Objective/Meaning  Rural tourism is one of the important ways to realize the rural revitalization. By selecting Dehua County of Quanzhou City, a typical area of mountainous counties, as the research object, its rural tourism development strategies were studied, in order to explore the approach of developing the rural tourism in mountainous counties relying on the characteristic cultural industries.

  Methods/Procedures  By taking Dehua County of Quanzhou City as the research subject, the SWOT method was used to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of the development of rural tourism industry with local characteristics in this area. Then, the strategies for promoting the development of rural tourism were put forward.

  Results/Conclusions  The results showed that Dehua County had the advantages of superior natural and geographical conditions, a strong foundation for the development of distinctive industries, profound cultural heritage, and abundant agricultural products with regional characteristics. However, there were also disadvantages, such as lower level of infrastructure, weak ability to integrate resources, imperfect leadership mechanisms, weak level of creativity of characteristic products, and insufficient publicity and promotion. It was faced with the opportunities from the nearby recreational travel and the development of intangible cultural heritage tourism brands, as well as the challenges of competitive pressure increase and human resources loss. Based on this, the strategic suggestions were put forward, including advancing the brand construction of rural tourism and promoting the development of health and wellness tourism centered around the Daiyun Mountain; strengthening the construction of tourism infrastructure, and the inheritance and utilization of cultural heritage; promoting the upgrading of regional characteristic tourism creative experiential projects; strengthening the human resources guarantee and talent team construction, the integration and utilization of tourism resources and establishing the protective mechanisms.