Shandong"s ICH Refuses to “Lie Flat”

As a birthplace of Qi-Lu culture, Shandong has a profound historical heritage, and its stock of folk intangible cultural heritage (ICH) resources ranks among the highest in China. How to protect, inherit, and make good use of ICH is an important issue.

Recently, Qingdao, Shandong, opened the “Craftsmanship Sustains Cultural Roots, ICH Radiates New Splendor” Exhibition of Qingdao's ICH Protection and Development Achievements. From shell carving and mother-of-pearl inlay to Lu embroidery and paper-cutting, 43 Qingdao-distinctive ICH skills and nearly 400 works unfold through an interweaving of physical objects, texts and images, and video.

Image source: Qingdao Cultural Center

As of March this year, Qingdao has built 92 municipal-level ICH workshops; 57 enterprises and their products have been included in the “Shandong Handmade · Top 100” list; more than 130 enterprises have annual sales exceeding 1 million yuan; and the output value of key handmade industries such as embroidery, straw weaving, tea processing, cosmetics, mother-of-pearl inlay, and shell carving has reached 50 billion yuan.

From exhibitions to sales, this precisely reflects Shandong's current approach to ICH protection.

To protect ICH, the first step is to “rescue” endangered items. Over the past decade, Shandong has completed documentation work for 78 national-level inheritors, collecting 1,430.9 hours of video and 3.932 million words of oral history manuscripts, preserving as complete “genes” as possible for subsequent activated use. In August this year, the shell carving ICH public welfare initiative, together with the Tencent ima knowledge base team, built an online AI knowledge base for shellfish popular science based on 3,500 shell specimens from the Qingdao Shell Museum, providing digital specimen resources and creative reference materials for shell carving inheritors.

After being “rescued”, the more critical task is to let ICH “live on”. In Qingdao, the China Time-honored Brand “Xinfusheng” has opened an official online flagship store and invited ICH inheritors and food bloggers to participate in livestreams, showing audiences the pig's trotter making process and traditional techniques; the highest single livestream viewership exceeded 1 million. In Weifang, more than 6,000 copyright registrations have been completed for kites, and the annual output value of the entire industrial chain has reached 10 billion yuan. In Weihai, Wendeng District has 33 flower bun (huabobo) production enterprises and 128 small workshops, with an annual output value exceeding 500 million yuan and product export value exceeding 3 million yuan... In Shandong, ICH has become an ongoing vehicle for employment and a source of income.

Image source: Xinfusheng

In addition, Shandong is promoting the embedding of ICH into daily life to unleash its deeper vitality. The provincial ICH protection work conference held in March this year explicitly proposed “implementing the integrated development action to further promote the integration of ICH into modern life.” Laoshan District in Qingdao adapted the Sunjia Xiazhuang dragon dance, Wulong Village dragon dance, and Laoshan Yangge into forms such as “two-person dragon dance” and “square dance” under the “two creative” cultural initiative, turning these century-old folk customs into fitness activities that residents can dance to at any time on summer-night squares. Weifang transformed the former British American Tobacco Company's industrial building complex into an ICH-themed block, gathering projects such as kites and woodblock New Year pictures, and innovating consumption scenarios such as “ICH + weddings” “ICH + performances” and “ICH + public reading”. The annual revenue of ICH-related businesses reached 20 million yuan, accounting for 70.2% of total revenue.

Digitalization is also opening new dimensions for this living path. Laiwu in Jinan has innovated a “ICH + cultural tourism + digital” model, launching digital products such as the documentary *Passing the Flame* and ICH shadow puppetry animations. Yantai uses 3D scanning and intelligent modeling to capture, at millimeter level, the openwork textures of Yantai paper-cutting and the handmade indentations of Penglai dough figurines. Visitors can scan a QR code to rotate and zoom in on the works on screen and see every handmade trace clearly...

The value of tradition ultimately depends on the people who live within it. Shandong's ICH protection has passed the stage of “recording things down” and is accelerating along the road of “putting things to use.”

The key next step is whether more young people can feel that this craft is worth for them. The shells of shell carving, the silk threads of Lu embroidery, and the dough of flower buns—what they await is never a display case, but a pair of hands willing to take them over. At present, Shandong has built a trinity integrated framework of “national curricula + local curricula + school-based curricula”， ensuring that ICH education has allocated class hours, content, and a systematic structure.