The definition of cultural tourism is a journey aiming to know, feel and experience specific cultural content. When used in a general sense, it refers to admiring the traditional culture in a different country or place, tracing the foot steps of a famous figure in culture and participating local cultural events. Cultural experience is already a fashion among tourists.

    The reason why cultural tourism exists is the difference between regions. It’s an interaction between cultures and it’s result is cultural integration. It’s national, artistic, mysterious, diverse and interactive. The process of cultural tourism is tourists experiencing the cultural content of tourism resource, which is also a main function of cultural tourism. It gives people an extraordinary cultural experience which embodies aesthetic emotion inspiration, education inspiration and religion emotion expression with tourism sites as carriers.

    When used in a general sense, cultural tourism refers to admiring the traditional culture in a different country or place, tracing the foot steps of a famous figure in culture or participating local cultural events. Seeking cultural experience is a new fashion in the contemporary tourism. Cultural tourism is a special comprehensive industry with high-level connection, wide relating areas, strong influence and strong leading effect, so it’s the most active emerging industry in economic and social development in a new century. Cultural tourism includes all kinds of content, like historical site, architecture, art of nationality and region. It covers a large area, almost all relating industries.

    Cultural tourism is a popular word emerged only a few years ago. It’s origin connects closely to travelers’ changing need. So, the most-widely-recognized definition is “tourism events with cultural resource as the main content, including historical site, architecture, nationality art, folk custom, religion and so on.” There’s also an other idea that cultural tourism is a kind of specific tour, an integration of politics, economy, education, science and technology.

    So, cultural tourism refers to all tourism events enabling tourists to experience traveling and cultural content with sight-seeing and entertainment created by practitioners.

    Cultural tourism and tourism culture are two related but different concepts. Cultural tourism is a changing concept and a kind of tourism, with organic connection with tourism in terms of content. Meanwhile, tourism culture is a cultural concept, a classification of culture. It’s counterparts include architecture culture, ecological culture and art culture, so it’s a type of culture. On one hand, cultural development enriches the content of tourism culture and promotes tourism culture. On the other hand, the development of tourism culture offers rich tourism content for cultural tourism. In terms of denotation, cultural tourism is a part of research for tourism culture and tourism culture has far more richer content than cultural tourism.

    Cultural tourism is not a kind of product and is very different from tourism culture. The key to cultural tourism is culture while tourism is just a form. The “culture” in cultural tourism represents the nature of the effect and the destination of tourism.

    The adjustment of Chinese industrial structure is also a process when tourism receives developing opportunities. Tourism planning experts said. “tourism is a labour-intensive industry and a leading third industry. It has long industrial chain, large influencing area and strong leading effect, all of which are good for Hubei province to develop tourism with it’s abundant labour resource and the tendency of national industrial structural adjustment.”

    Since China’s entry to the WTO, it’s domestic tourism and relating industries have been connecting with the international society. All of those conditions bring new opportunities for Henan to speed up it’s development at a large scale. The domestic secondary market is easy to be shared with neighbouring markets, like other places in the same province, Shaanxi, Hunan and Jiangxi. The tourism competition between different places is more and more intense, dividing the original tourism market. As a result, tourists have more choices of tourism products, requiring goods to have richer content, more attraction and higher standards.