To protect ICH, the first step is to “rescue” endangered items. Over the past decade, Shandong has completed documentation work for 78 national-level inheritors, collecting 1,430.9 hours of video and 3.932 million words of oral history manuscripts, preserving as complete “genes” as possible for subsequent activated use. In August this year, the shell carving ICH public welfare initiative, together with the Tencent ima knowledge base team, built an online AI knowledge base for shellfish popular science based on 3,500 shell specimens from the Qingdao Shell Museum, providing digital specimen resources and creative reference materials for shell carving inheritors.

　　After being “rescued”, the more critical task is to let ICH “live on”. In Qingdao, the China Time-honored Brand “Xinfusheng” has opened an official online flagship store and invited ICH inheritors and food bloggers to participate in livestreams, showing audiences the pig's trotter making process and traditional techniques; the highest single livestream viewership exceeded 1 million. In Weifang, more than 6,000 copyright registrations have been completed for kites, and the annual output value of the entire industrial chain has reached 10 billion yuan. In Weihai, Wendeng District has 33 flower bun (huabobo) production enterprises and 128 small workshops, with an annual output value exceeding 500 million yuan and product export value exceeding 3 million yuan... In Shandong, ICH has become an ongoing vehicle for employment and a source of income.

Image source: Xinfusheng