Territorial planning · Village development

Jingmai Living Landscape

A territorial strategy protects Jingmai Mountain’s tea-forest cultural landscape while strengthening the villages, livelihoods, and public spaces that keep it alive.

Territorial aerial plan connecting Huimin Town, village clusters, tea landscapes, and ecological corridors — Township renewal is concentrated beyond the protected tea-forest core, linking villages, civic services, and productive landscapes.

Territorial map of old tea forests, tea gardens, heritage protection areas, and development controls — Old tea forests, village landscapes, and development controls are coordinated at the territorial scale.

Aerial view of lakes, tea gardens, woodland, and low-impact visitor routes — Water, tea cultivation, and public landscapes form a low-impact community and visitor network.

Village buildings that reinterpret local roof forms and materials within the tea landscape — New village facilities reinterpret local building traditions at a modest scale.

Cultural facility with planted terraces overlooking the Jingmai mountain landscape — A planted public roof creates shared ground against the mountain horizon.

Contemporary cultural buildings carefully embedded among tea fields and forested slopes — Cultural destinations are embedded within the productive tea landscape to limit their visual and ecological footprint.

Illustrative village development plan embedded in the mountain and water landscape — The village plan retains the mountain settlement pattern while adding civic and community destinations.

0107

Project overview

Living Heritage, Shared Futures: Jingmai Mountain

The Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forests of Jingmai Mountain was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023. It is a living cultural landscape shaped by more than a millennium of interaction among old tea forests, traditional villages, and the knowledge of Blang and Dai communities. In Huimin Town, heritage protection therefore extends beyond scenery and buildings to the everyday cultivation, rituals, social networks, and local economies through which the landscape is continuously renewed.

The plan coordinates conservation boundaries, ecological corridors, village improvement, tea-related production, and visitor services as one territorial framework. Growth is directed toward suitable areas beyond the most sensitive heritage landscapes, while incremental public-space upgrades, culturally grounded architecture, cooperative livelihoods, and carefully paced tourism expand local opportunities. The result is a shared stewardship model in which heritage recognition supports ecological resilience and long-term rural life.

Year: 2022–2023
Location: Yunnan, China
Type: Territorial planning · Village development
Status: Completed
Project team: Yihao Wu · Niantao Xiao · Sheng Lin · Yang Liu

Next projectHub in Nature