On June 13-14, 2026, the Fujian provincial main venue of the national Cultural and Natural Heritage Day took over the Wudianshi traditional block in Jinjiang, Quanzhou. The two-day program pulled together intangible heritage from across the province under the banner “Intangible Heritage, Making Life Better,” and turned the centuries-old Minnan streetscape into a stage for traditional performance, craft, and community exchange.
Wudianshi — literally “Five Shops Market” — is one of Quanzhou’s best-preserved Minnan architectural districts, with red-brick houses, swallow-tail roof ridges, and a network of cobbled lanes that originally supported five family-run shops in the Tang dynasty. The choice of venue, on the southern edge of Quanzhou’s historic city, ties the program to ongoing World Heritage work in the old city.
Opening Performances: Palm Puppet, Nanyin, Martial Arts
The opening afternoon opened with the palm-puppet showcase “Palm Puppet Highlights,” a curated set of scenes from Quanzhou’s palm-puppet tradition, which is on the national intangible heritage list. This was followed by a martial arts performance, “Shaolin’s Mighty Wind,” performed by a local Nan Shaolin school. Minnan crowd favorites followed: the Paixiong Dance (chest-slapping dance, a slap-dance that mimics rowing movements), the Fire-Pot Elders (Huo Ding Gong Po, a comedic folk pair), and Liyuan opera excerpts.
On the evening of June 13, the Quanzhou Nanyin Art Research Institute hosted a separate Nanyin concert at the heritage venue under the theme “Continuing the Tradition, Promoting Chinese Culture.” Nanyin, the ancient southern Fujian musical form inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, served as the festival’s quiet counterpoint to the louder daytime street performances.
Announcements and New Initiatives
Two major initiatives were unveiled during the event. First, the 2026 Cross-Strait (Quanzhou) Street Dance Competition will run in July and August, an expansion of an annual event that previously focused on Fujian-Taiwan cultural exchange. Second, the Quanzhou Intangible Heritage Travel Guide went online, a curated, map-based guide to over 60 heritage venues and craft workshops in and around the city.
A formal agreement was also signed between Quanzhou Normal University and local authorities to jointly establish a research institute dedicated to the Minnan Cultural Ecology Protection Zone — a UNESCO designation covering the cultural-spatial fabric of southern Fujian. The institute will focus on documentation, training, and heritage education.
Why Quanzhou
Quanzhou is the only UNESCO World Heritage city in Fujian, inscribed in 2021 as “Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China.” It is also the historic starting point of the Maritime Silk Road. The city’s continued hosting of heritage events reflects a deliberate strategy of using intangible heritage as a vehicle for both cultural preservation and tourism — a balance that has made Wudianshi and the old city a model for heritage-led urban renewal across the province.