Guiyang's Qingyun Market upgrade blends food, heritage, and nightlife

As the sun sets in the west and the summer heat gradually fades, at 7:30 pm, the entrance of Qingyun Market on Qingyun Road Pedestrian Street in Guiyang's Nanming district begins to swell with visitors as the aromas of grilled fish, laoguo (a stir-fried mix of vegetables, tofu, and meat in a flat pan), and iced jelly waft through the air.

Qingyun Market in Guiyang's Nanming district thrives with bustling nighttime consumption. [Photo/ddcpc website]

Qingyun Road Pedestrian Street, a national-level nighttime cultural and tourism consumption cluster and tourism and leisure block, was a spontaneously formed open-air night market with a solid local following in its early years, but has suffered from chaotic surroundings, low-end business offerings, and inadequate supporting facilities.

During renovation, Nanming did not opt for large-scale demolition and new construction. Instead, it took urban organic renewal as a guiding approach, adopting a combined strategy of "retention, renovation, and demolition" to upgrade the area.

Now, Qingyun Market in the street has formed an integrated model combining "Guizhou-style cuisine, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) themed cultural creative products, trendy nighttime entertainment, and street performances".

On the food front, it brings together specialty snacks from across the province, while on the cultural side, it hosts over 160 cultural creative products and ICH shops, displaying traditional crafts such as Miao embroidery, horsetail embroidery, batik, and Miao silverwork.

The market features product explorations and ICH experiences during the daytime, peaks in dining and food sales in the early evening, and music performances and social leisure at night, expanding from a single focus on dining to include nighttime sightseeing, shopping, and entertainment.

In practical effect, the dining crowd drives retail sales of cultural creative products, performing arts events draw larger footfall, and ICH projects enhance the added value of cultural tourism. The various business formats achieve mutual traffic sharing, forming a relatively complete consumption loop.