“Of course, some people were against it,” said Mr. Liu, 67, a second-generation barber. “But they eventually came around. In the end, we are all just trying to be good citizens.”

Mr. Liu spoke from within the small white-walled shop where he keeps two rusty barber chairs on the main pedestrian street of Wuzhen’s western scenic area. Mr. Liu has worked on this street for 20 years, long before there were any tourists. It looks about the same, he said, though it is cleaner now and more commercialized.

Because of the tourist zone’s entrance fee, Mr. Liu said, he no longer saw some of his former customers. But, as is the case for many of the shop workers here, the increase in tourists has more than made up for that loss.

“Life is better now with the tourists,” said Shen Wenying, 66. Sitting on a wooden stool on a recent afternoon, Ms. Shen plunged her hands into a bucket to extract dead silkworms from their small white cocoons to make silk thread. As she worked, a group of tourists began to gather around to snap photos of what appeared to be a seasoned local craftswoman at work.