Qingdao’s urban residents experience “Living Life Slowly” at Happy Green Land in Qujialu Village, Yanghe Town. [Photo by Xing Zhifeng/Qingdao Today]?

A number of villages in Qingdao became hot tourist attractions this year during the National Day and Mid-Autumn Day holiday. 3D painting, red lanterns, folk fairs and performances of local operas were among the elements that attracted urban residents to experience a slow-paced life in these villages.

In Qu Jialu Village, Yanghe Town, Jiaozhou City, an annual “Living Life Slowly” festival attracted over 80,000 visitors from September 28 to October 8, generating a total income of eight million yuan for local villagers. Both the number of tourists and the income from the festival increased by roughly 10 percent.

In recent years, Yanghe Town, which positions itself as an eco-tour destination, has explored its advantages in ecological resources such as mountain, water, wood and park to develop a variety of tourism projects so that the villages it administers have distinct tourism features.

Now many villages in the town have marked out routes that are as long as dozens of kilometers each for slowly experiencing local ecology. With this, Yanghe’s rural tourism has already formed a landscape where the whole town is a park and each village is a scenic spot in the park.