Thick lotuses blanket a lake in Jining. [Photo/Shandian News]

The culture and tourism industries in Jining, a city in East China's Shandong province, have expanded their scales and optimized their structures over the past 10 years, officials announced at a recent news conference.

The city's tourism revenue increased from 34.22 billion yuan ($4.72 billion) in 2012 to 82.53 billion yuan in 2019, with an average annual growth rate of 13.4 percent.

In 2021, the added value of Jining's culture and tourism industries totaled 44.41 billion yuan, up 15.6 percent year-on-year and accounted for 8.75 percent of the city's regional gross domestic product.

Weishan Lake scenic area was rated a national 5A-level tourist attraction in July, increasing the number of Jining's national 5A-level tourist attractions to two.

To date, Jining has developed 19 State and provincial-level cultural industrial demonstration zones, 99 A-level scenic spots, three provincial tourism resorts, five national key rural tourism villages and 16 provincial key rural tourism villages.

The city's efforts of vitalizing rural areas by developing culture and tourism have been recognized by the National Development and Reform Commission as a typical example of poverty alleviation.

Children dressed in traditional Chinese uniforms attend a Confucian class in Jining. [Photo/Shandian News]

Over the past years, Jining has built five professional theaters, a municipal cultural center, 16 national first-class libraries and 28 urban libraries.

In addition, the local authorities have held more than 200,000 mass cultural activities, staged over 500,000 free movies in rural areas, and organized over 50,000 reading events over the past decade to enrich people's lives.

The city has also attached great importance to protecting and developing cultural relics by introducing a series of supportive policies.

Jining is currently home to two UNESCO World Heritage sites, namely the Three Confucius Sites and the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, 41 key cultural relics under State protection and 260 under provincial protection, 54 museums, and more than 1.3 million movable cultural relics.

The city also has 19 national intangible cultural heritage items, with 10 inheritors, as well as 86 provincial ICH items with 38 inheritors.