Why is rural tourism becoming more and more popular?
With the development of agricultural technology and changes in living habits, many tools used in China's countryside thirty or forty years ago have been abandoned, such as the plow for tilling land, the dou for measuring rice, as well as wheelbarrows, spinning wheels and so on. Even rural children now find these objects unfamiliar.
In recent years, city dwellers' longing for rural scenery has grown by the day. Green fields, old farm tools and fresh farm dishes have reawakened in people a certain attachment to rural customs.
⟦NL> “‘Charging up the mountain like a fierce tiger, crossing the river as if floating on water’ - that describes the wheelbarrow; ‘Wooden dragon, wooden dragon, the more you turn it the redder it gets, providing food and clothing and ensuring peace.’ - that refers to the spinning wheel.” Li Shusen, 72, of Lintong District, Xi'an, Shaanxi, said this while fiddling with a wooden farm-tool model he made himself, reciting a children's rhyme his father's generation taught him.
Starting in 2010, Li Shusen, who worked as a carpenter his whole life, and his wife Wang Yueqin, drawing on their rural life experience, began making “miniature versions” of old farm tools out of peach wood. These handicrafts are not only replicated to scale, but the wheels of the cart and the handle of the bellows can also move and extend. “Making farm tools takes too much time and doesn't make money, but I just want to leave something behind for future generations, so they know what the rural life of their ancestors was like,” Wang Yueqin said.
Today Li Shusen's craft has been named “Liyang Woodcarving” and has been included in the Xi'an intangible cultural heritage list. A room in his home is filled with farm-tool models of all kinds. The elderly couple's greatest wish is to let young people understand traditional farming culture.
Li Shusen is not the only one with such a dream. Tang Qian, a 70-year-old retired doctor living in Xingzhe Street, Lintong District, calls himself a “farm tool collector.” His collection consists of old farm tools, each one covered in dust and caked with mud.
His home has a courtyard specifically used to store the “treasures” collected from all over Shaanxi. “This is a plains plow, this is a mountain plow,” Old Tang can tell the difference between farm tools from the slightest curve. From small things like hemp sacks to a large hard-wheel cart that had to be pulled by a horse, as well as various millstones and rollers placed around the courtyard, these old objects that many rural people casually discard were all carried by hand or hauled by cart, one by one, back to the courtyard.
“In the past, with a sickle one person could harvest only a few mu of wheat a day; now a combine harvester sweeps through dozens of mu of wheat in one go. Today's tools really are advanced, but when people later want to recall rural life of the past, without the things I've collected, what would they rely on to remember?” Tang Qian said. After retiring he fulfilled his wish of cycling through Xinjiang and Tibet, and building a Shaanxi farming culture museum is now another dream of his.
“The more I walk on concrete roads all day, the more I miss the mountain dirt paths, even muddy paths, that I stepped on every day going to school.” Bai Xiangji, 59, is an outdoor sports enthusiast in Xi'an. Having come out of the countryside, he has a special feeling for the atmosphere of rural areas. “Whenever I see farm tools, wells or old oxen while hiking, I recall the simple satisfaction and happiness of the past. The popularity of rural tourism is a good thing; for young people, it's a way to experience the lives of their ancestors and parents.”
“Urban diseases have spurred the boom in rural tourism, and that is also why people yearn more and more for the countryside,” said Professor Zhang Lingyun, vice dean of the Tourism College at Beijing Union University. Noise and air pollution in cities are still rarely seen in rural areas, while rural facilities and environment, as well as the dishes people eat there, give many people a sense of novelty.
Folk culture displays, interactive farming culture experiences and tastings of distinctive local cuisine are the unique features that make rural tourism favored and attract visitors. The deeper reason is the lingering rural sentiment in people's hearts.