Seminar highlights achievements in protecting and promoting Yangtze culture

Spanning more than 6,300 kilometers, the Yangtze River flows through 19 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, sustaining major economic zones and rich cultural heritage, including irrigation works, agricultural and industrial sites, historical cities, cultural relics and intangible cultural heritage. Experts discussed these assets at a seminar on the protection and promotion of Yangtze culture held on Oct 28 in Beijing.

Co-hosted by the Jinghe Institute of Culture and Tourism and the Chinese Traditional Culture Museum, with support from the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation and the Yangtze River Culture Promotion Association, the event drew more than 150 participants from government, industry and academia. Organizers noted that 2026 marks the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan and the tenth anniversary of the Yangtze River Economic Belt strategy, against a backdrop of national guidelines aimed at better preserving the river's heritage and developing related tourism.

The seminar presented interim findings from research led by the institute with 11 universities along the Yangtze, including Qinghai Normal University, Sichuan University and Hangzhou Normal University. A team spent 45 days this summer surveying cultural tourism resources across 13 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities which the Yangtze River flows through. The survey covered archaeological sites, museums, historic towns, water conservancy projects and intangible heritage, resulting in a comprehensive Yangtze cultural heritage resources database.

From the database, researchers identified five major themes—prehistoric civilizations, agriculture and commerce, water conservancy, ancient poetry and revolutionary history—and mapped 20 themed cultural heritage travel routes. They also launched a beta version of the WeChat mini-program "Youzai Changjiang" (Travel the Yangtze), which provides AI route recommendations, resource queries and information services, turning research outcomes into a practical public tool.

Liu Yuzhu, head of the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation, said the themed routes embody the principle of "protection first, rational utilization and minimal intervention", supporting the holistic conservation of linear heritage while encouraging public participation. Li Xianfu, vice-president of the Yangtze River Culture Promotion Association, urged a "stringing pearls into a chain" approach that links scattered sites into an accessible cultural corridor. Wang Chenyang, Party secretary of the Chinese Traditional Culture Museum, called for shifting interpretation from isolated sites to basin-wide storytelling and deeper integration of intangible heritage with national cultural parks.

In the keynote session, He Yun'ao, a history professor at Nanjing University, cited Jiangsu's "100 Scenes of the Yangtze River" initiative, which selected 100 landmarks embodying the distinctive cultural resources, geographical environments and landscapes of the Jiangsu section of the river. He argued that Yangtze culture is the product of continuous interaction between natural endowment and human creativity, and recommended Jiangsu's practice as a replicable model for inventorying cultural resources across the full river basin.

Fu Caiwu, head of the National Institute of Cultural Development at Wuhan University, applied the cultural prototype theory to interpret the image of the "Yangtze Mother River", positioning the river as a vital spiritual anchor for the Chinese nation.

Specialized sessions featured teams from Fudan University, Central China Normal University, Sichuan University and Qinghai Normal University, addressing the lower, middle, upper and source sections respectively and covering heritage-tourism integration, digital solutions for intangible heritage, value interpretation and protection priorities.

In addition, a roundtable explored heritage's systematic protection and contemporary value transformation, with suggestions on building national cultural parks, converting academic results into public goods, and reducing homogenization in cultural and creative products.

The seminar closed with the launch of the "Initiative for the Yangtze Culture Research Alliance" by the Jinghe Institute and 11 partner universities. The alliance aims to remove disciplinary and administrative barriers and advance collaborative research on the origins of Yangtze civilization, heritage protection, cultural-tourism integration and international communication.