Abstract: In the context of the transition toward high-quality development in ‘new-type urbanisation', small towns are evolving from individual construction to network-based collaboration. Taking the ‘Beautiful Towns' initiative in Zhejiang Province as the policy context, this study selects 28 cultural-tourism-oriented towns in Ningbo as case studies. It constructs a town gravity network based on the ‘Beauty Index' and transport accessibility, and systematically analyses changes in network structure and indicator correlations before and after policy implementation. Using complex network analysis, this study characterises the evolutionary process of the culturaltourism beautiful town network from three dimensions: spatial structure, functional structure and hierarchical structure. Combined with correlation analysis between town evaluation indicators and cultural-tourism economic data, it explores the internal driving mechanism of network evolution. The results show that Ningbo's Beautiful Towns construction has promoted the spatial structure of the cultural-tourism town network from a singlecore pattern concentrated in the north to a multi-core structure with citywide connectivity through ‘weakness improvement' and ‘service enhancement'. Through ‘hardware popularisation' and ‘software strengthening', the network's functional structure has shifted from neighbouring resource collaboration to cross-regional functional complementarity. Meanwhile, the town network still has room for improvement in cross-regional resource coordination, synergy between cultural-tourism and service functions, and evaluation feedback mechanisms.