Festival celebrates village’s transformative success, bright future
By inspiring the creativity of villagers through art, the village of Chengyang in Ningbo, East China’s Zhejiang province, has become a hot tourism destination in the span of just nine months.
The village, located in the Dongqian Lake Tourist Resort in the city’s Yinzhou district, has 910 registered residents and a history dating back more than 1,000 years.
It is surrounded on three sides by mountains and has good air quality featuring a high content of negative oxygen ions.
Chengyang also boasts 280 hectares of forest, an ancient temple, an ancient road and a 1,000-yearold ginkgo tree.
Although Chengyang has distinctive natural and cultural resources, it has lacked an effective way to leverage those valuable assets, according to the local government.
Changes began in July last year, when Cong Zhiqiang, an associate professor at Renmin University of China’s School of Arts, came to Chengyang with some students to help the village carry out “artistic development”.
They have helped nearly 80 villagers master traditional craftsmanship such as woodwork, flower planting and bamboo weaving.
Their added skills have helped transform the village’s economy using the local resources like bamboos, rocks and bricks and tiles.
Under the guidance of Cong’s team, villagers converted old pigpens into bars and teahouses, and made cluttered spaces for keeping firewood into chic manual workshops.
Ancient trees, old temples and bridges were also utilized to be partly attributed to the village’s tremendous changes.
The Chengyang Life Art Festival has become a landmark event in the village’s rural revitalization.
The festival is organized by the Yinzhou district government, the management committee of Dongqian Lake Tourist Resort and the Ningbo Daily, and supported by the Dongqianhu town government, Yongpai Media, The Paper and the Zhejiang branch of China Daily.
On the same day as the festival, two related dialogues were held in Ningbo and neighboring Shanghai, attracting government officials, rural artists, experts and internet celebrities to share their experiences of Chengyang’s quick transformation as well as their insights on the relationship between arts and rural revitalization.
Eckhard, a German winner of the Ningbo Camellia Award, a prize set by the Ningbo government to honor foreign experts who make contributions to the city’s reform, opening-up and economic construction, said he saw mostly elderly people in villages he visited in the past. But Chengyang was different.
“Many young people have started businesses there, creating values and transforming the village with their own ideas,” he said. “I wish to see more villages like Chengyang.”
Pan Jiaolei, a representative of a Shanghai residential community called Xinhu Riverside Garden, said the artistic makeover has brought a new lifestyle and vitality to Chengyang, and “this is really a model of rural revitalization”.
The community has partnered with Chengyang in implementing its rural revitalization strategy.
Guo Xiaotao, a popular Chinese tourism blogger and writer of travel columns, said Chengyang fulfills the ideals of “working in the city, living in the village”.
“When the villagers change, so will the village,” said Cong Zhiqiang. He noted that a village should have “villagers with the ability and confidence to create and start businesses, making villages a different but attractive way of life compared to cities”.
According to the Yinzhou district government, the transformation in Chengyang is just the beginning of a larger revitalization project. More villages in the district will follow the path of artistic development in the future.