Contemporary tourism geographies are increasingly oriented toward experiences that are emotionally resonant, personally tailored, and meaningful. Yet, amid China’s rapidly growing temple tourism among younger and young-adult visitors, limited understanding remains of how such experiences are personalised and made immersive through the interplay between social media and temple spaces. This qualitative study explores the motivations and lived experiences of Chinese temple visitors, combining netnography with 15 in-depth interviews conducted at Tiantai Temple. Social media platforms such as RedNote and Bilibili provide insight into this growing trend, while interviews offer deeper understanding of on-site practices and meanings. The findings reveal shifting visitation patterns driven by cultural curiosity, social influence, and a desire for mental relief from work and academic pressures. Temple visits are increasingly framed as secular and pragmatic practices for balancing modern life, personally tailored through platform-curated ‘how-to’ templates that shape ritual scripts, itineraries, wish-making, and blessing-related objects. These encounters become immersive through sensory atmospheres, embodied routines, spatial sequencing, slowness, and co-presence in crowds, queues, and check-in cultures. This research contributes to contemporary geographies of personalisation and younger cohorts’ culture in China by linking temple tourism to ‘tang-ping’ and offering recommendations for experience design and heritage protection.
Han et al. (Tue,) studied this question.