After the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee proposed the goal of building a cultural power by 2035, the construction of water culture is widely carried out throughout the country. However, at this stage, water culture construction still has problems such as inadequate protection and ecological destruction. In order to explore the best path of water culture construction, based on the configuration perspective and the fsQCA method, five conditional variables including policy system, economic foundation, capital investment, resource endowment and market demand are selected. The comprehensive scores of economic, social and environmental benefits of water culture construction are used as the result variables to analyze how the combination of different factors and conditions affects and promotes the generation of benefits of water culture construction. The results show that there are five paths, namely, high-level driving, capital-driven, resource-supported under policy support, market-assisted and four-measures combined driving,therefore,in view of these five research paths, suggestions are made from the aspects of system improvement, policy encouragement and financial support to improve the comprehensive benefits of water culture construction.