Reposted from: SMART Vacation Industry Platform
I first arrived in Taizhou when I was attracted by a sentence: "Don't let go of rice without freshness."
In Taizhou, if there is not enough fresh food on the dining table, people will not be able to eat. This obsession with "freshness" is not just a matter of taste buds, but also a metaphor of the urban spirit - pragmatic, honest, not extravagant, but profoundly focused.
This makes me curious: What will a city look like if it really pays attention to its core?
Traveling in Taizhou for three days, I walked into this "small city" scattered between mountains and seas.
Taizhou has no reputable cultural and tourism name, but it quietly treats cultural and tourism as an industry, culture as a root, and local food as a technology.
Its liveliness does not rely on traffic, but is based on deep trust in the rhythm of local life and folk wisdom.
Geographically, Taizhou is like a "split" city—the coast and hills intersect, inland and fishing ports coexist, and the mountains between each district and county are bounded by the boundaries, and there are obvious differences in diet, accent, and lifestyle.
Although Linhai Ancient City does not face the sea, it is Taizhou's thousand-year-old political and cultural center. Jiaojiang is the current administrative and industrial center, rising by port industry, with modern buildings, new cities in colleges and universities, and new towns in Binhai.
In 1994, the municipal government moved from Linhai to Jiaojiang. A transfer order is still the topic of conversation between the two people after dinner: Who can better represent "Taizhou"?
But the deeper differences are hidden in the language: the first kick is Wu's soft language, and the second kick hits the rhythm of Minnan dialect; Huangyan dialect, Wenling dialect, Yuhuan dialect, different pronunciations of ten miles and are not connected to each other.
But it is this "bulk" that makes Taizhou people particularly understand how to listen. It is precisely because of the diverse dialects that people are more accustomed to communicating in Mandarin, which also makes the city particularly friendly to outsiders.
In recent years, this "crack" has been quietly repairing. The development of cultural tourism is not to break the boundaries, but to make mountains and seas a landscape and turn scattered into characteristics.
Through all this, is an ancient and modern spiritual code: harmony.
Outside Guoqing Temple, the statues found in Hanshan are quietly facing each other, one holding a box and the other holding a lotus. They are the "two immortals in harmony" and are the cultural symbols given to China by Tiantai Mountain -Harmony but different, beauty and beauty are shared.
In this city of mountains and seas, "harmony" is not a slogan, but a survival wisdom: although counties compete, they can respect each other culturally and form a unique symbiotic pattern
In many cities, cultural tourism is a lively marketing; in Taizhou, it is a long-term systematic project.
For example, Tiantai Mountain is not only a natural scenic spot, but also a cultural highland.
As the birthplace of Buddhist Tiantai Sect and Taoist Southern Sect, it has important towns such as Guoqing Temple, Tongbai Palace, Huading, and Chicheng Mountain. Li Bai, Xu Xiake, Master Zhizhe, Master Zuicheng... all left spiritual coordinates here.
The source of the Tiantai Sect in Japan and the bridge for the spread of Buddhism in East Asia are actually pointing to this misty mountain.
Guoqing Temple is located in the mountains and is not open-minded. The thousand-year tradition of "equal emphasis on agriculture and Zen" has not changed to this day.
Rice fields and pine forests, morning bells and cattle herds, vegetarian rice and tea seeds to wash dishes... Everything makes people feel like they have entered a paradise. Looking at the plum blossoms in spring and the rice in autumn, the four seasons are different and the mood is different.
Tongbai Palace is a fairy-style and treacherous bone, hidden by the lake. It forms a landscape with Guoqing Temple of "dual cultivation of Buddhism and Taoism", injecting a heavy and lively cultural soul into the city.
The new round of cultural and tourism layout in Taizhou is based on these "deep roots" cultures, and is superimposed on the expression of "lightness":
The East China Sea Eternal Love Project introduces immersive performance reconstruction of the "Marine Silk Road"
City of Skyrim Creates a Cloud Summer Resort and a New Landmark for Youth Check-in in the Yangtze River Delta
The 'Marine Potala Palace' style stone house group in Wenling Shitang is becoming a new landmark for coastal cultural tourism.
Ziyang Street Light and Shadow Theater reconstructs traditional memory with poetry naked eyes 3D
Some scenic spots pilot AI guide systems to customize personalized routes for tourists
These all show that cultural tourism should not just be the "reteller" of history, but the "creator" of urban strategy.
For other cities, Taizhou provides a possibility - to make culture not just gilded, but to make travel not just take photos, but to redesign lifestyle.
The charm of this small town does not lie in the density of the internet celebrity check-in points, but in a rhythm of life that is gradually drifting away from the world: natural, warm, solid, with a little stubbornness.
The wheat grease here needs to be rubbed by hand, the fish noodles must be made fresh, and the wall skin on the old street is not painted, because mottled is the ring of history.
This "slowness" is not laziness, but a kind of retention - retaining a sense of time, and also retaining the thickness of the relationship between people and things.
But you have to know that this kind of slack is not lazy, butStilliness after experiencing storms.
Taizhou is one of the most active regions in China's private economy, with Geely Automobile, Supor, and Yuan Pipeline. The boss here may be the son of a fisherman who selected razor clams at the wharf at three in the morning, or the Huangyan craftsman who drove the mold factory to Germany.
They believe in the "four thousand spirits" of "traveling thousands of mountains and rivers, speaking thousands of words, trying all kinds of ways, and ending thousands of hardships"—The appearance is warm, but the inside is tough.
In the intangible cultural heritage museum on Ziyang Street, Linhai, the child outlined the corners of the embroidery with his tender fingertips. The young mother beside him whispered to the way her grandmother did embroidery when she was a child;
In the pottery workshop in Huangyan suburbs, college students are trying to replicate the official kiln cups of the Southern Song Dynasty with porcelain mud, explaining that the teacher is the fifth generation descendant of the local craft family;
In the old village of Xianju, by the bonfire in the evening, residents of different eras sat together and listened to the elderly in the village singing folk songs. When the tea was cold, some people went to refill the water silently.
Young people are also redefining the word "Taizhou" in their own way.
A local team used short videos to record the closing ceremony of the century-old pastry shop, and niche magazines extract dialect clips from the boatman's voice to make sound devices.
Some people set up open poetry booths on the former site of the city wall, and some people launched "Rural Sutra Recitation Conferences" on the streets, using Songyun music and ancient chanting to bring people closer to the land.
They did not shout any slogans, but just aimed the lens, brush, and microphone at daily life, trying to keep the "truth" in Taizhou in the midst of the chaos.
The teachers and students of colleges and universities are not passive participants, but builders in action.
For example, the design professional team of Taizhou College moved the classroom into the old city and designed a smart guide system, Vlog route and parent-child treasure hunting game for the historical district; for example, volunteer organizations joined forces with night market stall owners to launch a "night tour theater" to allow immersive plots to shuttle through the market.
Even dry lard rice is turned into a picture and text book under their writing, a "city taste archive" belonging to Taizhou.
In many cities, culture is a slogan; in Taizhou, culture is lunch, dialogue, and tofu soup that takes half an hour to get the pot.
You can even say that it is a kind of "persistence" that is quiet: not rush, not acting, not pleasing traffic, but everything has its origin, taste, and response.
In this era of faster and lighter speed, Taizhou seems to be moving the opposite way, using slow, practical and human body temperature to establish a relaxed order belonging to a small city. In this order, people can know people, their hands can make things, the streets and alleys have echoes, and life is proportionate.
A city like this may not be the ideal "target place", but it must be the sentence in the minds of countless wanderers: "It would be great if I could slow down here."
After all, Taizhou's persistence in "fresh" is the simplest pursuit of life.
At the Taizhou dinner table, there is no "return". Choose clams at 3 a.m., boiled seafood without adding sauce, and the ingredients must be killed when you see water.
You must chew carefully to understand how this city kneads taste, homesickness and time in a mouthful of food.
From the Michelin star in "Xinrong Ji" to the small restaurant where only five side dishes are sold at the entrance of the alley, Taizhou cuisine is a "special technology".
Jiaojiang's "Renyi Hotel", Linhai's "Pengji", Luqiao's "Fresh Tada"... Each of them has its own "seaside philosophy".
Here, "fresh" is not only a taste experience, but also an adjective of a state of life. Some people are full of energy, and Taizhou people will say, "This person is so fresh today!" That lively, aura and vigorous state is exactly the impression this city leaves on travelers.
The day before I left, I passed by Ziyang Street in the sea again. In front of a canteen, an aunt smiled at me: "Did you come the day before yesterday?" This feeling of "recognizing you" has long been scarce in big cities.
Taizhou is not a "new front line" and does not seek to "scort the ranking". But it uses its own rhythm to build a city confidence that does not have to make noise.
When the first ray of sunlight passes through the windmill array on the top of Kuocang Mountain. Shide from Hanshan smiled at each other outside Guoqing Temple, one holding a box and the other holding a lotus - the word "harmony" is the code that this mountain city will never be separated for thousands of years.
It looks like a soup that has been stewed for a long time. It seems inconspicuous, but it is actually warm and full. You have to stay here for a few days, eat a few bowls of soup, blow the sea breeze, and listen to the morning bell to understand-
Taizhou has more than just scenery, it is a long-lasting narrative about the city, the future, and the human touch:
Where you live your life into a craft, live your life into harmony, and leave the future to time.
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