Using a unique dataset from China, this paper shows that the intensity of epidemic disasters during the country’s last feudal period (1644-1895) promoted tourism businesses’ contempo-rary performance. The results remain robust when considering geography, institutions, culture, confounding factors, and potential endogeneity bias. Three sources of tourism performance are referenced: business census data from individual travel agencies, visit data for national parks, and tourism revenue data from Chinese prefectures. To explain this complex but apparently uniform finding, we perform causal mediation analysis to demonstrate the importance of pro-motional effects by encouraging corporate risk-taking, with robustness to cultural fusion. Ulti-mately, we show the power of risk culture to justify the path dependence of tourism development on historical epidemics.(c) 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.