Turning simple travel into immersive experiences

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?"