Tourism Development Of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Since the21th century, protecting the diversity of worlds’culture and the nations’intangible cultural heritage has drawn much attention. More and more intangible heritages have entered World Cultural Heritage List of masterpiece, which attaches importance to the protection and continuity of non-material cultural heritage. Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage issues the principles of methods in protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage: the purpose of the protection is to ensure the vitality of the intangible cultural heritage, including confirming, archiving, protecting, researching, publicizing, inheritance (mainly through formal and informal patterns) and promoting in all aspects. Though it belongs to a different historical place and time, we should not just place it in a museum or an antique market, it’s a part of our lifestyle. Only being a part of modern culture by formal and functional transformation can the intangible cultural heritage be protected and inherited. Tourist development as the result of the combining of intangible cultural heritage and market, is an effective way to realize the inheritance and improving economic development by cultural productization. Making clear the relationship of protection and development, finding out whether intangible cultural heritage could be a tourist resource, and how to enforce the productization are essential for realizing tourist development and heritage conservation’s mutual benefit win-win. For that goal, the main contributions of this study are as follows:First, with the conceptual clarity, the paper makes a study on intangible cultural heritage. We concerned on intangible cultural asset in international files, folk creation and evolution from spoken language to intangible heritage then to intangible cultural conception, which started with the origin and the trait of intangible cultural heritage. Intangible cultural heritage not only has immanent cultural value, artistic value, scientific value, but also external use value and economic value. As the times is advancing, the cultural environment is changing, intangible cultural heritage as one of living cultures can maintain exuberant vitality only though fitting the development ability of the society ceaselessly in both form and content based on the original spiritual content. Tourist development combining of intangible cultural heritage and the market is an effective method to spur industrialization in the culture, serve at social economy, promote local cultural economy and its own inheritance.Second, classification and investigation of travel resource are the foundation for travel resource assessment, plan and development, but there is still a gap in classification of intangible cultural heritage resources in Chinese standard classification, investigation and assessment of tourism resources. All intangible cultural resources should be classified according to their existence patterns in this paper. We proposed three main types:physical entity, activity art, knowledge practice, cultural space, and take world-class intangible cultural heritage-Lianhuashan "huaer" as a case studies to make theoretical and practical analysis on types, distribution patterns, resources characters, etc. paving the way for development and productization of intangible cultural heritage.Third, building up a tourist development value appraisal system of intangible cultural resource was the key task in our research work. We should consider a great many aspects about intangible heritage under the premise of protection, such as the cultural connotation, existence pattern, composition and structure of material and non-material resources, geographical location and regional advantages, accessibility, market appeal and heritage-resource-product transformation, etc. A large number of works were undertaken in this research to build up the system mentioned above:analyzing tourist resource evaluation theory at home and abroad, paying attention to some practical problems in current tourist development of intangible cultural heritage, combining cultural heritage and tourist management, setting three evaluated levels as attractiveness, vitality, environmental capacity, employing step analysis and Delphi method, selecting9evaluative features (resource quality, regional particularity, environmental quality, application value of heritage, tourism administrative departments’management of heritage, tourist condition of exploration, stakeholders’comprehension and protective consciousness of heritage, current inherited situation, possibility of the negative impact of productization playing on the heritage),26evaluative factors, estimating tourist development value of Lianshuashan "huaer".Fourth, we conduct a survey on Lianhuashan "huaer"in peak season, using the questionnaire method, Likert Scale Method, considering objective weighting factors and inferred weighting factors to analyze category character and behavior level of the visitors.The visitors’categories were defined as five types according to the importance why visitors choose the intangible cultural heritage and the experience degree visitors get form intangible cultural heritage:purposive visitor, sightseeing visitor, serendipitous visitor, random visitor and accidental visitor. The conclusions indicate that the visitors visiting intangible cultural heritage receive higher education, have a steady income and most of them are females and the main reasons limiting the marketing development of intangible heritage are structural constraints and personal constraints. From this, market sale means of intangible cultural heritage development was proposed, then taking Lianhuashan "huaer" as an example, structure and form of intangible cultural heritage productization were specifically conceived in this paper.In conclusion, when it comes to Intangible Cultural Heritage tourism, tourist development is an essential way to boost the cultural connotation and experience level of tourist product, but we also need to do tourist developing for the intrinsic value protection purpose. For this purpose, only after seriously examining tourist and cultural factors, we could determine the development and management strategy.