Ritual immersion and experiencescapes: ethnographic insights from the Yao Panwang Festival

This article examines how immersive tourism experiences emerge within the Yao Panwang Festival in Liannan, China. Moving beyond perspectives that frame immersion as a designed or technologically mediated outcome, it conceptualises immersion as a ritual–relational process produced through temporality, participation, affect, embodiment, and ritual landscape. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and 32 in-depth interviews, the study adopts a constructivist grounded theory approach to examine how immersion unfolds across the festival’s ritual sequence. Findings show that visitors become progressively immersed through lineage-based ceremonies such as xiaogetang, collective practices including guo jiuzhou, processions, and communal gatherings, where sensory intensities and embodied participation align visitors with collective rhythms. The article advances the concept of the immersive experiencescape to explain how tourism experiences emerge through the interaction of bodies, practices, affective atmospheres, mobility, and place-based spatial relations. Rather than being fixed or designed, this experiencescape is assembled through co-presence and ritual enactment across distributed village spaces. The study contributes to tourism geography by reframing immersion as a situated and relational spatial process and highlighting tensions between cultural continuity and experiential consumption..