Your own Walden? Commercialised escape through paid temple-stay retreats in China

This study examines paid temple-stay retreats in China as a form of commercialised escape. Drawing on qualitative interviews, field observation and netnography, the findings demonstrate that retreat participation is legitimised as self-rescue and self-cultivation, and delivered through a disciplined time regime of schedules, silence, dietary control and behavioural rules. Payment is not treated as a simple price, but is continuously reframed through donation language, cost realism and authenticity work, revealing a fragile moral economy of exchange. The value of retreat is further tested through re-entry, where calm, attachment, disappointment and public storytelling expose commercialised escape as both remedy and risk. The study contributes to spiritual tourism theory by conceptualising withdrawal as a market-mediated, morally negotiated and temporally unstable form of sacred consumption.