On a hillside overlooking the sea in Dongbi Village, southeast China’s Fujian Province, guesthouses follow the contours of the terrain, with terraces opening toward the water. Visitors come here for the view, but increasingly, they stay for the experience, or simply a slower pace of life—a few quiet days by the coast, and a cup of coffee overlooking the sea.
A growing number of people have returned to villages like Dongbi to open guesthouses, cafés and restaurants. Old houses are being given new uses, local traditions are being turned into experiences for visitors, and villages once known mainly for the high levels of emigration are attracting not only tourists, but also new residents and entrepreneurs.
Across rural Fujian, tourism is becoming more than a way to bring visitors in. It is creating new reasons for people to return, stay and build a life.
When a view becomes a livelihood
When Chen Shuman returned to her hometown in Fujian after years of working as a designer in Beijing, she was not simply looking for a new career. She was looking for a way back to the sea she had grown up beside.
Born and raised in Xiapu County, Chen had spent years away from home before deciding to return. After looking at a number of possible locations, she chose Dongbi, a coastal village where the mountains slope down to the sea.
In August 2017, she opened Shijian Hai, the first guesthouse in the village. Its rooms opened onto sweeping views of the mountains and sea. Visitors came, stayed and shared photographs of the place. Before long, the quiet village was appearing on travel itineraries and social media feeds.
For the villagers, however, something more consequential was happening. They were beginning to see their home differently.
“Shijian Hai showed us that our landscape could support a real business,” said Cai Jianfeng, Party secretary of Dongbi Village. “We began looking for people who had the resources, skills and passion to come back and build something here.”
The village began exploring ways to attract entrepreneurs and encourage former residents to return. Zheng Xianshi was one of them.
A native of Dongbi, Zheng had worked in Fuzhou before returning in 2019, taking jobs in construction and later driving for a ride-hailing platform. In 2021, he opened a guesthouse, becoming the sixth operator in the village.
“People were already coming here for the scenery,” he said. “I thought, why not give them a reason to stay longer?”
Zheng’s guesthouse recorded an occupancy rate of around 95 percent when it opened.
In 2024, he opened a café along Dongbi’s now-popular coastal road. At the time, the road itself barely had any commercial activity. “I wanted to make use of the foot traffic, but I also wanted the café to bring more people here,” he told Beijing Review.
He brought in professional designers from Fuzhou to create a space where visitors could stop, sit and enjoy the landscape rather than simply pass through it.
Today, the guesthouse earns around 1 million yuan ($139,000) in profit each year, while the café makes roughly 2 million yuan ($278,000), according to Cai. His family helps run the businesses, including daily operations and procurement. “The business has changed our whole life,” he said. “And my family can work here instead of having to look for jobs somewhere else.”
For Dongbi, the sea had always been there. What changed was what people learned to do with it.
A cluster of guesthouses set against the mountains and facing the sea in Dongbi Village, Xiapu County, Fujian Province, on August 21 (WANGZIYUAN)
Tradition becomes attraction
The sea is not the only thing rural Fujian has learned to turn into an attraction. In Puyuan Village in nearby Ningde City, the attraction is a stream filled with carp that have been protected by local residents for centuries.
The tradition of caring for the fish in Puyuan’s Carp Stream dates back about 800 years and is now recognized as provincial intangible cultural heritage. Local customs include prohibitions on catching or eating the fish, as well as rituals held when fish die.
The practice began with the village’s founding Zheng family, who settled beside the stream during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). They released carp into the water to help protect the local water source and gradually established rules against catching and eating them.
Over generations, the relationship between the people and the fish became part of village life.
Today, the carp still swim freely through the village stream, gathering around visitors as they approach. But Puyuan’s tourism strategy has now extended beyond showing visitors its fish.
“We want visitors to experience the culture, not simply come here, take a few photographs and leave,” said Xu Jiangyan, deputy head of the publicity department of Zhouning County.
Visitors can watch traditional fish-related ceremonies, martial arts performances and puppet shows. Local authorities have also renovated more than 20 houses dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911) and introduced new cultural venues, including an art gallery, folk museum and fish museum.
The approach has also created new opportunities for accommodation and hospitality, as Puyuan now has 94 homestays.
Here, tourism is not simply built around scenery. It is also built around a story, one that gives visitors a way to understand how generations of villagers have lived with their environment.
Visitors watch carp swimming in the Carp Stream in Puyuan Village, Ningde City, Fujian Province, on August 22 (KANG CAIQI)
Visitors become neighbors
Longtan Village, also in Ningde, takes that transformation a step further.
Before 2017, Longtan was struggling with the familiar problems of rural depopulation. Many of its historic houses stood empty and deteriorating, while only a little more than 100 people remained in the village.
Then came a simple but consequential idea: leasing out the old houses for terms of 15 years.
The arrangement gave abandoned homes a new lease on life and made it possible for young entrepreneurs to experiment with new businesses.
One young entrepreneur building a business in Longtan is Chen Zhongye. A graduate of Quanzhou University of Information Engineering, Chen returned to his hometown in 2017 and renovated his family’s old house. He combined coffee with hongqu huangjiu, a traditional red yeast rice wine with national-level intangible cultural heritage status.
The result was huangjiu coffee, a distinctly modern drink rooted in a local tradition.
“We had a slogan: ‘Drink our ancestors’ wine, and walk the path of young people,'” Chen told Beijing Review.
During the peak tourist season, his shop can sell 300 to 400 cups a day. But Chen’s ambition goes beyond selling a beverage. He launched the Return to the Village initiative to encourage young people to reconnect with their hometowns.
“Some people used to think young people came back because they hadn’t made it elsewhere,” he said. “I don’t see it that way. I think our hometowns have things worth showing the world.” For Chen, returning home did not mean stepping back into the past. It meant finding ways to make what was inherited from the past relevant to a new generation.
And increasingly, Longtan is also attracting people not native to the village.
Since 2017, while more than 600 former residents have returned to Longtan, more than 100 people from outside the village have also settled there as “new villagers,” according to Yang Lin, Party secretary of Xiling Township, in which Longtan is located.
One of them is Wang Zupei, a native of Jiujiang City in Jiangxi Province.
Born in 1994, Wang had studied in Spain and worked in Shanghai’s film and television industry before eventually taking, and then leaving, a government job in his hometown. He did not want his life to be dictated by what he saw as a prescribed social timetable, and came to Longtan through a friend’s introduction.
For 3,600 yuan ($500) a month, he rents a traditional house. He lives upstairs and runs a barbecue restaurant downstairs.
Would life in a village be inconvenient? Not particularly, in his view. “If there’s Wi-Fi, it’s pretty much the same wherever you are,” he told Beijing Review.
His restaurant brings in over 10,000 yuan ($1,390) a month. The calculation is simple: relatively low living costs, a business that can support him, and the freedom to organize his days on his own terms.
Another new villager is Zhou Han, an artist who has made Longtan both her home and a base for her creative work.
Dressed in a bohemian-style dress and often barefoot, she moves between the old house she has renovated and the stone-paved lanes of the village. Inside, the house retains the weathered character of a traditional rural dwelling, while tropical-style furnishings and her own artwork give it a personal touch. A broken bamboo shoulder pole has been repurposed as a tea tray, while fallen orange leaves serve as coasters.
The house is now a small bistro, as well as her studio. Zhou paints and writes poetry in Longtan, selling her paintings and poetry collections alongside her hospitality business.
A corner of a renovated traditional house in Longtan Village, Ningde, now serving as Zhou Han’s bistro and studio, on August 27 (COURTESY PHOTO)
She is one of more than 100 “new villagers” who have settled in Longtan since 2017, bringing new businesses, creative practices and ways of working into the village.
For original village residents, meanwhile, the changes have brought other rewards. Chen Guansuo, 73, rents out his old house for about 40,000 yuan ($5,600) a year.
More than 50 restaurants now operate in the village. Longtan has also established what is described as Fujian’s first entrepreneurship park combining digital nomadism with rural “one-person companies,” providing a base for young people who work remotely, run businesses and create while living in the countryside. Old houses that once seemed to have little value are helping sustain the village.
In 2023, Longtan’s cultural tourism poverty-reduction project was selected as a demonstration case by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In 2025, the village received more than 1.3 million tourist visits and generated 130 million yuan ($18 million) in tourism revenue.
Yet the most revealing measure of change may be harder to quantify. A village that once struggled to keep people from leaving is making room for people to come back and for others to arrive for the first time.
More than a weekend away
The changes taking place in these villages are part of a broader shift in how Fujian is developing tourism in its rural and mountainous areas.
The province is increasingly looking beyond conventional sightseeing and encouraging visitors to slow down and experience what it calls a “Fujian-style life”—one shaped by the province’s mountains, sea, food, culture and everyday rhythms.
“We want to create new spaces for people to experience a Fujian-style life,” said Zhang Yuansheng, Director of the Fujian Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism. “The idea is to let tourism slow down, to move from simply looking at scenery to actually enjoying life.”
Under the province’s Fujian-Style Life: Mountain and Sea Retreats initiative, local destinations are being developed not simply for short visits, but for longer stays. Among them are the 24°C Wellness Space in Zhouning, known for its cool summer climate, and villages around Mount Wuyi that offer rural accommodation and experiences. A village can be a weekend destination, but it can also be a place to spend a season, work remotely, raise children, explore a local culture or simply live at a different pace.
In the first half of this year, tourists spent more than 30 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) in Fujian’s rural areas. The number of educational trips undertaken by children with their guardians rose 39.1 percent year on year, according to the provincial tourism authorities.
In this sense, the appeal of rural Fujian lies in more than its mountains, sea or heritage. It lies in the possibility of making the countryside part of contemporary life, not as an escape from the modern world, but as another way of living in it.–The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
