On 17 October in Chengdu, at the third Sanlian Humanistic City Season ceremony, the Xunpu zanhua headdress experience from Fengze District in Quanzhou, Fujian, was named one of ten Urban New Solutions for 2026. It was the only Fujian entry on the list. Zhuang Qun (庄群), a municipal-level inheritor of the Xunpu women’s custom, presented the case on stage to an audience of planners, architects and city officials.
Inside the Urban Award’s Shortlist
The award sits inside a larger ranking called Urban Vitality 100, which the Sanlian Humanistic City Season has compiled for three years, and the ten winners are picked from that longer list as demonstration cases. This year’s theme was creating the real, and entries were screened for four qualities: rooted in a place, perceptible, open to participation, and sustainable. Of those four, participation is the one Xunpu answers.
Most heritage sites answer the first two and stop. A visitor walks through, reads a label, photographs a display case and leaves. The Xunpu submission reversed that order: rather than build an exhibition hall, the district used the village’s own lanes and oyster-shell walls as the setting, and put working inheritors in front of visitors to teach the technique by hand. You leave with a headdress on your head, not a photograph of one.
Garland Prices and What They Buy
Walk into Xunpu and the flower shops start at the village entrance and continue lane by lane. A set that includes the headdress and a loan of traditional Xunpu dress costs between 40 and 70 yuan, and the women running the shops adjust the arrangement to your face as they work. Spanish jasmine, jasmine, rose and banana shrub are wired into strings, then coiled around a bun. Photographs taken against the oyster-shell walls and the shore rocks are the point of the purchase, and the phrase the shops have made famous is a promise of beauty in this life and the next.
What the price actually buys is labour and judgment, not flowers. The flowers are cheap and local; the arrangement is not. A good shop will raise or lower the coil depending on whether your face is round or long, and change the density so the garland sits on the head instead of sliding. Two women working from the same basket of blossoms will produce visibly different results, and that gap is the reason the trade survived the arrival of cheap imitations.
Oyster-Shell Walls Behind Every Photo
The village’s backdrops are structural, not decorative. Generations ago, households built walls from oyster shells that returning ocean-going ships had carried as ballast, setting them into local red brick and gravel. Shell grey-white alternates with brick red-brown across whole lanes, and no studio can reproduce the pattern because it was never designed; it accumulated.
That is why the experience is anchored in the village rather than in a photo studio on the edge of town. The route runs from a shop through lanes to the shore, and each stop supplies a different background: shell wall, stone doorway, fishing boat, rock. The added value of the visit comes from that sequence, and no single element in it can be moved without losing the effect.
Fishers Who Became Shop Owners
Xunpu’s shops grew out of the women who already lived there. Early shop owners were Xunpu natives who had made a living gathering seafood and digging oysters, with the headdress a household skill passed down without a price attached. When visitors started arriving, they opened shops and photography studios, and women who had worked at home or on the water learned styling, makeup and camera work, then drew a steady income from it.
Huang Liyong, one of the better-known operators in the village, has kept the traditional Xunpu dress in her package through the busiest seasons rather than switching to generic costumes. Fengze District says the next step is systematic protection and creative reuse of the Xunpu women’s custom and its related heritage, with more experience settings added. For readers who collect hair ornaments, the site’s Hanfu accessories section covers comparable regional styles.
