Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) constitutes a vital carrier of fine traditional Chinese culture and serves as key content for fostering cultural understanding within international Chinese education. However, the accuracy and applicability of existing large language model (LLM) in intelligent question-answering (Q&A) of ICH still need to be improved in international Chinese education scenarios. Therefore, this paper designs an intelligent Q&A system facing ICH in international Chinese education, and proposes a lightweight pathway for the coupling of knowledge graph and LLM. Firstly, taking three representative national-level ICH items as research subjects, entities are extracted and linguistically adjusted, and Protégé is adopted to construct the knowledge graph, which is then imported into Neo4j to form the graph database. Subsequently, natural language questions are mapped onto structured retrieval through Schema constraints, Few-shot examples and Cypher queries, so as to realize the coupling of knowledge graph and LLM. Finally, the quality evaluation of answers generated by the intelligent Q&A system is conducted through both objective indicators of knowledge coverage rate and subjective scores from teachers and students’ questionnaires, in order to examine the performance differences between this system and conventional LLM. Reseach results indicate that the intelligent Q&A system significantly outperforms the conventional LLM in terms of knowledge coverage, accuracy, and applicability of answers, and shows particularly prominent performance in generation of factual knowledge and procedural knowledge. The lightweight pathway proposed in this paper substantially improves the accuracy and teaching applicability of ICH content generated by intelligent Q&A systems in international Chinese education, and provides an operational practical paradigm for the effective dissemination of ICH.