Creative cultural products facilitate development of relevant industries

In recent years, emerging creative cultural products that blend traditional cultural heritage with modern flair, particularly fridge magnets, have taken the tourist market in China by storm and become must-have souvenirs. These trendy items have propelled the development of relevant industries and promoted local economic growth.

The Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou, northwest China's Gansu Province has rolled out creative cultural products inspired by malatang, a local street dish featuring a mix of fresh vegetables and meat boiled in a hot, spicy broth.

Trainees learn how to make fish-skin creative cultural products at an intangible cultural heritage studio of the Hezhe ethnic group in Fuyuan city, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. (Xinhua/Wang Jianwei)

Like Gansu Province, many places across China have launched creative cultural products inspired by local delicacies, including dolls themed on jianbingguozi, a popular pancake in north China's Tianjin Municipality.

As museums have emerged as popular tourist destinations, their creative cultural products have become must-buy items for many tourists.

Zhang Jiajia, a museum enthusiast, waited over two hours to snag a coveted fridge magnet inspired by a cultural relic in the Beijing Ancient Architecture Museum. The fridge magnet, which features glow-in-the-dark effects and can be displayed either separately or stacked, has been flying off the shelves since its release in May this year.

Visitors select creative cultural products at the 2024 Tianfu Book Fair in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province. (Xinhua/Tang Wenhao)

Zhang visits museums once or twice a month to see exhibitions or to specifically buy creative cultural products. Over the past two years, Zhang has bought more and more fridge magnets.

"Now, fridge magnets are well-designed. They are more than just decorative pieces. In a sense, to buy a fridge magnet is to bring culture home," Zhang said.

Distinctive local features are increasingly becoming a criterion for designing creative cultural products across China.

In north China's Shanxi Province, creative cultural products like fridge magnets inspired by a temple featured in the Chinese hit video game "Black Myth: Wukong," and postcards themed on the famous Nine-Dragon Wall, a cultural relic in the province's Datong city, have become hot items on tourists' shopping lists. These creative cultural products that meet the aesthetic preferences of young people have increasingly won favor with customers, opening a door for the promotion of culture and tourism in Shanxi.

A boy selects fridge magnets at the 2024 Ditan Book Fair in Beijing. (People's Daily Overseas Edition/Yin Jie)

In Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi Province, a shop sells about 2,000 kinds of locally-inspired creative cultural products. It expects sales to hit about 8 million yuan ($1.13 million) this year, up from nearly 5.9 million last year.

Rongjiang county, the birthplace of China's Village Super League (VSL), also known as "Cun Chao" in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Guizhou Province, has nurtured a batch of enterprises specializing in creative cultural products and guided them to develop over 200 types of creative cultural products themed on intangible cultural heritages and the VSL by integrating traditional crafts with the VSL.

Kites are a timeless cultural theme from Weifang city, in east China's Shandong Province. In the World Kite Museum of Weifang and other creative venues, kite-themed products such as "ringing paper kite" wind chimes, fortune kite displays, and embroidered incense bags with kite motifs have drawn many visitors. Weifang has a long history of kite-making, and artisans continue to innovate on the traditional techniques of "assemble, paste, paint, and fly." Currently, Weifang has over 600 kite enterprises, with an annual sales value of over 2 billion yuan, and its products are exported to more than 50 countries and regions.