Tangzha Ancient Town is one of the birthplaces of China's modern national industry. In the late Qing Dynasty, Zhang Jian, a famous patriotic industrialist and educator who was also the top scorer in the imperial examination, founded the Dasheng Spinning Mill here, and subsequently established a series of subsidiary industries such as flour mills, oil mills, soap factories, iron smelters, and silk weaving based on this foundation. This formed a huge enterprise system centered around the Dasheng Spinning Mill, which transformed Tangzha from an ordinary countryside into a nationally renowned industrial town, earning it the nickname "Little Shanghai."
Tangzha Ancient Town utilizes the characteristic aggregation of intangible cultural heritage to launch a variety of intangible cultural heritage experience tours. The first Nantong Intangible Cultural Heritage Market, themed "experiencing people, things, and life", invites well-known intangible cultural heritages from inside and outside the city, attracting hundreds of thousands of citizens and tourists to "encounter" traditional culture and feel the charm of intangible cultural heritage. It has become a beneficial attempt to explore the topic of "intangible cultural heritage + tourism" and a successful example of "unlimited space for the introduction of intangible cultural heritage into Tangzha Ancient Town".
At the "Intangible Cultural Heritage Market", nearly 80 types of intangible cultural heritage with distinctive regional characteristics, profound cultural history, and down-to-earth characteristics, including traditional craftsmanship, fine arts, and food from Nantong city are showcased. People can experience the charm of intangible cultural heritage products up close and feel the artistic enjoyment that intangible cultural heritage products bring to modern life.
The fluttering Banyao kites, Nanjing porcelain painting combining painting and ceramic art perfectly, exquisite and diverse-shaped sachets, vivid and lifelike dough figurines, delicate redwood carvings, lifelike paper-cut, and intricate woodcut New Year pictures are all irresistible. There are also various traditional foods such as oil buns, walnut-filled sesame cakes, and jujubes from Beijing to enrich the market experience.
