Beautifying the New Era! 2025 Yantai Citizen Cultural Arts Season and Cultural Tourism Consumption Season Kicks Off

By Qin Xueli from Qilu Evening News · Qilu Yidian?, Correspondent: Lyu Xuan

Amidst the symphony of mountains and sea, with drums and music resounding, the launch ceremony of the ??2025 Yantai Citizen Cultural Arts Season and Cultural Tourism Consumption Season?? grandly commenced on the morning of April 19, 2025, at Yantai Cultural Center Plaza. Over a thousand citizens gathered to witness this cultural feast shared by all. With the theme “Beautifying the New Era, Creating the Future Together,” this year’s Citizen Cultural Arts Season showcases the city’s cultural charm and ignites urban innovative vitality through year-round activities.

Highlights of the Opening Ceremony: A Cultural Landscape Painted by All

Amidst the resounding beats of ??auspicious gongs and drums?? and vibrant ??lion dance performances??, the event kicked off in a lively atmosphere. A cultural and creative fair simultaneously debuted, drawing citizens to interactive booths of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) demonstrations, calligraphy creations, collectible appraisals, etc. The children’s folk dance, Joyful Gathering, ignited the venue with its spirited choreography. Hand in hand with young performers, the host declared the official opening of the Arts Season. Instantly, all artistic troupes danced together across the plaza, merging into a sea of festivity, where the public’s shared enthusiasm for culture surged!

Event Organizers jointly promoted the competitions to inspire cultural creativity through public platforms. The opening ceremony unveiled the “Eight Municipal-level Competitions,” with hosting organizations taking the stage to vividly explain each competition’s highlights. The recitation competition will integrate dramatic performances to interpret literary classics; the square dance competition encourages all to display the port city’s vitality by dancing; in the chorus competition, voices will intertwine under the theme “Harmony of Mountains & Seas”; the photography and short video competition focuses on rural aesthetics and rural revitalization; the seal-carving competition uses carving knives as pens to engrave the landscape of the “Coastal Wonderland”; the folk arts competition gathers traditional skills like Kuaiban (Clappers) and Jiaodong big drum; the Telling Yantai Stories competition conveys poetic tales of mountains and sea through original scene dramas; the Peking Opera enthusiasts competition writes the new chapter of the Peking Opera heritage in Yantai, featuring renowned masters overseeing the events and amateur performers showcasing their talents. The eight competitions will jointly provide a vibrant stage for citizens to display their talents and inspire universal cultural creativity.

An innovative mechanism sparks service vitality, as the “Cultural Tourism Outreach Initiative Entering into Seven Fields” volunteer teams launch with a flag-presenting ceremony. At the opening ceremony, representatives from municipal cultural institutions, including the Municipal Cultural Arts Center, Museum, and Library, along with volunteer teams from various districts and county-level cities across Yantai, accepted their flags. They will enter seven scenarios, including high-speed rail stations, schools, communities, villages, etc., to carry out cultural tourism activities like ICH demonstrations, art training, and reading promotion. Breaking the traditional “venue-based supply” model, they will deliver high-quality cultural resources to the grassroots in a “light cavalry” form, establishing a “citywide-access, year-round enjoyment” cultural service network to truly achieve “zero-distance cultural benefits for the people.”

The youth empower cultural tourism integration, as the college students’ field trip teams and online influencers co-create urban IP. At the event, the “Growing Toward the Sun · Love in Yantai" college students’ urban field trip teams received their flag, launching a youthful journey of discovery. Cooperating with the students from Yantai-based universities and colleges, this initiative, around the urban IP of Most Beautiful Sunrise City”, aims to reveal Yantai’s mountain-sea charm and cultural heritage through young eyes with themed short video collections contests, offline field trips, college student discount months, and other activities. Meanwhile, Yantai cultural tourism influencer “Wonderland Director Jia” Jia Yanhua took the stage to promote the city, using new media traffic to empower cultural tourism communication, telling Yantai’s history through vivid stories, and helping shape a more youthful and international city brand.

The cultural feast showcases its splendor of the port city with tradition and modernity harmoniously composing a grand chapter. The themed art performance April in Bloom · Walking Toward Beauty showcases the collision and integration of Yantai’s traditional heritage and contemporary style through diverse forms like accordion ensemble, modern dance, scene recitation, and song-dance performances.

Cultural Tourism Consumption Season Launches Multi-Dimensional Themes: People-Benefiting Packages Boost Market Vitality

The Cultural Tourism Consumption Season issued the Implementation Plan for Further Cultivating New Growth Drivers to Revitalize Cultural and Tourism Consumption, which outlines 24 measures in six initiatives: enhancing consumer benefits, promoting “Attracting Visitors to Yantai” campaigns, expanding high-quality product offerings, cultivating new consumption formats and scenarios, upgrading consumption carriers, and optimizing the tourism environment. These efforts aim to invigorate cultural tourism consumption and promote high-quality development of Yantai’s cultural and tourism industries.

Meanwhile, the “Coastal Wonderland Tour, Depart This Weekend” product package was released, including five themed products: Leisure Train Tour for In-Depth Discovery, Azure Ocean Tasting Tour, Cultural Tour for Coastal Wonderland, Advanced Wine-Manufacturing Industry Tour, and Revolutionary-Era Jiaodong Coastal History Tour, offering citizens and tourists a splendid cultural tourism consumption feast. 

Year-Round Cultural Activities Unfold in Panoramic View: Four Chapters Write a People-Benefiting Answer

This year’s Citizen Cultural Arts Season spans the entire year, themed on four chapters of “Sounds of Spring, Dances of Summer, Rhymes of Autumn, and Emotions of Winter”, planning five sections of Red Theme, Cultural Services, Poetic Countryside, Humanistic Aesthetic Education, and Reading Promotion. Moreover, the eight competitions make citizens the cultural protagonists; the “Ten Signature Brands” integrate coastal lifestyle, ICH inheritance, and folk custom experiences to create a three-dimensional cultural tourism experience of “poetry and distance horizons.”

The 2025 Yantai Citizen Cultural Arts Season is an important measure for cultural benefits to the people. Through the activity model of “city-county coordination, departmental collaboration, social participation, and public benefit,” it uses culture as a bond to stimulate cultural tourism consumption vitality, contributing to building a demonstration city for green, low-carbon, and high-quality development and a central city in the Bohai Rim Region. This year-round cultural feast will continue to bring surprises to citizens and tourists, writing a splendid chapter of “Coastal Wonderland & Timeless Yantai.”