Big defeat! The tourist ancient towns that have been copied in batches are becoming "ghost towns" in batches

Glacier think tank

2024-05-09 14:24Posted on the official account of Zhejiang Glacier Think Tank

Many ancient towns are facing a common dilemma: it will be cold before the fire, and it will require a steady stream of capital investment to continue to maintain operations, and depreciation losses will be incurred every day; If it is closed directly, the hundreds of millions or even billions of investments in the early stage will be completely wasted, resulting in huge waste.

Written by丨Xiong Zhi

The lively "May Day" holiday has just passed, and as a fragrant dumpling in the tourism market, a number of characteristic ancient towns have made a lot of money in the swarming passenger flow.

In the past few years, ancient towns have blossomed everywhere, attracting a large number of tourists, but as far as the eye can see, there are only a few that can continue to explode. Many Internet celebrity ancient towns, some of which are currently sparse and seriously loss-making, and some have just been built and have entered a state of abandonment.

Is China's ancient town tourism hopeless?

On social media, complaints about the homogenization and over-commercialization of ancient towns can be seen everywhere. The cookie-cutter architectural style, highly similar food and souvenirs make tourists gradually lose interest in many ancient towns.

After the ancient town that lacks scientific planning is unfinished, some places are suffering the consequences of rushing to the top and following the trend.

01

During the past "May Day" holiday, the ancient town of Internet celebrity has become a popular tourist destination. For example, the Phoenix Ancient City in Hunan received 401,500 tourists, and the two ancient towns of Xitang and Wuzhen in Zhejiang received 471,400 and 305,900 tourists respectively.

Behind the tourism fever of the ancient town is the frenzy of the construction of the ancient town.

How many ancient towns are there in the country?

As early as 2012, Lin Peng, president of the China Institute of Ancient Cities and Culture, mentioned a statistic in an interview with the media: "At present, there are more than 2,800 ancient towns in the mainland that have been developed or are being developed, and the number must be the largest in the world." ”

In 2016, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and other three departments issued the "Notice on Carrying out the Cultivation of Characteristic Towns", which was encouraged and guided at the policy level, setting off a wave of building characteristic towns, including a large number of characteristic ancient towns with tourism functions.

At this stage, the number of ancient towns on the mainland may well exceed 2,800. From another perspective, we can feel the exaggeration of this number more intuitively - by the end of 2021, the number of counties in the country is less than 1,500, and there are more than 2,800 ancient towns, which is equivalent to about two ancient towns in each county on average.

While ancient towns are blooming everywhere, the problem of homogenization is becoming more and more serious, and the "duplicate check rate" is even as high as 99%.

I believe that many tourists have a personal feeling - those ancient towns all over the country look very similar.

First of all, the overlap of architectural styles is very high, with blue bricks and green tiles, tile houses, and small bridges and flowing water...... It seems to be carved out of a mold, and the "face hitting" is serious.

Secondly, in terms of commercial operations, the ancient towns are also highly similar. Many ancient towns are called ancient towns, but they are actually commercial streets dressed in the coat of ancient towns. If the commercial street can have some special food snacks, folk products, and amusement projects, the problem is that their commercial form is also a thousand towns.

Whether you are in Zhejiang in the east or Yunnan in the southwest, you can almost see the street signs in the ancient town that say "I miss you in ××", and you can eat snacks such as stinky tofu, squid, and grilled sausages that taste the same everywhere you go. The souvenirs sold are nothing more than bracelets, bracelets, mirrors, combs, hairpins, etc., which may come from the same place - Yiwu.

In short, the large number of ancient towns does not give people a pleasing look at the slightest, on the contrary, they continue to create aesthetic fatigue and make tourists lose the motivation to visit.

02

China has a vast territory and significant local differences, and the homogenization of ancient towns is certainly not due to the convergence of history and culture in different regions.

In the final analysis, the reason for the "one side of a thousand towns" is that in the process of rushing up the construction, many places have adopted the most labor-saving copy-and-paste mode, and the development of the ancient town has become an industrialized and assembly-line mass production.

After the construction of the ancient town has a fixed template, low-cost copying operations have been made in various places, which has become a landmark phenomenon in the cultural tourism market.

The development of ancient towns in some places is based on the existence of historical buildings and traditional folk customs, and it is better to repair the old as the old and reflect some local characteristics.

Some ancient towns are outrageous, there are no historical and cultural elements, and they also have to "build cities" out of thin air, and billions of funds will be smashed down, and those ancient towns that have been successfully developed will be directly copied one by one. Rockery, fake trees, fake scenery, a "fake ancient town" with only a shell and no cultural core, has risen from the ground.

Localities are keen to follow the trend of building ancient towns, for the simple reason that the development of ancient towns can indeed bring tangible economic benefits.

Taking Wuzhen, one of the most profitable ancient towns, as an example, the financial report released by the operating entity "CYTS" shows that in 2023, Wuzhen Scenic Area will receive a total of 7.7207 million tourists (person-times), achieving an operating income of 1.784 billion yuan and a net profit of 284 million yuan.

You must know that before large-scale development, Wuzhen was once the last township in Tongxiang City, Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province to open a road.

From an ordinary town to a world-class tourist destination, the success of Wuzhen's development has made many places see the huge drainage effect of the ancient town, so they have followed suit. It doesn't matter if the local government has no money to invest, it adopts the PPP model (i.e., the public-private partnership model) and hands it over to market-oriented private capital to operate.

For the local government, in addition to creating tourism revenue and providing visible political achievements for the main government officials, there is also a hidden logic hidden in the boom of ancient town development - many places are engaged in real estate land sales under the banner of cultural tourism.

The construction of ancient towns is often located in non-city centers, or even relatively remote suburbs. Developers can acquire land at a low price under the banner of ancient town development, and local governments can take advantage of the appreciation of surrounding land prices driven by the cultural tourism boom to obtain higher land returns, and at the same time promote the expansion of urban development to the suburbs.

However, as a result of overheated development, the ancient town has lost its characteristics and has a serious oversupply.

In order to recover the investment, some ancient towns are overly commercialized, and you have to charge admission fees to enter, and there are many types of fees. There are not many antique buildings inside, there are many shops that buy wholesale goods from Yiwu, and the whole ancient town is like a large small commodity market, without any historical heritage and cultural atmosphere.

On the other hand, copying, copying and pasting in a rush not only makes the ancient town highly homogeneous, but also creates a situation where "there are too many ancient towns and not enough tourists". What is more exaggerated is that a tourist city can even pop up three or four ancient towns at the same time.

03

Ancient town tourism is very popular, many people see the success of the Wuzhen model, but do not see or turn a blind eye There are one after another "fake ancient towns" due to the lack of scientific planning and local characteristics, into a serious loss situation, and even to the edge of unfinished, into a "ghost town".

In 2021, an article titled "Death List of Featured Towns" circulated online. The article pointed out that the capital chain of many characteristic towns was broken, and the flight of merchants made them "empty cities", and at least 100 "cultural tourism towns" were in a state of unfinished and bankruptcy.

Like the Shaanxi Bailuyuan Folk Culture Village mentioned in the article, it was rushed into operation after the fire of "Bailuyuan", with an investment of 350 million yuan, but it was cool after less than a year of fire, and it was still powerless after many closures and rectifications, and finally opened only four years before it was demolished.

The failure of the development of Bailuyuan Folk Culture Village is not an isolated case.

In the face of some ancient towns with large-scale investment and development, the investment of 350 million yuan in Bailuyuan Folk Culture Village is already a small amount. In the past two days, there have been media reports that the ancient city of Songfeng in Jinan, built with 4 billion yuan, has not been completed for five years, and now it has become an "empty city" overgrown with weeds, which is suspected to be unfinished.

It is easy to reproduce the ancient town, but it is never easy to revitalize the ancient town. In fact, in terms of the development and operation of ancient towns, even those traders with successful experience are prone to encounter the embarrassment of "Huai orange for orange" when replicating in different places.

For example, the state-owned enterprise "China Youth Travel Service" has successfully built Wuzhen into a well-known cultural tourism town, but Gubei Water Town, another characteristic ancient town it began to build in 2010, is far from meeting expectations.

The passenger flow of Gubei Water Town began to decline after peaking in 2017, and the operating company once lost as much as 170 million yuan a year. In 2023, it will receive 1,523,600 tourists, which will only recover to 64% of the 2019 level - although it may not be a failure, but compared to the star product Wuzhen, it can be described as two heavens of ice and fire.

In contrast, Gubei Water Town is quite successful, and there are some ancient towns that have not even started their names, and they have already been empty.

04

From the construction of piles to the closure of batches, it is expected that the antique ancient town will be abandoned by tourists. From the perspective of development, it is because of the rush and blind following the trend that the ancient town has lost its characteristics; From the perspective of consumption, the market environment and preferences of tourism are also changing.

The development of social media has greatly alleviated the problem of information asymmetry in the tourism market in the past. Is an ancient city worth visiting? There are a bunch of strategies, experiences, and pit avoidance posts on the Internet for your reference. In this case, no matter how hard the local promotion is, it is difficult to attract tourists to the ancient town that lacks characteristics and has a poor experience.

In addition, young people are the main force in the tourism market, and now young people are increasingly favoring some distinctive and clearly recognizable cultural tourism projects. Just like the explosion of "Wang Po Says Matchmaking", young people's way of playing has also changed from a shallow and casual sightseeing in the past to an immersive and in-depth experience, and they hope to experience those more participatory and novel ways to play.

In this case, how can those antique ancient towns with the same architectural style and the same style of big squid and stinky tofu be of interest to tourists?

When tourism competition becomes a "volume" of ancient town development, and this development is still a low-level replication, the ancient town construction boom often incurs huge sunk costs.

Taking the ancient city of Dayong in Zhangjiajie, Hunan Province as an example, under the premise that there are already three ancient towns in the surrounding area: Xibu Street, Guyong City, and Dayong Fucheng, this ancient town is still under construction in 2016 and will start operation in 2021, and has been in a state of loss in recent years.

According to the financial report of the operator "Zhanglv Group", the operating income of Dayong Ancient City in 2023 will be 5.2086 million yuan, and the net profit will be -249 million yuan. What's even more surprising is that in the income composition of Dayong Ancient City, the core contribution is not tickets, but parking lot service income!

The loss of Dayong Ancient City directly dragged down the performance of "Zhang Travel Group". In this regard, its person in charge said bluntly: "It is mainly dragged down by the ancient city of Dayong, including the depreciation and amortization of the ancient city, financial expenses, asset provisions, etc." ”

This may be a common dilemma for many ancient towns: it is cold before it is fired, and it is necessary to continuously invest funds to continue to maintain operations, and depreciation losses will be incurred every day; If it is closed directly, the hundreds of millions or even billions of investments in the early stage will be completely wasted, resulting in huge waste.

Therefore, when young people begin to abandon the antique ancient town, the local government should also wake up from the dream of getting rich from the development of the ancient town and restrain the impulse to "build a town".

The development of ancient towns is not impossible, but at least there must be scientific planning, adaptation to local conditions, and deep digging into local cultural characteristics. Ignoring the laws of the cultural tourism market, rushing to large-scale development, and relying on copy and paste, the "fake ancient town" created by copying and pasting will sooner or later go to decay or even die.

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