The question facing Wangping was not only how to make old villages look better. It was how to make them earn again.
For decades, the town in Beijing's western Mentougou District lived off coal. By the 1990s, some villages had more than 100 small coal pits. Wangping's main mine shut in 2016, and in 2020 Mentougou ended a mining history that had lasted for nearly a millennium.
What remained was a difficult balance sheet: idle courtyards, scattered village assets, aging residents, young workers who had left, and natural and cultural resources that were attractive but hard to turn into steady income.
Wangping's answer has been to pool village resources, set up a local operating company and recruit what it calls "village CEOs" -- market-oriented operators expected to turn old houses, historic paths, farm products and local crafts into businesses.
The experiment reflects a broader question in China's rural revitalization drive, which is, after infrastructure is improved and old villages are renovated, can rural areas build business models strong enough to keep people, capital and services flowing?
Lyu Zhifu, 39, is one of Wangping's answers to that question.
A ceramics artist and university teacher, Lyu first came to Wangping for its stones, not its tourism potential. Along the Yongding River, he found rocks rich in iron and bearing geological traces hundreds of millions of years old. After repeated experiments, he used the material to fire a small red-clay stove inspired by a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem.
The stones kept bringing him back. He took students to the villages to collect materials and develop graduation projects along the river. In 2025, he became the cultural-tourism operator for Jiuyuan, an area covering four villages and about six square kilometers.
At the time, the business case was far from obvious. Roads were unfinished, old houses sat idle and a spring that local officials hoped to turn into a tourist attraction was obscured by a tangle of irrigation pipes. Lyu said he brought more than 200 groups of potential partners to see the area, only to hear the same question: "What exactly was there to sell?"
His answer was not coal, not farmland and not scenery alone, but a slower form of village life packaged through tea shops, craft workshops, old courtyards, study tours and weekend stays.
That required more than renovation. It required changing the way village resources were organized.
Wangping has 16 villages with uneven conditions. Some have the former residence of renowned Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) playwright Ma Zhiyuan and sections of the Jingxi Ancient Road. Others are mainly residential areas with little room for tourism development.
If each village worked alone, local officials said, those with stronger cultural and scenic resources would move faster, while others would struggle to find a path. Since late 2022, Wangping has explored a regional model and set up a company to bundle village assets and operate them as a whole.
"Government guidance, regional coordination, company operations and professional teams all have to connect," said Song Aimin, Wangping's town Party chief. "Only then can the benefits feed back into the villages."
The model gives operators space to act, but not a guaranteed cushion. Lyu and another operator, Zhang Shuang, are signed on as operating partners of the company, without guaranteed fiscal backing. That exposes them to the market and to the question early visitors asked Lyu: can the project recover its costs?
Lyu said the absence of a safety net has also made the work more entrepreneurial. "Without the mindset of being guaranteed a fallback, we can move more freely and get things done without constantly looking over our shoulders," he said.
The more difficult part was turning villagers from bystanders into participants.
To uncover the old spring, Lyu and local officials had to remove villagers' irrigation pipes one by one. Each pipe brought complaints. When villagers crowded around the spring to sell farm products, blocking the view, Lyu proposed unified stalls. No one agreed, so he settled the matter by drawing lots.
"They can scold," he recalled thinking as he pulled out the pipes. "I'll keep pulling. When the water is clear, they'll stop."
The episode showed that Wangping's economic experiment depended not only on attracting tourists, but on creating a local value chain in which villagers could see their own gains.
Lyu brought in friends with live-streaming experience to train residents. When large volumes of local pears were hard to sell last year, he connected the village with e-commerce channels and helped draw visitors during the National Day holiday, resulting in the pears being sold out.
One villager, He Shuxia, who once struggled to use a smartphone, later sold camping packages on Douyin, China's version of TikTok. She said one session brought in as much as 3,000 yuan (approximately 439 U.S. dollars).
"Farm products used to bring money in only one season," she said. "Now, with live-streaming skills, I can make money from home all year."
In nearby Ximagezhuang Village, Zhang is testing a similar logic from another entry point. A Peking University graduate and former media worker, she returned to her hometown to run an arts and aesthetics village. She has turned an abandoned school into a guesthouse and the old villagers' committee office into an arts education space.
Her first problem was trust. Some villagers thought she had come to make quick money, while others objected to renovation plans or worried about land boundaries. Zhang found a way in through gourds, a local planting tradition.
She invited Che Meiying, an inheritor of gourd-carving skills, to open a workshop where villagers learn pyrography, carving and rope-braiding. The workshop buys back gourds and sells finished works, linking planting, handicrafts, training and tourism consumption in one chain.
The early returns remain modest. Mentougou's rural leisure-tourism revenue reached 122.67 million yuan in 2025, up 14.13 percent from a year earlier, according to local figures. In Wangping, individual businesses are still small. A college student running a weekend health-tea shop said monthly revenue can reach roughly 15,000 yuan. A wine-shop owner said she has more than 1,000 customers on WeChat and ships bottles across China.
But these small businesses are important to Wangping's larger test. The town is trying to find out whether village assets that once seemed fragmented -- a courtyard here, a spring there, a craft tradition, a crop, a former school building -- can be repriced, packaged and operated as part of one rural economy.
For Lyu, the work resembles firing pottery. Too little preparation, or one small mistake, can ruin the piece. A slight imbalance in glaze or a faint mark left by a hand can be enough to make a work fail.
"The more you prepare at the beginning, the more confidence you have later," Lyu said. "Slow is fine. If the direction is right, the road can be long."
