Traditions build into a tourism powerhouse

From rooftop harvest displays to immersive ancient towns, tourism entrepreneurs across China are reinventing cultural heritage for a generation seeking experiences, connection and meaning. In the mountains of Wuyuan county, Jiangxi province, farmers once dried chili peppers, chrysanthemums and pumpkins on their rooftops for the simplest of reasons: there was nowhere else to put them.

For generations, local residents saw little beauty in the practice. They saw difficult mountain roads, chronic water shortages and dwindling opportunities that pushed many young people to leave. The village was hollowing out.

Yet when Wu Xiangyang stood on a hillside in Huangling village in 2009, about 39 kilometers from the county seat, he saw something different. Wrapped in ancient trees and dotted with more than 100 Hui-style (Hui is short for Huizhou, an ancient geographic area in today's Anhui and Jiangxi provinces) houses of gray tiles and white walls, the settlement appeared almost like a painting.

"It was beautiful," he recalls.

He was impressed by the colorful, art-like rooftop displays. At the time, Wuyuan already had several successful ancient villages. The formula was a poetic template of little bridges, flowing water and picturesque homes. Wu quickly realized Huangling would not succeed by becoming just another version of the villages tourists had already seen.

"The village did not need to copy anywhere else to become a destination," says Wu, chairman of the company behind Huangling's revival.

Instead, Wu led his team to focus on the autumn drying tradition practiced by local residents and elevated it as the village's defining cultural symbol, turning an everyday agricultural necessity into a "sun-drying festival" that has since drawn millions of visitors. Today, those colorful rooftop displays have become one of China's most recognizable images, helping transform Huangling into a national rural tourism icon. In 2023, the United Nations World Tourism Organization named it one of the world's Best Tourism Villages.

Across China, a growing number of tourism entrepreneurs are discovering that the most powerful cultural attractions are often hiding in plain sight: not only in monuments or museums, but in everyday traditions that once seemed too ordinary to notice.

"We have a saying in our team: if you can't be the best, at least be the only one," Wu told the China Tourism Entrepreneurs Summit in Xiamen in early June, where more than 1,000 industry leaders gathered to discuss building a "tourism powerhouse".

As young travelers flock to ancient towns, immersive performances and heritage-themed districts, destinations across the country are searching for ways to make traditional culture relevant without reducing it to a social media prop. The answer, many industry leaders argue, lies in "translating" culture itself. The most successful projects are not simply preserving traditions or packaging them for consumption, but are translating local customs, historical memory and cultural values into forms contemporary audiences can immediately understand and enjoy.

It is all part of the emerging popularity of xinzhongshi (new Chinese-style) travel, a movement that blends traditional culture with contemporary experiences. Tourism is no longer limited to sightseeing, according to a March report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that analyzes and forecasts the country's tourism development. "It has become a composite experience integrating cultural cognition, emotional resonance and value identification," the report states. The report predicts that visitor demand for cultural participation, depth of experience, artistic expression, and digital interpretation will continue to rise during the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period.

Zeng Xin, an associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, notes that the younger generation is growing up in an era of flourishing Chinese culture and is eager to embrace the classics and experience them in more modern, flexible and immersive ways.

Looking back, Wu believes that Huangling fits squarely within the new Chinese-style tourism landscape because it was never designed as a tourist attraction in the first place. The "sun-drying festival" emerged from necessity. With little flat land available, residents dried their harvests on rooftops. What outsiders now photograph as a cultural spectacle began as a practical solution to everyday life. Nothing artificial was added, and nothing essential was cut, he says.

Similar approaches are now appearing across China, though each draws on very different local traditions. In Tangshan, a gritty industrial city in Hebei province long known for its steel mills and little else, Hetou Old Street has emerged as an unlikely cultural tourism success story.

Qiu Kai, founder of the project, inherited what many regarded as a failed development in 2022 — a one-kilometer-long replica of an ancient street built more than a decade ago that fell quiet after less than six months. The street had the tiles, the arches and the lanterns, but it lacked a compelling reason for people to visit.

Digging through local records, Qiu found a thread in Tangshan's name. According to local lore, it came from Emperor Taizong (Li Shimin) of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), who camped here during a campaign to conquer the eastern territories."That was enough for me," Qiu says."The grandeur of Tang culture is more than enough to draw from."

He reopened the failed commercial street as an immersive Tang Dynasty destination. No roller coasters. No gimmicks. Just actors in Tang Dynasty costumes, streets designed for wandering around, and an atmosphere that asks nothing of visitors except to be present. In 2024, its first full year after reopening, Hetou Old Street welcomed 6.7 million visitors. The figure grew to 8 million last year, and is on track to exceed 10 million.

For Qiu, reverence for traditional culture is tested in the details and means taking responsibility for the entire experience, not just the costumes and architecture. During this year's Spring Festival holiday, Hetou Old Street welcomed more than 1 million visitors in seven days. While his team celebrated the numbers, Qiu found himself focused on online complaints. Visitors were not just unhappy about long restroom lines or slow service. They had come expecting an authentic encounter with Tang culture — the poetry, the rituals, the atmosphere — but what some found instead was a crowded street that felt hurried and inattentive.

To preserve the integrity of cultural immersion, Qiu recently announced a policy that dissatisfied visitors would receive a full refund."We can't supervise ourselves. Only the market can do that," he says.

Tangshan was not the only unlikely bet. In the minds of many travelers, Linyi of Shandong province had no business being a tourist destination. It is a trading hub, a logistics center and a revolutionary base, with no famed mountain or sea to drum up tourism. Yet Liu Yunfeng led an investment of 8 billion yuan ($1.18 billion) to build Langya Ancient City there.

Before breaking ground, his team visited over a hundred ancient towns across China. They found the same problem everywhere: gray walls, gray tiles, replica streets, copied temples. "The form was copied, but the cultural excavation remained shallow," he notes.

So he went back to the archives. He discovered that Langya's historical legacy included Wang Xizhi, the Eastern Jin (317-420) calligrapher known as the Sage of Calligraphy; Zhuge Liang, the Three Kingdoms (220-280) strategist; and Liu Hong, the Eastern Han (25-220) mathematician and astronomer — figures whose stories had faded from local memory.

Liu Yunfeng concludes that live performance offers the most effective vehicle for cultural translation because it transforms visitors from observers into participants. He observes that visitors often do not remember what they see but remember what they feel. Therefore, he framed the architecture of Langya Ancient City as stages, with the streets, the plaza and the buildings all designed to host shows. A 500-person performance troupe now works on site.

"If you build a stage but no one performs, you just have an empty platform," he says. "The performance is what fills it with meaning."

Since its February 2024 opening, the site has received nearly 8 million visitors, generating over 800 million yuan in total revenue. Its core production, Guoxiu Langya, has been performed over 1,700 times and drawn more than 4 million viewers. Nearly 90 percent of the audience is between 18 and 39.

He thinks that new Chinese-style tourism is about using modern methods to "tell traditional stories wonderfully enough to reach people's hearts".

The goal, the entrepreneurs concur, is to build places where tradition can move and perform — so people can feel it.