Turning simple travel into immersive experiences

In the winter of 2019, Feng Jiachen was "nobody". She stood on a curved base in the bustling streets of the Grand Tang Dynasty Ever Bright City in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, swaying gently, leaning back and forward, repeating the same motions hundreds of times a day. Dressed in a traditional Tang Dynasty (618-907) costume, she was what the industry calls a non-player character, a costumed performer who interacts with visitors.

"Every day, I danced the same dances on a fixed stage," she recalls. "There was always an invisible wall between the audience and me."

But millions of people online now know her as the "roly-poly sister" after she broke through that wall.

"I always felt that performance should not just be the repetition of moves, but the transmission of emotion," she said at a recent chief tourism branding officers conference hosted by the China Tourism Association in Tangshan, Hebei province.

To improve her craft, Feng began visiting museums and studying historical documents, trying to understand the spirit and bearing of ancient figures. She then added small gestures — a nod, a smile, a reaching hand — to her performance, while stepping down from the high stage and interacting with the audience, come rain or shine.

Then she went viral. Overnight, crowds rushed to see her.

"Even on a tiny stage, as long as you put your heart into it, you have value," she says. "Our generation of cultural tourism characters cannot just be fleeting symbols of internet buzz. We must be transmitters and inheritors of culture."

Her six-year journey mirrors a quiet but profound shift across China's cultural tourism sector: from chasing clicks to cultivating content, from cookie-cutter performances to deep, culture-based storytelling.

Wang Haonan knows that shift firsthand.

A music graduate from Tangshan, he plays the legendary Tang poet Li Bai on the buzzing Hetou Old Street in his home city. Dressed in a white robe with a wig tied in a classical bun, he stands in the lantern-lit night, surrounded by visitors reciting poetry.

When visitors ask him questions, such as what to do after a breakup and how to handle family pressure, he answers with poetry.

"The human heart is like the moon over the horizon; gatherings and partings are like dust on the road." His responses, literary and witty, made him an online sensation and a living landmark at the attraction.

But Wang was not always so polished. A year ago, fresh out of university, he was lost: "I didn't know where to direct my passion."

He applied online to become a "cultural NPC" at Hetou Old Street. On his first day as Li Bai, a visitor asked him about one of the poet's lesser-known works, Ode to Gallantry. Wang drew a blank.

Although he deflected with a joke, he could not sleep that night.

"I felt I had failed the visitor who stood in front of me," he says. "And I felt I had failed Li Bai, because this role carries with it culture and responsibility."

That failure spurred him to memorize poems, learn from veteran performers, and refine his bearing. The turning point came when a heartbroken visitor asked for advice. His improvised poem, featuring four lines on the transient nature of relationships, struck a chord online.

"Ancient poetry really can comfort people. The thing I've been holding on to has finally found an echo," he says.

What truly drove the lesson home, though, was a sixth-grade boy. The boy asked Wang to explain a difficult poem. A week later, he returned and recited the entire piece from memory, adding emotion.

"At that moment, the transmission of culture became tangible," Wang says.

Young performers like Feng and Wang are emerging at tourist sites across China. They thrive not only on their own efforts but on the systems that support them.

Wuzhen, a historical canal town in eastern China's Zhejiang province, evolved from a place of "old, broken and new houses" into a tourism hot spot through cultural enrichment.

In 1999, when Chen Xianghong took over its tourism development, the place had no visitors, no attractions, no businesses, and no brand.

Twenty-six years later, Wuzhen has received over 120 million visits in total and grown its total assets to more than 8.4 billion ($1.2 billion) yuan.

Remarkably, while nearly every other ancient town within 100 kilometers offers free admission, Wuzhen still charges 150 yuan. When people ask why, Chen gives a blunt answer: "We are a branded tourist destination."

He describes Wuzhen's journey in three steps: from a sightseeing town into a resort, and then into a cultural icon.

In the sightseeing phase before social media, he brought the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize to Wuzhen and set up an independent booth at ITB Berlin, one of the world's largest travel trade shows.

In the resort phase, he focused on overnight stays, with uniformly designed guesthouses and transparent pricing.

"The brand is word-of-mouth," he says.

In the cultural phase, Chen spent 15 years building three major assets: the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, now recognized as a world-class theater carnival; the Mu Xin Art Museum, a waterside pavilion housing the works of one of modern China's most beloved yet long-overlooked artists; and a permanent venue for the World Internet Conference.

"Small bridges and flowing water are common to all. Only culture makes you different," he notes.

In Kaifeng, a city in Central China's Henan province, the Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden has followed a similar path over three decades. The large theme park is based on a 12th-century painting that vividly depicts daily life in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) capital.

Zhou Xudong, the park's founding general manager, shares his formula: "Product accounts for 60 percent, marketing and service for 40 percent. If your product has no content, no matter how good your marketing is, it will be short-lived."

The park has gathered nearly 100 intangible cultural heritage items. One sugar-figurine maker used to wander the streets, barely making a living. Now working at the park, he earns 500,000 yuan annually. His university-graduate son, who had not wanted to learn the craft, returned after seeing how profitable it was, Zhou shares.

For performances, the park has a strict rule: they must be based on authentic Song Dynasty stories. "We don't make hodgepodges," Zhou says.

Wang Wei, a lead archaeologist of the project to trace the origins of Chinese civilization, a major national program launched in early 2000s, notes that culture matters because it gives a place a story longer than any person's memory.

He cites Sanxingdui, the Bronze Age site in southwestern Sichuan province, whose strange, large-eyed bronze masks have fueled speculation about extraterrestrial origins and drawn countless curious travelers.

As lead archaeologist of the Sanxingdui excavation, he explains that the raw materials used for Sanxingdui's bronzes came from the same source as those used for the bronzes at Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (c.16th century-11th century BC).

"Sanxingdui was not created out of nowhere," he says. "It was a regional civilization formed under the strong influence of the Central Plains dynasties during the Xia (c.21st century-16th century BC) and Shang periods."

He also shares other findings from the project, which has used multidisciplinary research to trace the origins and development of Chinese civilization over the past 8,000 years.

At a 6,300-year-old site in Puyang, Henan, archaeologists found a high-status individual buried with shells arranged into the shapes of a dragon on the east and a tiger on the west — a layout that matches the spatial formula "azure dragon on the left, white tiger on the right" found in texts from much later periods.

"The belief in the dragon has continued on this land for over 6,000 years," Wang Wei says.

"Through archaeology, we can see the 8,000-year-old origins and 5,000-year formation of Chinese civilization. Isn't the essence of cultural tourism precisely to help people understand these things as they travel?"