欧

May 19 is China Tourism Day, and this year's "5.19 China Tourism Day" campaign marks its 16th edition. The 2026 programme runs from April 23 to May 31, with its main venue in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, as tourism and cultural authorities nationwide launch a coordinated wave of consumer-benefit activity built around the ideas of "benefiting the public, delighting the public and educating the public." According to China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism and local tourism authorities, localities across the country have planned more than 9,000 public-benefit measures this year, coordinating with over 70 partner organizations, with total planned consumer subsidies exceeding 1 billion yuan (roughly 140 million US dollars) — the largest scale in the programme's history.

China Tourism Day falls on May 19 in honor of the Ming-dynasty geographer and travel writer Xu Xiake and his classic work "Travels of Xu Xiake." On May 19, 1613, Xu Xiake set out on his journey to Mount Tiantai in Zhejiang Province, and wrote the opening entry of his travelogue, "Diary of a Journey to Mount Tiantai," on that day. In 2001, the Xu Xiake Tourism Club in Ninghai, Zhejiang, first proposed establishing a national "China Tourism Day." Between 2007 and 2008, representatives from twelve cities across seven provinces and regions — Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi and Yunnan — jointly signed the "Xu Xiake Tourism Belt Cooperation Declaration," calling for May 19 to be designated as the national tourism day. On March 30, 2011, an executive meeting of the State Council formally approved the decision to designate the date as "China Tourism Day." Every year since, various forms of public-benefit tourism and cultural events have been held nationwide around this date.

This year's China Tourism Day activities are themed around "enjoying quality tourism and journeying through China's beautiful mountains and rivers," focusing on consumption scenarios spanning food, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing, shopping, entertainment and study travel. Nine major categories of public-benefit measures have been rolled out, covering safe and comfortable travel, distinctive food experiences, quality accommodation, smooth transportation services, mountain-and-sea sightseeing, trendy domestic-brand shopping, performing-arts entertainment, study tours, and inbound-tourism convenience. During the main-venue events in Guangzhou, multiple municipal tourism discount policies were unveiled, while a "consumer-benefit season" and local festival events were coordinated across many provinces, encouraging "scenic-area-plus-multiple-industries" combined discounts and pushing the tourism market to shift from chasing visitor "traffic" toward building sustained visitor "retention."

According to information released by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and local authorities, scenic areas nationwide plan to hold more than 500 activities during the theme month, including over 300 free-admission or half-price discount events aimed at groups such as students and senior citizens. These are expected to benefit more than 60 million visitors over the course of the year, with total discounts exceeding 210 million yuan. Online travel platforms such as Trip.com's Tongcheng Travel also took part, coordinating with more than a dozen provinces to distribute consumer vouchers worth a combined total of over 17 million yuan, further stimulating cultural-tourism consumption around the May Day holiday and creating what has been described as a "red May" consumption boom.

Running alongside the tourism-benefit campaign is the continued strengthening of China's system for protecting and transmitting intangible cultural heritage (ICH). In May this year, the Ministry of Finance issued its notice on the budget for the 2026 National Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Fund — a dedicated fund that has continuously operated since it was established in 2006 — to be used for the protection of representative ICH items, transmission and performance activities, and the training of inheritors. China's 15th Five-Year Plan outline explicitly calls for "cultivating new scenarios for heritage transmission and experience," and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has likewise proposed building participatory, experiential and shareable spaces for showcasing ICH, drawing in young people, brands and universities to take part — pushing ICH protection from static preservation toward living transmission. With the application of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, ICH protection is entering a new stage of "digital-intelligence integration," serving both the digital preservation of heritage resources and the contemporary transformation of their design and creativity.

The story of cultural inheritors carrying tradition "from one generation's torch to the next" is also well illustrated on the ground. According to Xinhua, Lu Yongmei, an inheritor from the Dong ethnic village of Zhaoxing in Liping County, Guizhou Province, has built a "cooperative-plus-orders-plus-embroiderers" business model. She has visited veteran craftspeople to systematically restore and refine traditional indigo-dyeing techniques, while experimenting with a variety of plant-based dyes to expand Dong textile products beyond a single indigo-blue palette into a full range of colors. The cooperative she leads has grown from just 7 members when it was founded in 2014 to more than 200 members today, has developed over 600 new and distinctive products, and has been granted more than 10 related patents. In 2025, the cooperative's total output value surpassed 20 million yuan, making it a model example of combining the creative transformation and innovative development of traditional crafts with rural revitalization.

Suzhou embroidery (苏绣) stands as a leading example of this round of heritage transmission and innovation. Su embroidery was included in the first national list of representative intangible cultural heritage items in 2006, and has since been listed in both national and provincial directories for revitalizing traditional crafts. In the Suzhou New District's Zhenhu Su Embroidery Town, the local community has gathered four experts receiving special State Council allowances, one Jiangsu master of arts and crafts, and two Jiangsu-recognized arts-and-crafts notables in embroidery. It has built 19 provincial- and municipal-level "local talent" master studios and three provincial-level Su embroidery transmission demonstration bases, and has cultivated a total of 93 provincial "Three Belts" local talents — forming an orderly succession of older, middle-aged and younger generations of practitioners who emphasize both transmission and innovation in equal measure. The local Su embroidery industry has built a complete industrial ecosystem covering design and R&D, production, patent cultivation, intellectual-property protection and embroidery trading, with the Su Embroidery Town's annual output value reaching approximately 1.5 billion yuan. In June this year, the "Jin Xiu" (Brocade Embroidery) brand held a major exhibition event in Paris, France, formally opening the 2026 China Intangible Cultural Heritage Month — a milestone marking Su embroidery's shift from "exporting craft techniques" toward a deeper "export of culture."

Beyond Su embroidery, ICH inheritors in many other regions are also exploring paths to innovation. Liu Jinglan, a national-level representative inheritor of Baotou paper-cutting in Inner Mongolia, resolved venue difficulties to establish transmission classrooms for community residents and primary and secondary school students, and developed product lines — such as zodiac-themed paper cuttings and wedding decorations — tailored to modern life needs; related cultural-creative products are now sold nationwide and even overseas. In the "millennium porcelain capital" of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, a team of university teachers and students conducted field research between November 2025 and March 2026, visiting more than 20 local ICH inheritors, and launched the "Porcelain Charm, Digital Intelligence — New Chapter on the Silk Road" project; within five months of operation it had listed 19 product SKUs, achieved 1.8 million total impressions across all channels, and produced a short video with as many as 220,000 views. Jingdezhen has also built the world's first ancient-ceramics gene bank, is experimenting with combining porcelain-carving techniques with artificial intelligence, and is using 3D-printing technology to empower folk workshops in production. In Shanghai's Changning District, Zhang Yaxu, a member of the post-1990s generation and a district-level representative inheritor of ancient ceramic restoration techniques, has forged her own path of innovation by blending traditional restoration methods with modern technological tools.

China's achievements in cultural-heritage protection and innovative transmission are also winning continued international recognition. On June 13 this year — China's Cultural and Natural Heritage Day — the National Cultural Heritage Administration, together with media organizations, jointly launched the "Civilized China" international communication works campaign, calling for photo, text and video submissions on cultural-heritage themes from around the world. According to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, 18 new items have been added to the World Heritage List from China, and the country's approach to heritage protection has shifted from passive response to proactive planning, from a narrow focus on heritage sites themselves to coordinated management of their surrounding environments, and from siloed sector-by-sector efforts to collaborative social governance. China has also worked with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on transnational cooperation such as the joint inscription of the "Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor" as a World Heritage Site, while the Dunhuang Academy has carried out collaborative research with multiple international institutions in the digitization of Dunhuang cultural relics. Irina Bokova, former Director-General of UNESCO, has commented that China has shown an innovative spirit in cultural-heritage protection and made a distinctive contribution to safeguarding the world's cultural diversity.

From a nationwide tourism public-benefit campaign spanning more than 9,000 measures and over 1 billion yuan in subsidies, to breakthroughs in the generational transmission and innovation of ICH crafts such as Su embroidery, Dong ethnic dyeing and weaving, paper-cutting and ancient-ceramic restoration, to the ongoing "Civilized China" storytelling effort aimed at the world, this year's China Tourism Day season reflects China's simultaneous push across three fronts: stimulating cultural-tourism consumption, safeguarding its cultural roots, and enhancing its international cultural influence. Industry observers say that as public-benefit policy and cultural innovation continue to reinforce one another, the deep integration of China's culture and tourism sectors will be further consolidated — providing more vivid, contemporary footnotes to the story of Chinese civilization's engagement with the world.