Tea, Ritual and Rules: How a Chinese National Park Is Governed by Mountain and Culture Alike

Deep in the mountains of Fujian province, where subtropical forest cloaks rocky slopes and the air smells of tea, one of China’s first national parks is quietly rewriting the textbook on how protected areas should be run. A new qualitative study of Wuyishan National Park argues that conservation there works not because institutions, culture, and ecology are merely linked, but because each actively reshapes the other in a continuous, traceable loop. The researchers call this process institution–culture–ecology co-constitution, and their evidence suggests it may be the missing ingredient in community co-management schemes worldwide.

The study, published in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, draws on six field visits between September 2024 and May 2026, thirty-five interviews, twenty-three household visits including five oral histories, direct observation, and a dense body of policy and administrative documents. Its lead author, Qingyuan Li, and co-author Yan Ma, both of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do formal rules, culturally embedded practices, and monitored ecological change actually shape one another on the ground? Their answer challenges the way co-management is usually evaluated, which tends to treat institutions as the mechanism, ecology as the outcome, and culture as decorative background.

Wuyishan is an unusually revealing place to ask such questions. It is the only one of China’s first five national parks that overlaps a UNESCO World Heritage property inscribed under both cultural and natural criteria. Taoist texts from the Tang dynasty classified the mountain as the Sixteenth Grotto-Heaven, a sacred site within a ranked geography of numinous peaks. Zhu Xi, the towering figure of Neo-Confucianism, wrote and lectured there for more than five decades, founding the Wuyi Jingshe academy in 1183. Tea has been cultivated, classified, and traded from the region for centuries, traveling Dutch East India Company routes to Europe as bohea and overland along the Great Tea Road to Russia. The Fujian section of the park today covers more than 1,000 square kilometers, nearly 80 percent of the park, contains 28 natural villages and 3,415 registered residents, and has 66.4 percent of its land collectively owned.

The researchers’ framework demands a strict evidentiary standard. A relationship counts as co-constitutive only when a documented governance episode shows reciprocal change across at least two domains: a change in one domain traceable to an alteration in the form, meaning, or consequences of another. Mere co-presence, broad coupling, or descriptive entanglement does not qualify. This distinction matters because it converts a fashionable metaphor into something that can be tested, and potentially falsified, in other protected areas.

The clearest co-constitutive episode in the dataset involves a forest easement in Aotou Village. Under China’s tripartite rights system for collective forest land, ownership stays with the village collective while the park administration acquires specified protection authority for a fixed contractual period. Intensive bamboo management had created tension between watershed protection and village livelihoods. When easement agreements restricted intensive use in exchange for compensation, villagers were initially suspicious. Their insistence on retaining collective ownership shaped how the agreement was designed and interpreted, while the park’s contractual clarity and reliable payments shaped what villagers were willing to accept. The decisive feedback was not an abstract indicator but something everyone could see: water running clear downstream again. As one villager put it, when the water cleared and the compensation arrived on time, people knew the arrangement could work. At the scale of the Fujian section, the 2025 annual report records bamboo-forest easements covering about 6,053 hectares.

Tea culture supplies the second movement of the argument. Local growers evaluate their product through shanchang, a place-based category linking mountain shape, rock and soil, shade, moisture, surrounding vegetation, and cultivation history to sensory quality. A related idiom describes ideal tea-forest structure as wearing a cap, belt, and shoes: forest retained on hilltops moderates exposure and runoff, vegetation along slopes slows erosion, and ground cover protects soil and tea roots. This is not folklore appended to agriculture; it is a compact local model of forest–tea ecology. A tea farmer in Tianxin Village explained that the famous rock rhyme and rock bone and floral fragrance of Wuyi tea come from the harmonious ecological environment of each shanchang, adding that the ecological environment is the community’s rice bowl. Yet the researchers are careful to note the limits of cultural logic alone: shared ecological knowledge does not automatically produce restraint when tea prices soar, which is precisely where formal institutions enter as complementary enforcement.

That complementarity is visible in the Yanzike ecological tea garden, a demonstration project that translates traditional forest–tea knowledge into a standardized agroecological model. Taller trees provide shade and regulate microclimates, soybeans and rapeseed serve as green manure, and tea varieties are matched to local conditions, reducing chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Photovoltaic pest-control lamps and displays of temperature, humidity, and particulate matter make environmental conditions visible to managers and visitors alike. An interviewee described the project as an application of traditional ecological wisdom in which traditional culture and modern science jointly construct a modern ecological tea garden. Cultural knowledge lends the intervention legitimacy; scientific and administrative resources make it transferable.

Ritual does similar work in public. The tea-offering and mountain-calling ritual, jicha hanshan, descends from Song-dynasty customs and a Yuan-era rite at the Imperial Tea Garden, where in 1332 officials erected a platform from which drums were beaten and calls made for tea buds to emerge around the solar term of Jingzhe. Today the practice is listed as municipal-level intangible cultural heritage and staged publicly at tea sites. A scenic-area official summarized its ecological ethic succinctly: to ask the mountains for a living, one must respect them. The researchers treat such public staging analytically rather than romantically, noting that heritage presentation recontextualizes ritual and introduces commercial incentives, but they conclude that ritual gives conservation a culturally grounded language through which ecological responsibility is communicated and made meaningful.

Ecology, in turn, feeds back into governance through two complementary channels. Administratively, the park’s 2025 monitoring program conducted six rounds of surface-water sampling at 33 locations using 24 parameters, established 44 soil-monitoring plots, and recorded eight newly identified taxa, bringing the cumulative total to 62. Forest coverage in the Fujian section stands at nearly 94 percent. Situated observation runs alongside: a Hongxing Village resident who combines a family rock-tea business with work as a forest ranger patrols daily with a partner, flies a drone, and uploads images through standardized reporting procedures. His terrain familiarity directs where monitoring attention goes, while the reporting system converts local observation into evidence that travels across administrative levels. The park-wide system comprises 80 forest rangers and 98 patrol grids. Compensation and employment close the loop: in 2025 the administration paid 21.85 million renminbi to owners of ecological public-welfare forests and collective rights holders, and employed 72 conservation personnel, 80 rangers, and 26 checkpoint staff. Residents’ tea-sector income was estimated at roughly 1.3 billion renminbi.

The authors are candid about asymmetry. Public agencies retain legal and spatial authority; communities influence how rules operate and how ecological outcomes are interpreted, not the formal allocation of power. Reciprocity does not imply consensus or harmony. But the comparative payoff is concrete. The framework identifies four enabling conditions for similar dynamics elsewhere: durable institutional channels for evaluation and revision, ecological knowledge embedded in livelihood practice, visible connections between ecological quality and livelihood or identity, and organizations capable of translating situated observations across administrative levels. Where those conditions hold, whether in pastoral Sanjiangyuan, in contractual parks modeled on the Makuleke case in South Africa, or in tribally co-managed Bears Ears, culture can function as a practical medium of governance rather than a heritage label. Where they do not, the Wuyishan configuration may simply fail to emerge. Either way, the study offers something rare in conservation scholarship: a testable account of how rules, meaning, and mountains make each other.

Subject of Research: Institution–culture–ecology co-constitution in community co-management at Wuyishan National Park, China

Article Title: Beyond coupling and entanglement: institution–culture–ecology co-constitution in community co-management at Wuyishan National Park

Article References: Li, Q., & Ma, Y. (2026). Beyond coupling and entanglement: institution–culture–ecology co-constitution in community co-management at Wuyishan National Park. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, 10(1), Article 17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-026-00166-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41257-026-00166-w

Keywords: Wuyishan National Park, community co-management, co-constitution, social-ecological systems, local ecological knowledge, tea culture, shanchang, protected-area governance, ecological compensation, intangible cultural heritage, China national parks, environmental anthropology