*3.2. Research Design and Data Collection*

Semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders were mainly applied to collect data. From September 2019 to June 2021, the authors went to Meiguan Historical Trail six times to conduct fieldwork for 35 days. These interviews with residents were mainly carried out after the authors lived in their guesthouses or consumed at their restaurants and established interpersonal relationships with those people, ensuring sufficient interview time and depth. Access relied on the introduction via local government, directly approaching villagers, and snowball sampling processes. The purpose is to reveal various actors' agency in the spatial reconstruction process and their perception of LCH. In total, we conducted 46 interviews in Mandarin with government officials, residents, and tourists. The in-depth interviews lasted from 30 min to one hour. Some respondents were interviewed twice or thrice for clarification. They were taped with permission and subsequently transcribed. All names are fictitious to ensure anonymity. Additionally, the interviewees are initially coded according to the coding rules of "interviewee identity - interviewee order" (Table 1). Among the main types of interviewees, R represents local villagers, G represents government administrators, V represents volunteers of the "Three Teachers Association", and T represents tourists. The last number is the order in which people of the same identity are interviewed. This paper used 46 interview samples from the field survey database, and the interview data were transcribed into more than 98,000 words in Chinese.

**Table 1.** List of interviewees.


The analysis reveals the cultural experience and perception of various actors' production of the Meiguan Historical Trail space. It summarizes the various representations of culture in restoring and utilizing the Meiguan Historical Trail and the cultural practice behavior of each subject in the space. To ensure the comparability and scientific nature of research data, during the data collection process, researchers collected and analyzed literature, Nanxiong County records, policy texts, planning texts, and news reports related to the restoration and utilization of the Meiguan Historical Trail. Regarding the use of interview data in this article, one point deserves elaboration. Considering the need to summarize the changes to the Meiguan Historical Trail and the villages along it, the presentation of the interview results is predominantly not a format of direct quotes; more often, they are organically integrated into the narrative and analysis of the findings. This fits with Russell Hitchings and Alan Latham's conclusion that interviews are a major qualitative method of human geography, wherein indirect quotes are also one of the conventions [44].
