In Xiyangjiabu Village, Hanting District, Weifang City, Shandong Province, the "intangible cultural heritage plus" model is driving a transformative renewal in rural tourism. The village's Party branch leader explained that in recent years, leveraging its two major intangible cultural heritage resources—kite-making and New Year paintings—the village has propelled the cultural tourism industry forward through "living inheritance" and "innovative development." By establishing a Red Kite Party Construction Alliance and innovating with a "Party branch + company" model, it has fostered the scaled, specialized, and branded development of ICH-related industries. Capitalizing on holidays like the Spring Festival and Labor Day, the village creates immersive scenes, designs interactive programs, and offers distinctive content, releasing the cultural tourism appeal of "scenery for all seasons and performances for festivals."
Today, four ICH inheritor studios have been set up within the Yangjiabu Folk Art Grand View Garden, achieving brand linkage between the scenic area and the inheritors, developing new cultural and creative products, and invigorating the "ICH+" initiative. The locality has launched over 200 types of cultural and creative products, such as "Five Sons Seize the Top" and "National Trend Style," with single-store sales exceeding 1 million yuan. It has also built a research and study platform, offering nine ICH handicraft courses with annual instruction exceeding 8,000 participants. Rural tourism has long moved beyond the simple "farmhouse fun + fruit picking" model; its value spans the five major areas of economy, society, culture, ecology, and urban-rural coordination, serving as a key driver for activating endogenous rural vitality.
In Weifang City, with the continuous advancement of rural revitalization, local rural tourism is no longer a subsidiary industry to agriculture but has become the leading industry for many distinctive villages. Relevant counties and districts in Weifang have incorporated rural tourism into their overall regional development plans, coordinating land, capital, talent, and policy resources to achieve "revitalizing villages through tourism, strengthening villages through tourism, and enriching villages through tourism." Tourism is now comprehensively integrated into the overall rural development system.
What does a farmer-turned-artist look like? What about an artist-turned-farmer? Caijiagou Village in Zhucheng City, Weifang, adheres to the concept of "artists becoming farmers and farmers becoming artists," creating a blueprint for rural revitalization that integrates industrial development, artistic creation, and academic discussion. Relying on the "art + cultural tourism" model, it has attracted 12 resident artists who have trained over 30 farmer-artists by offering free painting guidance to villagers. It has established an "art research + cultural experience" model, founded the Caijiagou Ecological Tourism Development Co., Ltd., and created seven distinctive workshops, including seal carving, ink rubbings, and ICH tie-dyeing.
Simultaneously, the locality hosts over a hundred annual events like the Caijiagou Cultural Fair and "Hundred Flowers Festival." Daily visitor numbers at the cultural fair have exceeded 15,000, transforming it into a multi-faceted consumption scene integrating dining, accommodation, sightseeing, shopping, and entertainment. By building a cultural foundation and empowering industries, Caijiagou Village has explored a new path for rural revitalization that prospers the village and enriches the people, successively earning honors such as Shandong Province's Key Rural Tourism Village and Shandong Province's Model Village for Rural Cultural Construction.
Currently in Weifang, the traditional, isolated household operation model in rural tourism is declining. A pattern involving multiple participants—village collectives, cultural tourism enterprises, cooperatives, returning entrepreneurs, and social organizations—is taking shape. Enterprises are responsible for overall planning, brand building, and market operations; village collectives coordinate resources; and villagers participate in services. This division of labor is more professional, significantly enhancing operational capabilities.
Shijiadian Village in Qingzhou City, Weifang, uses art as its engine. Leveraging the natural scenery of Niujiaoling and ancient village resources, it has transformed abandoned rural spaces into an aesthetic check-in destination dubbed the "Eastern Chefchaouen" through color reconstruction, scene activation, cultural empowerment, and business format upgrades, exploring a new path of art-driven rural revitalization. The locality invested over 120 million yuan to develop the 1,000-mu Niujiaoling Lotus Cave Scenic Area. Using "blue" as the main色调, it applied artistic graffiti to over 6,000 square meters of building facades and main roads, blending Chinese and Western elements to shape the "Eastern Chefchaouen" landscape.
It painted Van Gogh-style artworks on walls and ground, adorned with vines and flowers, creating a "photogenic" atmosphere. Leveraging Qingzhou's advantage in the painting and calligraphy industry, it built bases for painting, calligraphy, and research studies, creating immersive experience spaces that attract enthusiasts and study groups. Today, Shijiadian Village is fully integrated with the scenic area, receiving over 100,000 tourists annually. The booming sales of art derivatives and local specialties have injected new vitality into the rural economy.
Relevant experts suggest that in the future, rural tourism should focus more on deeply exploring local culture, red culture, folk culture, farming culture, and family tradition culture to create rural scenes with stories, warmth, and sentiment. It is essential to avoid over-commercialized, performative pseudo-folk customs and adhere to cultural authenticity. In recent years, Yinshi Village in Linqu County, Weifang, has deeply tapped into local characteristics, focusing on the persimmon cake industry to build a high-end leisure tourism destination, developing into a well-known rural tourism village and a model village for persimmon cake production.
The head of the Yinshi Village Committee noted that the reputation of Yinshi Red Frost Persimmon Cakes continues to grow, with products exported to Japan and South Korea. The locality strives to build a persimmon industry chain. With the popularity of the persimmon cakes, processing industries like persimmon wine have emerged in the village. By establishing a village-level e-commerce platform, Yinshi Village now has over 60 e-commerce business households, with annual online sales of nearly 400,000 jin of persimmon cakes. This has increased the per capita income of processing households by 20,000 yuan, boosted collective village income twentyfold, and driven the clustered development of surrounding villages.
Highlighting industrial characteristics creates a tourism名片. Rural tourism is an ideal setting for the living inheritance of China's excellent traditional culture. Within rural tourism itineraries, traditional folk customs, ancient village architecture, farming techniques, local opera, intangible cultural heritage crafts, and family traditions and village rules have also become experiential, interactive, and disseminable tourism products.
"The visits of tourists and market recognition will pressure localities to prioritize the restoration of ancient dwellings, the inheritance of folk customs, and the protection of dialects, avoiding the hollowing out and homogenization of rural culture. Simultaneously, exchanges between urban and rural populations allow farming culture to step out of the countryside, achieving cultural dissemination and value reshaping," said a relevant official from the Weifang Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau. The future direction of rural tourism is regional clustering and IP branding. Weifang will explore integrating surrounding villages, scenic spots, and industries to transform from "one village thriving" to "an entire region prospering," breaking free from dependence on seasonal and sporadic tourist flows.
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