Abstract: Tongling, renowned as China’s ancient copper capital, hosts numerous mining heritage sites that form the core identity of the “Millennium Copper Capital” and bear significant historical, scientific, and social value. These sites are intrinsically linked to the sustainable development of Tongling as a resource-exhausted city. This study, focusing on Tongling’s mining heritage, reviews relevant literature and legal frameworks concerning its conservation and utilization. Grounded in the four core dimensions of the hierarchical theory of cultural landscape—“stratigraphic succession” “surface depth” “historical critique” and “interlayer linkage”—and considering the city’s transition context, it identifies key challenges: theoretical misalignments such as fragmented layering, insufficient depth, and lack of interconnectedness, alongside practical issues like oversimplification, commercialization, and homogenization. The root cause of these problems lies in the core contradiction of achieving sustainable development in post-resource-exhaustion cities. Addressing these challenges, this paper proposes theory-guided optimization strategies: ①establishing a stratified conservation system with tailored measures for the geological, historical, and intangible layers to preserve traces of landscape accumulation across periods; ②enhancing surface depth through interactive displays and scene reconstructions to translate profound historical information into perceptible landscape experiences, thereby countering homogenization and oversimplification; ③constructing diverse historical narratives incorporating ecological and social dimensions to balance commercial development with cultural value preservation; ④fostering organic linkages between layers via spatial integration, functional diversity, and element coordination to build a cohesive mining landscape system. These measures aim to achieve the dual objective of “heritage conservation-promoting transformation”, offering a clear pathway and practical reference for the conservation, restoration, and utilization of Tongling’s mining heritage, thus supporting both the long-term preservation of these sites and the sustainable urban development of resource-exhausted cities.