On January 14th, it is learned from the agricultural and rural affairs department of Luoyang City that the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China recently publicized the list of candidate projects for the eighth batch of China’s Important Agricultural Cultural Heritages. The Luoyang Peony Culture System is successfully selected and received national recognition.
The excavation of China’s important agricultural cultural heritage aims to promote the protection and inheritance of outstanding Chinese farming culture, empower the comprehensive revitalization of rural areas, and continuously play a positive role in ensuring supply, protecting the ecology, inheriting culture, and increasing employment and income. The Luoyang Peony Cultural System, with its “coexistence of flowers, medicine and grains, and integration of city, mountain and countryside” complex planting system, stood out among a large number of application projects, highlighting the city’s continuous efforts in the protection and innovation of this agricultural civilization.
The relevant person in charge of the Agricultural and Rural Affairs Bureau of the Luoyang’s Laocheng District introduced that the core area of the Luoyang Peony Cultural System covers over 2,000 square kilometers, integrating peony cultivation, mountain conservation and cultural inheritance. Its uniqueness lies in the ecological cycle of “nourishing the land with flowers and working according to the festival”, as well as the peony cultivation techniques that have been passed down for over 1,300 years since the Tang Dynasty, forming the wisdom of “the whole plant utilization, with flowers charming the city, roots and leaves for medicine, and seeds for oil”.
This application was led by the government of Luoyang’s Laocheng District. Over the past two years, the district has systematically sorted out ecological experiences such as the rotation of peonies and wheat and millet, as well as water and soil conservation. It has also integrated cultural carriers such as flower fairs, poetry, and paintings since the Tang and Song dynasties, demonstrating the characteristics of agricultural heritage being “dynamically preserved and resonating across time”.
Today, Luoyang is leveraging this heritage to boost industrial development. Beyond traditional appreciation and medicinal uses, it has given rise to integrated business forms such as peony essential oil, cultural and creative experiences, and eco-tourism, benefiting hundreds of thousands of flower farmers and achieving a leap from “a single flower” to “an entire chain” in the industry.
In the future, Luoyang will promote the in-depth integration of heritage protection with modern agriculture, cultural tourism and health care by establishing protected areas and building a peony germplasm resource bank, allowing the thousand-year-old peony cultural heritage to blossom into a brilliant economic flower in the contemporary era. (Reporter Guo Xuefeng, Correspondent Shi Zhiwei)
