Traditions build into a tourism powerhouse

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.