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Revival of Pingtian Village in Songyang County
construction, culture, agriculture, tourism,
and established a “leadership team of
conservation and development of historic
cities, villages, and buildings” to coordinate
the work of conservation and development of
traditional villages in the whole county. The
leadership team actively engaged in exploring
policy mechanisms for adaptive reuse of
vacant historic structures and property
transfer mechanisms of traditional buildings,
which provided policy guarantee to develop
new industries in traditional villages. On the
other hand, the government also developed
technical guidelines for renovation of
traditional buildings, which was a conscious
move to build local craftsman teams to inherit
traditional renovation and reconstruction
techniques.
Songyang county has made great
achievement in recent years in terms of
conservation and development of traditional
villages. In December 2014, Songyang
county was named among the first group of
model counties in the conservation and
development of traditional villages, together
with Jianshui county in Yunnan province. In
January 2016, Songyang county was chosen
as the pilot county for the “Save Old Houses”
project by the China Foundation for Cultural
Heritage Conservation. It was the only one in
the country that received support for the
whole county. The project promoted holistic
conservation of historic structures through a
financing model that the foundation and the
owner each contributed half of the
conservation cost. The planning team of
Pingtian published an article in Outlook
Weekly, entitled “Understanding Traditional
China in Songyang,” the team also set the
goal for the heritage conservation and cultural
development work in Songyang to be a
“traditional Chinese model county.”
With rich resources of traditional
villages, Songyang county formulated a
development strategy that introduced
guesthouse businesses into traditional
villages. The county government enacted
“Songyang County Guesthouse Rating
Standard” to set specific management
measures for different grades of guesthouses.
AccScience Publishing
Sun, et al.
The document also formulates different levels
of subsidies according to the accommodation
capacity and grading of guesthouses. The
renovation of traditional buildings,
particularly those listed historic buildings into
guesthouses is entitled to higher level of
subsidy.
With the large number of traditional
villages, the strategy of Songyang county is to
focus on selected areas, and use these pilot
areas to influence the whole county. The
county attaches importance especially to the
introduction of high-end resources and
branding of public cultural product. Villages
retain and develop existing culture and attach
[5]
importance to cultural construction . Apart
from guesthouses in Pingtian village,
Songyang has supported guesthouse brands
like Red Persimmon (柿 子 红 了 ), Guoyun
Residence (过云山居), Birdvine Residence
(茑舍), Tea Girl (小茶姑娘), Youtian Flower
Blossom (酉 田 花 开 ) and so on, and also
incubated cultural projects like Damushan
Tea House, Contract Museum, Brown Sugar
Workshop, Wangjing Memorial Hall, Shimen
Covered Bridge, and Tofu Workshop. Now
traditional village tourism has become an
important industry and cultural brand of
Songyang. The establishment of cultural
brands and the planning of art events make
Songyang an imaginative scene [6] . These
small projects have gradually formed an
industry cluster in recent years, making
Songyang a top cultural tourism destination in
southwest Zhejiang, or even in China.
Figure 3. Guoyun Residence in Xikeng Village, a sea
of clouds can be seen here. Source: Photo by Deyin
Luo
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