Tourists’ value perception mechanisms in heritage night tourism: insights from Chinese garden heritage

Heritage night tourism, as a form of cultural performance, is reconfiguring the relationship between visitors and heritage, yet how nocturnal experiences reshape tourists’ value perception and heritage identity remains insufficiently understood. Existing studies concentrate largely on management and marketing concerns such as satisfaction and loyalty, while overlooking the mechanisms of value construction and identity formation. Using a grounded theory approach, this study compares online reviews from day and night tours of a Chinese gardenWorld Heritage site and interprets the results through a Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) lens. The findings reveal that night-time stimuli (S)—including environmental characteristics, nightscape creation, and artistic performances—activate tourists’ psychological processes (O), generating yijing perception (artistic conception perception), a culturally embedded aesthetic mediator. This perception deepens visitors’ cognition of cultural, artistic, and social values andenhances their local identity (R). By identifying yijing perception as a mediating mechanism between sensory stimulus and value cognition, this study advances a novel model of how cultural meaning is co-created and identity reinforced through performative tourism, contributing to a deeper understanding of the relationship between tourism and cultural change.