Tourscape, cultural identity, and loyalty in a themed cultural precinct: A study of Datang Everbright City in Xi’an, China

Abstract

The archaized block, a typical form of themed cultural precinct in China, creates a consumable and experiential “sense of history” through themed physical environments and symbolic performances. This type of urban space has emerged under the country’s cultural-tourism integration policy. In the field of cultural identity research on heritage sites with authentic historical remains, existing studies have confirmed the positive effects of factors such as authenticity of cultural heritage tourism, tourism experience, place attachment, and value perception on cultural identity. However, most of these studies presuppose the existence of objective historical relics. For themed cultural precincts like Datang Everbright City, which was developed without any authentic historical remains, the mechanism through which symbolic landscapes convey abstract historical meanings and stimulate tourists’ cultural identity remains underexplored in the academic literature. Drawing on constructive authenticity theory, and based on the S-O-R framework, this study constructs a theoretical model of how Tourscape perception influences cultural identity. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 289 tourists to Datang Everbright City and the data were analyzed using PLS-SEM. The study finds that cultural identity plays a significant mediating role between each dimension of Tourscape and destination loyalty, with full mediation for the physical and socio-symbolic dimensions and partial mediation for the social dimension. This study extends the application of Tourscape framework to the domain of “cultural identity”, validating its explanatory power in completely newly built themed cultural precincts, and examines the differentiated pathways through which each Tourscape dimension influences loyalty via cultural identity. These findings offer important theoretical insights into how themed cultural precincts carry historical meaning and stimulate cultural identity. They also provide practical guidance for cultural communication and experience design, as well as strategic references for destination managers seeking to enhance tourists’ cultural identity and revisit intentions.