Nanjing has released its 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, positioning "cultural empowerment" as one of four strategic priorities. The plan emphasizes using culture as a key pillar for high-quality development, promoting deep integration of ancient capital culture, modern humanities, and natural landscapes, and advancing the practice of humanistic economics to build a high-quality cultural city. The profound, millennia-spanning Yangtze River culture provides vital support for Nanjing’s cultural empowerment strategy and urban development momentum.
By drawing on cultural heritage, Nanjing is strengthening the spiritual foundation of urban development. The Yangtze River has witnessed the city’s thousand-year evolution and nurtured its unique urban culture. The plan calls for protecting the distinct cultural lineage of the historical city, implementing projects to trace the origins of Nanjing’s regional civilization, and deepening research on cultures such as the Lake熟 Culture, West Street Culture, Yangtze River Culture, Grand Canal Culture, and Maritime Silk Road Culture. These efforts lay a solid academic foundation for cultural inheritance and innovation.
Centered on the 97-kilometer Nanjing section of the Yangtze River, the city has systematically cataloged cultural heritage sites, including historical relics, revolutionary culture, and industrial remains. It has coordinated cultural preservation with explorations of civilization origins, achieving notable results in archaeology and conservation. For example, the West Street archaeological site uncovered the Changgan Ancient City from the Shang and Zhou dynasties, pushing back Nanjing’s recorded history from 2,500 to over 3,100 years. The Xuecheng site in Gaochun filled multiple gaps in prehistoric archaeology of the lower Yangtze region.
The long-standing, continuous Yangtze River culture runs through the development of Nanjing as a historical city. Recently, the Nanjing Historical Axis Urban Design was released for public feedback, bringing the city’s historical backbone into public view. The design features three axes—the Southern Tang Qinhuai Cultural Axis, the Ming Dynasty Imperial Ritual Axis, and the Republic of China Zhongshan Boulevard Axis—along with the Six Dynasties Scenic Heritage Line. These overlapping and interconnected axes form the spatiotemporal framework of Nanjing’s urban development, serving multiple functions such as transportation, cultural display, and daily life, making millennia of history accessible and tangible.
Following the launch of the Ming Cultural Axis last year, Nanjing introduced new "City Reading" routes this year. Starting at the Zhonghua Gate Fortress, a core landmark of the Ming city wall, these routes use archival collections as clues to explore the preservation of historical urban areas, cultural relics, historic districts, and traditional residences in southern Nanjing. Through activities like "Reading Architecture," "Reading Place Names," and "Reading Time-Honored Brands," residents and visitors can experience the city’s profound cultural heritage and charm while walking, exploring, and interacting.
Cultural empowerment of the economy hinges on transforming cultural resources into industrial advantages. Leveraging the rich heritage of Yangtze River culture, Nanjing has enhanced the integration of culture and tourism, with the cultural industry’s value-added proportion of GDP ranking among the highest in comparable Chinese cities. The plan sets a target for the cultural industry’s share of GDP to reach around 6.5% during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.
In line with building the Yangtze River World-Class Urban Leisure Tourism Belt, Nanjing has planned and developed several specialized cultural industrial parks and creative blocks, focusing on new sectors such as digital culture, immersive performances, cultural creative design, and cultural tourism. It has promoted the industrial development of cultural IPs like the Dabao'en Temple ruins, Muyan Riverside Scenic Area, and the old Pukou Railway Station, creating premium routes for Yangtze-themed study tours, riverside eco-vacations, and water-based cultural experiences. This has formed a tourism pattern where visitors "sightsee by day, enjoy performances by night, and consume across the region."
During the Spring Festival this year, Jinling Changle Square, East China’s first immersive Ming culture space, began trial operations in Nanjing. Incorporating the "Forty Scenes of Jinling" into various settings, it follows the story of Ming top candidate Huang Guan from examination to success, allowing visitors to appreciate the charm of imperial examination culture. Daily visitor numbers exceeded 100,000 during the trial period, injecting new momentum into Nanjing’s efforts to become an international consumption center.
Nanjing is also vigorously developing the digital cultural industry, using VR/AR and AI technologies to create digital experience halls for Yangtze culture and digital museum exhibitions. It has established digital display spaces such as the Yangtze River Bridge Metaverse, Wumadu Metaverse, and VR Xinjizhou, presenting ancient Yangtze culture in modern forms and expanding new scenarios for cultural consumption.
The plan emphasizes accelerating a comprehensive green transition to create a beautiful Nanjing where humans and nature coexist harmoniously. It outlines an ecological spatial structure described as "one belt, ten zones, two rings, and multiple corridors," with the "one belt" referring to the Yangtze River Green Ecological Belt. Adhering to ecological priority and green development, Nanjing has integrated Yangtze cultural heritage with environmental protection and urban function upgrades. It continues to improve the Yangtze riverfront, enforces the ten-year fishing ban, protects habitats of rare species like the finless porpoise, and aims to become a model modern riverside city where nature, culture, and ecology coexist.
According to the China Yangtze River Culture Development City Index Report 2025, Nanjing has been recognized as a benchmark city for Yangtze cultural construction for three consecutive years, with particularly notable achievements in biodiversity conservation. In January, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs listed 11 important habitats for key protected aquatic wildlife in the Yangtze Basin, including the Nanjing section of the Jiangsu Yangtze River, which is a crucial habitat for finless porpoises. Since the establishment of the Nanjing Finless Porpoise Provincial Nature Reserve over a decade ago, the area has become the stretch of the Yangtze with the highest density of finless porpoises, hosting half of the Jiangsu section’s population. Today, porpoises are frequently spotted near the Qinhuai River estuary and Zhongshan Wharf, becoming popular "ecological hotspots" for residents.
Nanjing also integrates cultural elements into riverside ecological spaces, embedding historical allusions, poetry carvings, and intangible cultural heritage landscapes into the riverside scenic belt to create a "Hundred-Mile Riverside Gallery" where ecological beauty and cultural ambiance enhance each other. By optimizing public spaces along the river, the city continues to expand recreational opportunities for residents to approach, engage with, and enjoy the river, steadily enhancing public well-being.