An Analysis of Anhui Five-Animal Exercises’ Regional Tourism Development from the Angle of Intangible Cultural Heritage Activation and its Promoting Effect

HRMARS - As a national intangible cultural heritage (ICH), Anhui Five-Animal Exercises is a bionic health-preserving exercise created by Hua Tuo, a renowned physician of the Eastern Han Dynasty in China. It is itself an organic integration of regional culture, traditional Chinese medicine wisdom, and traditional sports, thus possessing profound cultural connotations and high tourism development value. However, the academic community has not yet conducted sufficient and rigorous theoretical discussions on how ICH revitalization can promote regional tourism development. Therefore, this paper takes the Five-Animal Exercises in Bozhou City, Anhui Province as an example to systematically and hierarchically examine how to transform ICH revitalization into tourism development outcomes. More importantly, this paper breaks through the traditional framework of merely descriptive discussions on ICH-based tourism and proposes a logical and theoretically valuable analytical mechanism, clarifying how ICH activation facilitates tourism and development effects. This not only provides a new perspective on the role of intangible cultural heritage in tourism development but also offers practical insights for other countries or regions seeking to combine cultural heritage protection with regional economic growth through tourism.