Objective The “Small Yet Beautiful” projects implemented in Fujian Province under the promotional tea tourism program were scrutinized on their long-term sustainability with suggestions for improvements.

Method Tea tourism aims to promote the tea business, and the “Small Yet Beautiful” projects was designed to follow the national directive of Culture-Enterprise-SciTech Coordinated Development of Tea Industry (aka Three-Tea Coordination) and the governmental policy announced by the Central Document No. 1 in 2026. A five-dimensional model based on the sustainable development theory that encompasses resource activation, cultural experience, economic resilience, ecological carrying capacity, and technology empowerment with 18 observable indicators was established as a tool to assess the business operation. The analytic hierarchy process was employed to determine the dimension weights in evaluating 9 randomly selected “Small Yet Beautiful” projects carried out in Fujian. Field observation, platform data extraction, and semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data for the study. Relevant businesses were classified according to non-replicable resources, and performance differentiations in same classification obtained for analysis.

Result The comprehensive scores ranging from 3.25 to 3.83 of the 9 projects were in the “good” grade. The 5-dimensional assessment weighed the businesses in three tiers of (A) leading on resource activation and cultural experience, (B) medium on economic resilience and ecological carrying capacity, and (C) low on scientific and technical empowerment and high on performance differentiation (CV=0.40). The operations were classified on the basis of non-replicable resources into types of craft-inheritance, culture-display, scene-experience, and eco-lodging. The culture-display type received the highest mean score of 3.62, and the eco-lodging the lowest of 3.33. Within the same class, notable differentiations in performance were observed. Of which, the culture-display type was most diverse with the highest rating of 0.43. It appeared that efficient conversion of non-replicable resources for market demand, rather than scarcity of natural resources, could better explain sustainability of the business.

Conclusion The “Small Yet Beautiful” tourism program to promote tea drinking and associated entertainment activities merited promotion, as it represented a sustainable potential. However, significant differentiations existed in practices. Ability of an entity to effectively utilize and release the latent value of available resources was the determining variable. Since each enterprise faces different obstacles, optimization strategy for individual business needs to be specific and designed according to locality, target customers, and available resources. To map a functional plan, it will require a thorough analysis based on extensive sampling.