Last weekend, the annual Bamboo Culture Tourism Season in Xizhou Town, Xiangshan County of Ningbo, kicked off as scheduled.

Xizhou Town is the core agglomeration area for the bamboo and bamboo shoot industries in Xiangshan. The nine bamboo shoot industry villages, including Mengxi Village, Jianlingtou Village, and Chaixi Village, have been deeply engaged in the development of bamboo resources all year round, forming a complete industrial chain from bamboo shoot planting, processing and sales to cultural tourism experience. The bamboo and the spring bamboo shoot link up the common prosperity chain of wealthy villages and people.

The main venue of this year’s Bamboo Culture Tourism Season is located in the Ruyayang Village, a thousand-year-old ancient village. The event will span the entire month of April, featuring such special activities as a bamboo shoot feast tasting, a bamboo shoot-themed fair, and intangible cultural heritage bamboo art experiences.

On the opening day of April 11, the “Farmhouse Bamboo Shoot Feast” alone attracted over 3,000 visitors. At the event, women representatives from different villages took turns serving up special bamboo shoot dishes, attracting tourists to taste on the spot and place orders directly, which led to a surge in sales of local agricultural products such as fresh bamboo shoots.

The sale of fresh bamboo shoots is only the first link in the industrial chain. In the Xiangshan Common Prosperity Workshop, spring bamboo shoots are processed and transformed into popular dim sum snacks like bamboo shoot balls. Under the leadership of Zheng Kaiyuan, a young guy returning home, the workshop annually consumes over 50,000 kilograms of unsold fresh bamboo shoots from mountainous areas. It has provided employment opportunities for nearly 30 women in the surrounding area, turning traditional craftsmanship into a new industry that brings wealth to the local people.

The value of bamboo has been continuously enhanced through the extension of the industrial chain. Based on the local bamboo resources, Xizhou Town has cultivated several key bamboo-processing enterprises, transforming ordinary bamboo into such crafts and cultural and creative products as bamboo weaving and bamboo carving items. This has not only provided stable employment for villagers but also enables the inheritance of intangible cultural heritage crafts.

To break the seasonal limitation of the bamboo industry, this tourism season has also launched the bamboo forest adoption plan titled “I Have a Bamboo Patch in Xizhou Town”. A designated exclusive area was set aside from the collective bamboo forest in Ruyayang Village, and 100 adoption spots were offered to the public. Currently, all the spots have been fully claimed.

“Adopters can not only obtain the exclusive right to use the bamboo forest, bamboo products, dried bamboo shoots and other specialties, but also participate in regular farming experiences such as bamboo shoot digging and bamboo shoot ball making”, said the related person in charge from Xizhou Town. The adoption funds will be used for bamboo forest maintenance, bamboo shoot variety improvement, and bamboo industry upgrading. In a virtuous cycle, it enables the temporary cultural tourism traffic to been extended into the all-year-round consumption.

With the empowerment of industries, the driving effect of cultural tourism continues to emerge. According to preliminary statistics, on the opening day of the event, over 10,000 bamboo shoots were sold out, with a supply of over five tons of fresh bamboo shoots from local area. It is estimated that the town will receive over 30,000 tourists during the entire tourism season.