption server failed, there was also a famous conspiracy theory in the market:Too many secrets have been revealed here.

The charm of the community is so great that Ning Caishen also left a famous post "Tianya is a rotten place". The core idea is to blame Tianya for being too wonderful and wasting almost all of his spare time in Tianya.

Finally, he expressed his love for Tianya with the sentence "In order to return to a normal life as soon as possible, I hope Tianya will quickly become indifferent and incomprehensible. That will be my only chance to get rid of the temptation of the Internet. I sincerely look forward to that day!"


On the day when Tianya was finally resurrected, the first generation of netizens recalled the glorious past, and the new generation of netizens also came to watch how well the older generation ate.

Tianya's own statement is: "The return of Tianya is by no means a simple retro, but an evolution towards a new era."

To put it bluntly, Tianya believes that its unique human original content data resources will shine in the AI ​​era.

But, does the new era really need a new horizon?

God's soil

Tianya and Shentie were born in a special period with many restrictions.

In 1999, when Tianya was founded, there were only 750,000 Internet-connected computers in China, and 2.1 million people had learned to dial-up Internet access[2]. The entry barrier itself was a hard barrier.

There was a report in Computer Business Daily that put the price range of low-end PCs within 20,000 yuan, which corresponded to the average monthly salary of urban workers at that time being less than 1,000 yuan.

On the other hand, the Internet was also a new thing at that time. The majority of netizens did not know how to play it, and the relevant departments did not know how to manage it.

Later, some netizens revealed the true identity of Tianya Master, who was almost all top figures in their respective fields such as university scholars, government officials, and stock market traders.

That is to say, the Internet infrastructure was not perfect back then and could only generate electricity for love. Otherwise, the master of stock trading would have opened Knowledge Planet while selling his own Flush installation package on Xianyu.

The real world lacks public expression channels, and Tianya provides an outlet for them to speak freely, allowing them to eagerly type out long articles of tens of thousands of words and spread their surplus knowledge here for free.

Tianya era uses ancientTop postMechanism, traffic all depends on tap water. As long as people continue to post, the content can occupy the core exposure position of the website for several months. This classical mechanism has an advantage:High-quality content from many years ago can also be displayed for a long time.

Among the current mainstream Internet platforms, except for certain types of websites, only YouTube can do this.

For example, Li Ziqi has been inactive for many years, but her videos on YouTube can continue to receive advertising shares. According to calculations by a third-party channel value evaluation website, Li Ziqi can earn 785,000 yuan in advertising revenue every month during the suspension period.

YouTube's algorithm can allow old content to be exposed for a long time on a yearly basis, but in almost all content platforms, the algorithm logic encourages creators to continuously improve efficiency and continue to create new content, resulting in "magic posts" being digested quickly.

All users are immersed in the recommendation context customized for them. A popular article is deleted in 15 seconds and the whole network reads it verbatim. It has become a rare species.

In other words, Tianya’s sacred post has lost the soil that holds it.

Better to miss it forever

Going back to the simplest beginning of the story, Tianya closed down because it owed money. The ultimatum issued by Hainan Telecom required a back payment of 3 million yuan, but Tianya really couldn't pay it.

Like many colleagues who are begging for their golden jobs: Talking about money hurts feelings, but if you don’t talk about money, even the network cable will be unplugged.

In the early days, Tianya had an aloof attitude and refused to raise funds, relying on its boss Xing Ming’s stock trading skills to support itself [2];

Later, there was no mature commercial layout, and advertising space was sold piecemeal, which failed to achieve success and was easily scolded;

Later, I realized the value of IP, but due to lack of commercial infrastructure, I made a wedding dress for a more professional online writing platform.

In the era of mobile Internet, people simply began to seek medical treatment urgently, and tourism, e-commerce, and blockchain were all mixed together. As a result, no money was made and users left. In 2016, there were still nearly 3 million monthly active users, but after 2020, there will only be a few hundred thousand left [3].

At that time, Huang Zheng made a comment about Tianya, which Xing Ming himself also deeply agreed with: The Tianya now is no longer the Tianya before, and the Zhihu now is a bit like the Tianya back then [4].

Nowadays, the more realistic problem facing Tianya is that although New Tianya has cleverly avoided the 139 million yuan in cumulative executions of Old Tianya through the new operating entity, it can escape from its shell legally, but it cannot build a high-rise building from the ground financially.

In live broadcasts in previous years, Xing Ming was still very confident about Tianya’s rebirth: “200 million can bring Tianya back to the forefront of the Internet [4].”

But this goal obviously cannot be achieved by "New Tianya Creation Members". At present, it seems that there is some hope, perhaps only by selling off ancestral property and betting on AI corpus.

Just when thinking about how Tianya can adapt to the new era, it’s best to also worry about how to avoid being insecure at the end of the year.

end

When he first tried to "restart Tianya" in 2023, Song Zheng, an uninterested party, put forward an idea:

Tianya can become a static Internet memory museum without new users and new interactions. We would like to commemorate the story of China’s first generation of Internet users [1].

This is actually the best destination in the world.

Just like the Legend of Sword and Fairy Tales and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 that gamers have always been obsessed with. If these things were moved to 2026, how many people would be able to continue playing them?

The era of classical Internet represented by Tianya Community, like every material that has become the core of Chinese dreams, supports everyone's filter for the prosperity of the millennium.

Just like Zhuge Liang died of illness in Wuzhangyuan and Byzantium perished in 1453, these stories end just right, leaving future generations with almost unlimited imagination space to imagine those wonderful and moving possibilities.

There are many stories worth remembering, thinking about, and hypothesizing about, but not worth continuing.