Xiao County, Anhui Province is midway through a 21-day food-and-culture event that illustrates how regional culinary identity can anchor a destination tourism strategy. The 2026 Fuyang Cultural Festival, which runs through August 4, centers on the county's centuries-old mutton-eating tradition — most notably a mutton soup inscribed on Anhui's provincial intangible cultural heritage (ICH) list — while layering in performances, handicraft markets, and multi-site programming across several districts.
The Culinary Core
The festival's food programming anchors itself to Xiao County's white goat industry, which generates an annual output value of 2.4 billion yuan and ranks the county among Anhui's top ten animal husbandry regions. Food streets surrounding the Xiao County Sports Center Square serve a full spectrum of local mutton preparations, with the acclaimed mutton soup drawing the heaviest foot traffic. The Xiao County Summer Mutton Banquet, recognized under the provincial ICH designation, forms the centerpiece of the culinary offer — a packaging approach that ties the dining experience directly to cultural authenticity rather than novelty alone.
For operators tracking food tourism and regional cuisine trends, the Xiao County model is a useful case study: a commodity-scale livestock industry (white goat farming) is being positioned as a cultural asset, with the festival functioning as both a marketing event and an economic multiplier for local restaurants, food vendors, and artisan producers.
Beyond the Plate
Parallel programming runs across multiple venues — Shengquan Ancient Town, Dingli Town, Huangcangyu Scenic Area, and Dai Lake Park — distributing visitor traffic across the county rather than concentrating it at a single site. Traditional handicrafts including paper-flipping flowers, embroidery, and paper art have drawn sustained engagement alongside the food programming, demonstrating that culinary festivals with strong cultural scaffolding tend to extend average visitor dwell time.
The opening ceremony incorporated drum music, street dance, folk dance, and scenario role-play centered on Liu Yu, a fifth-century emperor from the Southern Dynasties period with documented ties to the region's mutton soup tradition. That historical narrative thread — connecting a dish to a specific figure across fifteen centuries — reflects the kind of origin storytelling that hospitality and destination dining operators increasingly deploy to differentiate local food experiences from generic festival fare.
The broader festival format — ICH exhibitions, sports carnivals, local produce sales, and culinary experiences packaged as a single ticketed destination event — mirrors strategies used by regional food festivals globally to convert agricultural identity into tourism revenue. As Food & Beverage Magazine has tracked, food-led tourism events that integrate provenance storytelling with direct-to-consumer sales consistently outperform those built on entertainment alone. Xiao County's Fuyang Cultural Festival runs through August 4.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
