Abstract: With increasing demand for ecological and cultural tourism in recent years, rural heritage tourism becomes more and more popular worldwide.As the representation of local culture, folk custom and architectural art reflecting the evolvement of historical culture and social development, it is of great significance to be protected and made good use of the rural heritage.In China, the vast geographical land has nurtured colorful rural heritage, which promoted cultural tourism development greatly.However, with the rapid development of tourism, problems such as over-commercialization and tourism urbanization occurred which threatened the protection and sustainable development of the rural heritage resources.On the one hand, urbanization and rural modernization have a great impact on traditional landscape and make the cultural identification gradually lose.Furthermore, the traditional mode of tourism development is resources-oriented, which focuses on the protection of core area or primary buildings especially.So the protected area becomes more and more limited while the core area shrinks and traditional landscapes are changed.This "centralized" mode brings many conflicts between rural heritage’s protection and tourism development.In view of these problems, it is necessary to develop a new way for managing the local cultural resources in tourism.Taking Longmen ancient town for an example, this article discussed the effective way to protect and further exploit rural heritage resources aiming for sustainable tourism development:First, to identify the culture features and the extent of ancient villages and towns, based on which a cultural landscape zoning approach can be applied.Second, to define a cooperative function area to relax the pressure on core areas and to protect their authentic cultures by extending tourism space.In addition, to balance the tourism development with traditional industries to enhance the sustainability of community economies.