From Religious Belief to Intangible Cultural Heritage Tourism: A Case Study of Mazu Belief

Abstract

Mazu belief was recognized by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the Intangible cultural heritage of Humanity in 2009, which is China’s first world-class folklore intangible cultural heritage. More than 5000 Mazu temples and 200 million tourists who believe in Mazu can be found worldwide. The aim of the study was to take Meizhou Island as a case study to understand the relationships among tourists’ perceived value, place attachment, and revisit intention. In total, 424 tourists in Meizhou Island were surveyed and structural equation modeling was performed to test such relationships. Results show that tourists’ perceived value has a significant positive impact on place attachment (p < 0.05), which in turn has a significant positive impact on revisit intention (p < 0.05). The results of bootstrap test show that the confidence intervals are (0.001, 0.328), (0.147, 0.425), (0.058, 0.396), (0.092, 0.408), respectively, which do not contain 0. Therefore, place attachment acts as a complete intermediary in the relationship between tourism resources and service value, social value, cost value, and revisit intention. The confidence interval of the direct effect of cultural value and revisit intention is (0.193, 0.501), which does not contain 0, indicating that place attachment acts as a partial mediator in the relationship between cultural value and revisit intention. Findings of this study would be of use to readers of cultural tourism.