In 2025, revenue reached 65.5 billion yuan, representing a year-on-year growth of over 22%. To date, the park has gathered more than 8,000 cultural enterprises. This impressive performance is credited to Ziyun Mountain. What is the secret behind this "mountain"?
Rewinding to one year ago, during the spring of 2025, the Ziyun Mountain (Baohe) Cultural and Creative Industry Park was officially launched at Anhui Province's conference on high-quality development of the cultural industry. The meeting outlined plans to use the park as a catalyst for accelerating the cultivation of distinctive cultural creative parks, buildings, streets, and corners, aiming to create more vertical development zones, mid-air industrial parks, and major projects within office buildings.
Endowed with high expectations to boost cultural industry growth, the park became a significant opportunity for Baohe District to enhance its cultural creative sector and polish its cultural brand. The foundation rests on unique and superior resources: a robust industrial base holding four national-level titles—National Cultural and Sci-Tech Integration Demonstration Base, National Cultural Industry Demonstration Park, National Radio, Film and Television Technology Innovation Experiment Base, and National Virtual Reality Technology Application Demonstration. Resource advantages include gatherings like the Anhui Innovation Museum and the Technology Market; over 30 research institutions, including branches of State Administration of Radio and Television academies, University of Science and Technology of China, and Hefei University of Technology, along with 43 national and provincial laboratories; 16 industry-university-research platforms such as the National Radio, Film and Television Technology Center; and 109 parks and gardens, where landmarks like the Anhui Celebrity Museum and the Crossing the Yangtze River Campaign Memorial Hall blend with newer sites like Bao Park, Lei Street, and Hechai 1972. Location benefits are highlighted by the Hefei South Railway Station hub, offering integrated access via high-speed rail, subway, expressways, elevated roads, and ports.
Focusing on innovation and reform, Baohe District has rolled out a spatial layout of "one axis, two cores, three zones, and four sections," building project carriers like "one city, one park, ten platforms," and establishing a "3+3" industrial system covering big audio-visual, digital content, creative design services, virtual reality production, live streaming, and digital music. Li Ying, Deputy General Manager of Anda Chuangzhan Technology Co., Ltd., a long-established cultural enterprise in Baohe and one of the first companies to sign into the park, noted that over the past year, Ziyun Mountain has provided significant brand value enhancement. Beyond high-value policies, strong resource connectivity has indirectly helped business expansion in cultural and technological integration, with expected revenue growth of 30% year-on-year, boosting confidence to deepen roots in the cultural industry.
Provincial measures from 12 units, including the Publicity Department, were quickly followed by 27 district-level policies, covering the entire development chain from platform construction and operational support to corporate listings, with over 70% of benefits available without application. A "six ones" approach—one leader in charge, one task force promoting, one set of industrial policies supporting, a batch of project carriers undertaking, one state-owned enterprise providing full service, and one cultural industry fund—has turned institutional innovation into confidence and vitality for businesses.
The park leads nationally in radio, film, television, and online audio-visual R&D capabilities, digital content production, and technological exhibition standards. New formats, models, scenes, and products in virtual reality production, live streaming, and digital music are gaining momentum, with achievements in ultra-high definition, high-speed photography, full-color light display, scientific visualization, and cultural equipment manufacturing industrializing.
At the start-of-year APEC senior officials' meeting, a "robot calligrapher" wrote a beautiful character for "fortune," sending New Year greetings to international guests. This robot, from Lingcifang Robotics, a Baohe-local embodied AI robotics company incubated in Ziyun Mountain, saw orders surpass 100 million yuan within a year, with monthly production exceeding 100 units, marking a leap from cutting-edge R&D to large-scale commercial delivery and quickly rising to the top tier in wheel-arm humanoid robotics.
Founded by a core team of post-00s members from Tsinghua University, founder Min Yuheng believes that relying on Baohe's vibrant and creative environment, Lingcifang Robotics will live up to its name, implying "no limits, breaking boundaries, and infinite possibilities." On March 25, Chen Xiaoxue, Chairman of Anhui Jinshiguang Culture Media Co., Ltd., shared that since moving to Baohe the previous year, the park has offered comprehensive support, from daily life assistance to employee recruitment, resource connections, business development, and policy applications, providing a stable environment for steady growth amid market changes.
Now embracing AI in her transition from traditional film and television, Chen appreciates the convenience of having copyright centers, promotion companies, and technical talent nearby, enabling efficient collaboration. She revealed plans for the team to independently produce 10 high-quality AI short dramas monthly by 2026, building their own IPs.
At Baohe's "First Meeting of the New Year," Li Xiaona, Vice President of EHang Intelligent and General Manager of Heyi Aviation, was commended as an outstanding enterprise representative. During the CCTV Spring Festival Gala's Hefei segment, 16 EH216-S unmanned aerial vehicles operated by Heyi Aviation made a stunning appearance over the "Eye of Anhui" stage at Luogang Park, setting a record for the most eVTOLs flying simultaneously in public. The company had previously received the nation's first operational certificate for civil unmanned passenger aircraft.
Blending tradition with future, and attracting youth and entrepreneurs, Ziyun Mountain is paving a golden path from creativity to implementation. In 2025, Baohe District historically became the first county-level division in Anhui to exceed 200 billion yuan in GDP, ranking 13th in the National Cultural Industry Competitiveness Top 100 Districts. Ziyun Mountain Cultural Park became a provincial IP and was included in key support projects for the 15th Five-Year Plan. The district leads the province with over 1,200 national high-tech enterprises and more than 1,800 sci-tech SMEs.
Starting from a high point, Baohe District has proposed a "dual innovation integration" strategy for cultural and technological creativity, listing the cultural industry as one of three key trillion-yuan leading industries. On March 20, the "Baohe Forum" featured Zeng Fanwen, Executive Dean of Renmin University's Cultural Industry Research Institute and Chief Expert of Ziyun Mountain Cultural Industry Research Institute, who tailored development ideas and tasks for Baohe. The same day, a cultural technology enterprise forum in Beijing themed "Intelligence Gathering in Baohe, Brilliant Win-Win" saw multiple quality integration projects secured.
On March 24, the Ziyun Mountain AIGC Micro-Drama Innovation Conference was held, with 30 universities joining the Anhui University Student AIGC Micro-Drama Industry-University-Research Alliance, establishing the province's first such platform focused on student AIGC micro-dramas. Five days later, collaboration plans between Huangshan University and Ziyun Mountain advanced further.
Increasingly, attention and projects are converging on Ziyun Mountain. Since its 2025 launch, the park has signed 173 new projects with agreed investments of 11.41 billion yuan. A Baohe District principal leader stated that the cultural industry is inherently a new quality productive force, and with unprecedented opportunities, the district will amplify Ziyun Mountain's IP influence to contribute to Hefei and Anhui's cultural strength goals.
Today, Ziyun Mountain is proactively setting new development coordinates, aiming to become a nationally influential first-class cultural creative industry park. Targets for 2027 include industrial scale exceeding 100 billion yuan, nurturing over 200 large-scale cultural enterprises, and developing 10 cultural buildings with billion-yuan characteristics. Baohe District will focus on project recruitment, enterprise services, and talent acquisition, expanding industrial clusters, strengthening tech support, optimizing application scenarios, and improving mechanisms through a "3+3+N" industrial upgrade action, high-standard development of a "university encircling sci-tech belt," and matching products with scenarios, striving to create a national cultural and sci-tech integration pilot zone.
Drawing on the elegance of Chaohu Lake and a millennium of cultural heritage, Ziyun Mountain's sparks of innovation, under the gentle spring breeze, promise a path blooming with achievements.