China News Service, Yongzhou, November 7 (Reporter Tang Xiaoqin ) Jiangyong Nvshu, Yao Panwang Festival, Daozhou dragon boat and other special folk customs are full of brilliance, and the "Champion City of Hunan" is famous far and wide; strolling through the bluestone slabs of the ancient city, you can read Liuzi's poems and enjoy the charm of Xiaoxiang's mountains and rivers... As a national historical and cultural city and an important cultural hub of Hunan To ensure the origin of the city, Yongzhou, Hunan Province anchors the goal of building a famous cultural and ecological tourism city, continues to answer the development proposition of the integration of culture and technology, and the integration of culture and tourism, promotes in-depth collaboration among cultural, sports and tourism businesses, and strives to build a cultural tourism industry worth hundreds of billions, so that the millennium cultural heritage will shine with new luster in the new era.
Ginkgo landscape in Tongzi Ao, Shuangpai County, Yongzhou City, Hunan Province. Photo by Tang Jixiang
Event empowerment activates cultural and sports integration momentum
As night falls, the night market around the Yongzhou Stadium is filled with fireworks. Various food and specialty stalls are arranged in an orderly manner. The aroma of grilled fish and barbecue fills the air. The number of customers in restaurants along the street increases. Many stores have taken advantage of the trend to launch Hunan Super League viewing packages to seize business opportunities from the competition. "During the event, the passenger flow was more than 30% higher than on normal days. Many customers chatted about football while dining, and business was booming," said Boss Tang, the owner of a barbecue restaurant near the stadium.
In Yongzhou, the Hunan Super League continues to activate the event economy, and "watching games + consumption" has become a vivid epitome of the integration of local culture and sports. For each home game, Yongzhou gives away 5,000 free tickets to fans from other provinces. With the ticket stubs, you can enjoy free tickets to many key scenic spots and discounts on catering and accommodation, which connects the integrated experience of "watching games, sightseeing, and tasting food"; outside the stadium, supporting cultural performances are staged in turn. Fans went to Lingling Ancient City, Liuzi Temple, and Jiuyi Mountain to check in, and tasted Yongzhou Blood Duck and Dong'an Hui, giving birth to a new travel model of "watching a Hunan Super League and visiting an ancient city".
From December 10th to 12th, the 7th Hunan Tourism Development Conference will be held in Yongzhou. Relying on the conference platform, Yongzhou will hold the province's integrated development of culture, tourism, sports and business and tourism industry investment and financing conference, the 7th China Hundred Poems and Hundreds of Couples Competition and the "Hometown of the Grass Saint" Cursive Works Exhibition to promote the in-depth integration of culture, tourism, sports and commerce.
After the meeting, Pingzhou Academy's "Xiaoxiang Here" immersive exhibition and Yongzhou Museum's online "Cloud Observation" and other projects will be transferred to market-oriented long-term operations, transforming one-time event activities into normalized cultural tourism products, and creating a model for the integration of culture, tourism, sports and business that can be replicated and promoted.
In the integration of culture and sports, Yongzhou relies on its unique landscape endowments to vigorously deploy outdoor businesses. Yunbingshan, Yangmingshan, and camping bases along the Xiangjiang River are still very popular; mountain hiking, river tracing, and cycling are widely favored by young people; Qiyang, Xintian, Dong'an, and Shuangpai extensively carry out national fitness and rural football activities; Dao County Dragon Boat Festival A Guinness World Record was set with 212 dragon boats taking part in the competition; local intangible cultural heritage such as Jianghua Yao Clan Dance, Jiang Yong Nvshu, and Qiyang Ditty were integrated into the event package and festival performances, using the sports stage to spread the millennium cultural context and continue to amplify the integration and drainage effect.
From the surging heat of the Hunan Super League stadium to the dim lights of Lingling Ancient City; from the intangible cultural heritage night tour of Goulan Yao Village, pastoral leisure in Tongzi'ao, to the immersive performance of Shun Culture in Jiuyi Mountain, sports vitality, thousand-year cultural heritage and market fireworks coexist in the land of Xiaoxiang. Yongzhou will continue to polish the "Travel to Yongzhou with the Events" brand, promote Internet celebrities to become popular, and strive to transform sports traffic into a cultural tourism industry with a value of 100 billion.
Data show that Yongzhou City's number of tourists increased from 34.5389 million in 2020 to 66.205 million in 2025, a five-year cumulative increase of 91.68%; the total tourist expenditure increased from 33.761 billion yuan to 66.33 billion yuan, a five-year cumulative increase of 96.47%. In 2025, the Hunan Super League will directly drive consumption of 2.1 billion yuan and 15.645 million tourists, making the event economy a new engine of growth.
The Hunan Super League matches sparked excitement throughout the city, and the football competition combined with characteristic cultural performances attracted a large number of fans from both inside and outside the province to Yongzhou. Photo courtesy of the Propaganda Department of the Yongzhou Municipal Party Committee
Technology as wings awakens the millennium Xiaoxiang culture
Located on the bank of the Xiangjiang River in Qiyang, Yongzhou, the Wuxi Stele Forest has 505 square meters of cliff stone carvings preserved from the Tang Dynasty to the Republic of China. It is the largest and best-preserved open-air cliff stone carving group in the south. "Ode to the Zhongxing of the Tang Dynasty", written by Yuan Jie and written by Yan Zhenqing, is known as the "Three Wonders of the Cliff" for its "wonderful writing, strange characters and strange stones"; more than 250 famous masters of the past dynasties, including Mi Fu, Huang Tingjian, He Shaoji, etc., left their stone carvings here, with seal script, official script, regular script, running script and cursive script, and accumulated rich calligraphy and literary treasures.
In recent years, Qiyang has launched a digital protection project for Wuxi cliff stone carvings and built a digital museum. It uses non-contact technologies such as three-dimensional laser scanning and photometric stereo imaging to collect stone carving data with zero damage, restore the details of the inscriptions with an accuracy of 0.01 mm, complete the three-dimensional reconstruction of more than 300 square meters of weathered stone carvings, and build a standardized digital resource library, so that the cliff stone carvings can be permanently digitally retained and shared in the cloud.
In Yongzhou, technology is no longer just a means of display, but allows the cultural context sleeping on the stone walls to come out of static display and become tangible and tangible.
It is reported that the viewing route of this tourism development conference is specially set up at Yongzhou City Museum, Wuxi Cliff Carving Cultural Industrial Park and other points. Digital technologies such as naked-eye 3D, VR, and AR are used to collect and restore inscriptions, ancient books, and cultural relics, solving the problem of weathering of stone carvings and difficulty in viewing cultural relics at close range, and allowing Yongzhou's rich history and culture to be wonderfully presented.
In fact, in order to continue to deepen the integration of culture, science and technology, Yongzhou has successively issued supporting policies to support it: the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Integrated Development of Culture and Science and Technology (2024-2026)", which focuses on digital cultural tourism, intangible cultural heritage revitalization, cultural creativity and intelligent manufacturing and other fields, and defines four major projects1 2 specific actions; "Several Measures for Yongzhou City to Build a Regional Science and Technology Innovation Highland with Core Competitiveness", which will provide real financial rewards to newly recognized national and provincial-level cultural and scientific and technological integration demonstration bases, and set up a special fund of 30 million yuan for cultural and scientific and technological integration.
Relying on digital empowerment and scene creation, Yongzhou promotes cultural heritage to go out of the warehouse and integrate into the market. By building a digital museum of cliff carvings, improving cultural sites such as Li Da’s Former Residence and Nushu Garden, and optimizing real-life literary and artistic performances in Lingling Ancient City and Liuzi Street, we can make the thousand-year-old cultural heritage more vivid and perceptible, and infiltrate people’s hearts with the help of events, conferences and other platforms.
Yongzhou officials stated that in the field of cultural tourism and creativity, the local area will rely on core resources such as Jiuyi Mountain, Wuxi Stele Forest, and Goulan Yao Village to deeply explore the unique cultural heritage of Shun culture, Liu culture, Yao culture, and Nüshu culture. It will open up three scenarios of precise service for tourists, intelligent protection of resources, and efficient brand promotion. It will rely on artificial intelligence to empower cultural tourism experience and polish the cultural tourism brand of "Go to Yongzhou."
Yongzhou digs deep into the unique cultural heritage of Yao culture. Photo courtesy of the Propaganda Department of the Yongzhou Municipal Party Committee
Consumption convergence boosts industry quality and efficiency improvement
The 100,000-year-old ancient human remains in Fuyan Cave and the 10,000-year-old ancient rice cultivation in Yuchanyan have engraved the dawn of civilization in Xiaoxiang; the culture of virtue and filial piety of Emperor Shun in Jiuyi Mountain, the culture of Neo-Confucianism in Lianxi, the culture of Yuxi Liuzi, and the culture of Wuxi inscriptions complement each other; this hot land came from the older generation of proletarian revolutionaries such as Li Da, Li Qihan, Tao Zhu, and Jiang Xianyun, and the red gene was passed down from generation to generation.
Even though the "family wealth" is deep, in Yongzhou's view, cultural heritage cannot be shelved on the shelf. It is necessary to go beyond ancient books and inscriptions to form sustainable consumption as the long-term foundation of the cultural tourism industry.
To this end, the local government has deeply cultivated the integration path of "culture + sports + tourism" and deeply explored resources such as Shun culture, Liuzi culture, Nvshu, and Yao folk customs, promoting cultural tourism from one-way viewing to immersive experience, and effectively boosting cultural tourism consumption. For example, Lingling Ancient City has launched experience activities such as rubbings, garden tours, and NPC poem dialogues; Jiuyi Mountain has opened the Emperor Shun Festival experience; Jiangyong Nu Shuyuan, Goulan Yao Village, Jianghua and other places have taken turns to stage special folk customs, and various intangible cultural heritage handicrafts and cultural and creative products are favored by tourists.
"I once knew Lingling County in painting, but now I know that painting is not as good as it is." The title page of Yongzhou's book is engraved with the past of thousands of years, and the main text is written with the wonderful present. Nowadays, in Yongzhou, "seeing the mountains and rivers during the day and enjoying the culture at night" has become the mainstream way of travel. Lingling Ancient City, Jiuyi Mountain Nanfengji, and Yaodu Water Street continue to be popular, and new projects such as light shows, street folk songs, and small intangible cultural heritage theaters have been unveiled. Night tours continue to drive passenger flow, and consumption scenarios extend to cultural and creative shopping and theatrical performances. The night-time economy has powerfully boosted the quality and efficiency of catering and accommodation.
Consumption in counties is heating up simultaneously, and the overall consumption pattern is taking shape at an accelerated pace. Various regions in Yongzhou have created differentiated consumption scenarios based on local conditions. Jiangyong, Dong'an, Daoxian, and Qiyang have successively launched people-benefiting and theme activities to cultivate "one county, one product"; rural tourism in the suburbs continues to be popular, orders for homestays and farmhouses have increased, and multiple themed study routes continue to release consumption potential.
Three Hunan and four rivers meet in Hunan; a thousand-year cultural heritage originates from Yongzhou. At present, Yongzhou is taking the opportunity of hosting the 7th Hunan Tourism Development Conference to promote the integration of cultural, tourism and sports businesses to a deeper and broader dimension, constantly enrich new business formats and new scenes, and bring more diverse and higher-quality cultural and tourism experiences to tourists. (over)
