Three kilometers southeast of Quanzhou's old city, in a fishing village called Xunpu, an unbroken tradition that began on the wharves of the medieval maritime Silk Road has, almost by accident, become one of the most-photographed intangible heritage practices in China. The tradition is the Xunpu women's hair garland — a circular wreath of seasonal fresh flowers pinned to the hair with a bone hairpin — and the village's statistics now read like a regional tourism board's dream: more than 9.3 million visitors in 2025, peak daily counts above 100,000, and a village collective economy that has crossed the 100-million-yuan line for the first time.
Quanzhou was, in the Song and Yuan dynasties, the largest port in the world, and Xunpu sat on the seawall that protected the approach to it. The women of the village — the "Xunpu Girl" — worked the oyster-shell reef fisheries, and the garland they wore was a working uniform. The bone hairpin, made from fish bone, held the hair up off the neck so it would not catch in the fishing ropes. The flower ring — a tight circle of magnolia, camellia, chrysanthemum, jasmine, or seasonal wildflower — was both decoration and, in the days before refrigeration, a marker of the woman's household economy: a fuller ring meant more time in the garden, a thinner ring a busier week on the boats.
In 2008, the Xunpu women's customs — including the hair-garland practice, the oyster-shell house construction, and the "Thorny Uncle" folk religion — were added to the second batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list. The recognition ran for more than a decade without visibly changing the village's economy. The pivot came in early 2025, when the village committee reorganized its tourism offer around eight structured experiences: zanhua (hair-garland dressing), lushai (studio portraiture), wenhai (sea exploration), xiangyu (alley walks), tingyin (live folk music), kanxi (opera), pinxian (local seafood), and legou (village market). The program was rolled out in time for the 2025 Duanwu Festival, and the numbers followed within months.
According to a March 2026 feature on the village carried by Tencent News under the State Council Information Office's "Perceiving Happy China" program, Xunpu received more than 9.3 million visitors in 2025, with peak daily counts above 100,000. The hair-garland service — the centerpiece of the visitor experience — is delivered by more than 200 village women who have been trained as professional zanhua stylists, with a standard floral wreath priced at 68 yuan per head. Photography studios now line the lanes around the village's 16th-century oyster-shell houses; cultural-creative merchandise sales in the village grew roughly 800 percent year-on-year through the first half of 2025, according to Quanzhou's municipal culture and tourism bureau.
For the broader new Chinese style market, Xunpu is significant because it shows how a single, small, place-bound accessory — the kind of object that would, in the older heritage conversation, be locked in a museum — can become the basis of a working-class tourism economy. The garland is not, strictly speaking, hanfu. It is a regional folk accessory from a southern fishing community, and it does not appear in the Confucian ritual codes that hanfu scholars use as a reference. But the act of putting one on has become, for millions of young Chinese women, the most accessible and most-shareable entry point into the broader heritage-fashion conversation. From there, the path runs through the qipao, the mamianqun, the Song dynasty beizi, and the slow rebuilding of a full heritage wardrobe — which is, in the end, what the village's old women were wearing all along.
