Recently, the Ministry of Finance issued the central subsidy fund budget for the protection of traditional villages in 2023 in advance, including two places in our province. Lanxi, as a demonstration county for the centralized and continuous protection and utilization of traditional villages, received a fund budget of 18 million yuan.
Lanxi has a history of nearly 1400 years. It has a profound historical and cultural heritage, a dense distribution of traditional villages, and beautiful buildings with distinctive characteristics. It is the hometown of traditional Chinese architecture and a provincial historical and cultural city. There are 21 traditional Chinese villages and 20 provincial traditional villages. In recent years, Lanxi has taken the demonstration work of centralized and continuous protection and utilization of traditional villages as an opportunity to further explore the activation and utilization of traditional buildings, found a high-quality development path, and made efforts to create a replicable “Zhejiang model”.
In order to realize the centralized and continuous development of traditional villages, Lanxi will connect the scattered traditional villages into a whole area, build the overall pattern of centralized and continuous protection and utilization of “one core and three areas” in the central core, western area, northern area and eastern area, activate the development of surrounding villages and regions, and realize the integration, optimization and sustainable development of traditional resources. Zhuge Village in the western region is a model of Lanxi protection and utilization. “In Zhuge Village, everyone is a cultural protector, and everyone is a shareholder.” Zhuge Kunheng, secretary of the general party branch and director of the village committee of Zhuge Village, told reporters that every ancient building in the village should be listed, and the villagers living in the village should sign a letter of protection responsibility. Every villager is a shareholder and also a beneficiary of the protection of ancient villages.
Thanks to the “Zhuge Model”, the ancient buildings in Zhuge Village are still well preserved. Experts and scholars call it “the model of traditional ancient villages and ancient dwellings in the south of the Yangtze River”. Relying on its unique resource endowment, the village has established a multi-party linkage mechanism of “village committee+tourism company+cultural security office”, which has led to a path of common prosperity with the participation of the whole people, and has brought earth-shaking changes to the village’s collective income and villagers’ income.
Lanxi’s “going out of the circle” depends not only on the ancient village, the ancient house, the ancient river and the ancient bridge, but also on the poetic and picturesque flavor of the Lanxi days and the human fireworks. Every morning, tea guests arrive at Youbu Ancient Town from all over the country, just to sit in the teahouse and drink a cup of tea, or eat some special snacks such as meat sink, chicken dumpling, etc., chatting everywhere, exuding the ancient charm of Jiangnan. Youbu Ancient Town radiates and drives Liaoxiqiao Village and Yanggang Village, continuously and deeply excavates the morning tea culture, displays a cultural town integrating photography culture, food culture, art experience and ancient town life through telling cultural stories, carrying out intangible cultural heritage activities and festival activities, and promotes the integration of regional culture and tourism, and the characteristic cuisine and philosophy of life become a golden card of traditional villages.
Next, Lanxi will continue to explore the new method of protection and utilization of traditional villages and vernacular buildings of “empowerment, promotion, activation and inheritance”, constantly innovate the new mechanism of centralized and continuous protection and utilization of traditional villages of “sharing, common prosperity, and common creation”, and strive to establish a new path of centralized and continuous protection and development of traditional villages of “urban planning, culture first”, so as to realize the benign interaction between traditional village protection and development. (Chen Zhiheng, Lanxi Rong Media Center)