As the Chinese New Year fireworks faded and the night sky fell quiet, a profound transformation in China's fireworks industry was only just beginning.

For decades, the business model in the country's fireworks heartland of Liuyang, Hunan province, was straightforward: export products or labor. Creativity and intellectual property were rare. That is the legacy Zhang Yang inherited when she took over Liuyang Intently Fireworks Display Co Ltd, the company founded by her father in 1996.

Today, Liuyang has evolved into a global fireworks powerhouse. In 2025, the city's total fireworks output value surpassed 50 billion yuan ($7.26 billion), accounting for about 70 percent of China's fireworks exports and supporting nearly 300,000 jobs.

"Fourteen years ago, we could only participate in international competitions. There were hardly any real commercial cultural events for us," Zhang said, standing in her company's exhibition hall and gesturing toward old photographs on the wall.

As general manager of Intently, Zhang represents a new generation of industry leaders determined to shift China's fireworks sector beyond low-margin manufacturing. Her ambition is to turn fireworks from industrial products into cultural works, and from a seasonal spectacle into a driver of tourism and technology exports.

A turning point came in 2014, when China's then ministry of culture invited Intently to participate in the "Happy Chinese New Year" program overseas. From 2014 to 2019, the company's creative and technical teams staged fireworks over Manhattan's Hudson River in the United States during the Chinese New Year celebrations.

The shows marked one of the first times a Chinese fireworks company appeared on a major international stage with its own intellectual property and full creative control.

Before COVID-19, Zhang's team had staged displays for national celebrations and cultural festivals across multiple countries, with original music, choreography and visual storytelling. The experience convinced her that the future of fireworks lay not in production volume, but in creative storytelling.

She later repositioned Intently as a company focused entirely on fireworks performance and creative production. However, this momentum was abruptly disrupted during the pandemic, when tourism-related displays largely halted worldwide.

Facing a collapse in demand, Zhang made a risky decision: suspend all existing business and redirect the company's resources to developing heavy-payload drones capable of launching fireworks.

"It was like a 'hell mode'," she said. "People who understand fireworks don't understand drones. People who understand drones don't understand fireworks. We had to build everything from scratch."

Over more than two years, her team re-engineered structures, ignition systems and materials. Instead of small drones typically used for light shows, they adopted industrial models with wingspans of more than 1 meter, outfitted with custom carbon-fiber mounts.

Drone payloads could not exceed 50 percent of their theoretical capacity, while remote ignition at 500 meters had to withstand signal interference. Meanwhile, traditional recoil forces destabilized aircraft, forcing redesigns of propellants and launch structures.

"We had to modify products, ignition, materials — all at the same time — without any existing playbook," Zhang said.

In 2025, Zhang took the new system to the Liuyang Fireworks Competition, competing against teams from Germany, Italy and Sweden.

Drawing inspiration from poet Li Bai of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), she built a nine-tiered tower of fireworks symbolizing the line "The roc (a mythological bird) rises 90,000 miles in a single day".

During the performance, some foreign competitors told her that simply taking part was already a victory. Zhang disagreed."I want the championship," she replied, and her team won. "At that moment, I felt the two years of hardship were worth it."

Six months later, the company set a Guinness World Record, launching more than 7,900 drone-mounted fireworks simultaneously in a dense but nearly smokeless display.

Environmental innovation is central to the technology. Finer-milled propellant, honeycomb-shaped solid charges that burn more completely, water-based binders replacing alcohol and resin, and sulfur-free formulations have reduced residue by around 80 percent, Zhang said.

"Fireworks are not synonymous with high risk and high pollution," she said."They are precise and controllable technology products."

Zhang believes the market for fireworks has also evolved. Consumption, she said, has moved through three stages — from excitement, to visual beauty, and now to emotional resonance.

"Today, beauty alone can't satisfy audiences," she said.

Her experimental fireworks drama "White Moon and Brahma Star", inspired by the legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai — often called China's Romeo and Juliet — combined drone fireworks with narrative choreography and concepts such as quantum entanglement. Golden moons signaled budding affection, blue raindrops mimicked heartbeats and butterfly formations symbolized transformation.

The 40-minute weekend show at the Liuyang Sky Theater became one of the few performances where audiences stayed until the very end, Zhang said.

"People didn't just watch fireworks. They watched a story," Zhang said. "We are co-creators of content."

With an average age of 28, her team comprises engineers, visual designers and tourism planners, a structure far removed from the traditional family-workshop model that once dominated the industry.

Zhang's efforts reflect a wider shift in Liuyang's fireworks economy. Deng Weiping, deputy director of the Department of Commerce of Hunan Province, said that Liuyang's transformation is no accident.

"It is the result of integrating deep cultural heritage with technological innovation,"Deng said.

Deng added that Liuyang has built a large and integrated industrial ecosystem, ranging "from a single sheet of fireworks paper to a full-scale show". Through a "fireworks plus tourism" strategy, weekend fireworks shows at the Liuyang Sky Theater have attracted more than 7 million visitors since 2023, generating more than 20 billion yuan in direct local consumption.

Zhang credits her father's generation for laying the groundwork. In 2013, he developed a 100-meter fireworks launch column and opened the patent to the industry free of charge, a technology now widely used at major events nationwide.

Zhang said she follows the same approach, sharing drone fireworks technology and supply-chain support with peers.

Liuyang's industrial ecosystem, she added, thrives on openness and collaboration.

In 2025, Intently's drone fireworks entered Ethiopia, drawing steady international inquiries. "We are no longer selling boxes of fireworks," Zhang said. "We are exporting a complete Chinese story, and Chinese technology."

At the Yiwu venue of this year's China Central Television Spring Festival Gala, her team revived a Song Dynasty (960-1279) palace fireworks form recorded in the Dongjing Meng Hua Lu (Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendor), blending 1,400-year-old tradition with modern engineering.

"A thousand years ago, fireworks artisans did the same thing we are doing now," she said. "Using the most beautiful fireworks to convey human joy. It's a dialogue across time."

For Zhang and her peers, the next generation of China's fireworks industry is not abandoning tradition, but digitizing and reinventing it — turning a seasonal craft into a year-round engine for tourism, technology and cultural export.