Qinglong Pear Blossom Festival Kicks Off, Boosted by Digital Empowerment for Rural Revitalization

The grand opening of the Pear Blossom Festival in Guanchang Township, Qinglong Manchu Autonomous County, Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, took place on April 11th. The boundless white pear blossom sea, set against the winding Great Wall, has attracted a steady stream of tourists from Beijing, Tianjin and surrounding areas, who gathered to embrace the spring feast. This year’s festival has innovatively joined hands with Alibaba Public Welfare and Amap, leveraging the power of large digital traffic platforms to bring immense popularity to this traditional agri-cultural-tourism event and inject strong digital momentum into rural revitalization.

Guanchang Township boasts a long history of pear tree planting, with 16,000 mu of fruiting pear trees, including 5,000 ancient ones over 100 years old. Every April, the blooming pear blossoms turn the area into a popular spring scenic spot in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. However, restricted by limited promotion channels and information reach in the past, the local high-quality agri-cultural-tourism resources remained unknown to the public. Inconvenient travel planning for tourists and scattered consumption scenarios had hindered the improvement of the industry’s benefits.

To address this challenge, Qinglong has actively embraced the digital economy and seized the tourism development opportunity of “So Close, So Beautiful, Weekend in Hebei”. It has jointly launched the “One-Click Smart Tour Qinglong” digital service with Alibaba Public Welfare and Amap, which officially went online on April 10th. This service is not only a core highlight of this year’s Pear Blossom Festival, but also sets a benchmark for county-level smart tourism.

According to China Economic Net, Amap APP has over 1 billion global users and 360 million daily active users, boasting strong traffic and reach advantages. To help the Pear Blossom Festival gain wider popularity, Amap launched targeted pop-up ads reaching 500,000 people in key surrounding cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and Tangshan, accurately covering potential tourists. When tourists open Amap, they can receive promotion information about the festival and obtain one-stop services including scenic spots, hotels, food and local specialties through a special page.

“I only heard about the Qinglong Pear Blossom Festival before, but now I can see the promotion as soon as I open Amap. It not only provides detailed flower-viewing routes, but also recommends local food and specialties—it’s so convenient!” exclaimed Li Xin, a self-driving tourist from Tianjin. From customized aerial street view for “cloud flower viewing” and 24-hour AI cultural tourism assistant, to precise flower-viewing route planning, clear marking of best photo spots, and real-time query of traffic and parking information, the digital service enables tourists to “travel freely with one click without a guide”.

Meanwhile, Amap’s operation team provided online operation training for local catering, homestay and specialty merchants in advance, helping them connect the closed loop of online drainage and offline consumption, and truly convert “traffic” into “sales volume”. As a part of Alibaba’s “Internet + Rural Revitalization” practice, this cooperation also echoes the company’s commitment to supporting rural development through technology and platforms.

“Taking flowers as a medium and digitalization as a driving force, the successful holding of this Pear Blossom Festival is a vivid practice of Qinglong’s exploration of integrated ‘platform + agri-cultural-tourism’ development,” said a relevant person in charge of Qinglong. He added that the county will take this cooperation as an opportunity to further deepen strategic cooperation with large traffic platforms such as Amap, focus on annual characteristic events including the Guanchang Pear Blossom Festival, Dasendian Flower Viewing Festival and Chinese Chestnut Festival, and continuously improve the digital agri-cultural-tourism service system to brighten the regional brand of “Pictorial Qinglong, Satisfactory Journey”.

From ecological beauty to industrial prosperity, and from traditional festivals to digital empowerment, Qinglong is now taking a new path of rural revitalization featuring beautiful ecology, booming industries and wealthy people, allowing the poetic landscapes deep in the Yanshan Mountains to shine more brightly in the digital age.