New Media Perspective: Strategies for Expanding the Reach of the Luyu Ancient Road

The successful dissemination of the Lu Yu Ancient Road involves multiple aspects, including cultural resource exploration, content format innovation, media channel operation, and psychological engagement with users. Faced with challenges such as insufficient material carriers, repetitive content narratives, and overly singular dissemination channels, the dissemination of the ancient road must shift from a one-way output approach to a user-centric mindset, reconstructing its communication logic with young audiences at its center. This study uses IP character design as a starting point, extracting various symbols from the story of the Tea Saint and the tea ceremony and developing related products, thus making cultural value more accessible to a wider audience. Different content production plans were developed for the platforms Douyin and Xiaohongshu, achieving a seamless communication effect of “online seeding-offline experience-online sharing”. Furthermore, the study explains the psychological mechanisms behind young users’ consumption of ancient road culture from three aspects: emotional arousal, identity recognition, and group belonging. The dissemination practice of the Lu Yu Ancient Road demonstrates that only by transforming historical relics into easily accessible cultural symbols, truly integrating this ancient road into the discourse and daily lives of young people, can it break through niche circles and achieve effective dissemination of traditional culture.