China’s heritage through history: reconfigured pasts, by Yujie Zhu. London: Routledge, 2024. ISBN 9781032395661

The definition of cultural heritage has intrigued, challenged, and frustrated architects, designers, governments from the local to the national level, international organisations, and theorists since the later decades of the 20th century. How to preserve the physical past, however, has a much longer history. In China as in Europe, and more recently in the Americas, reconstruction and rebuilding occurred after natural disaster such as earthquake or flood, warfare, and, in wooden construction, which dominates the Chinese building tradition, as a result of the passage of time. More than in other places, in China, local and sometimes even national records inform us of reconstruction. Those writings do not tell us if the bracket sets of a 12th-century structure rebuilt in the 19th century used contemporary style or sought to imitate the original appearance, nor if books, pictures, or local memory guided the restorers. This kind of information is best for an entity like the Forbidden City, but still does not address the questions we ask today.1 (Liu 2012) Yujie Zhu’s book, China’s Cultural Heritage through History, tackles these issues from the Chinese and the Western perspectives, and through well-selected questions and buildings or larger architectural settings shows how China has answered them. The book also seeks to empower the reader to take seriously the responsibility to address questions of cultural heritage in the future.

The introduction lays out fundamental questions one should consider when decisions are made about architectural heritage, what is at stake in addressing them, and the most influential or prolific researchers on the subject. It is emphasised that heritage became part of global discourse only in the 21st century and this attention was coincident with conventions adopted by UNESCO and ICOMOS. One also learns that the study of cultural heritage is interdisciplinary. In the end, the author emphasises, even though theorists have tried to reconfigure the past, questions of heritage can only address what survives. There is inevitably a political aspect of heritage studies.

Following the introduction, the author uses the concept of Antiquarianism to provide background Chinese history and to frame how China has addressed its past buildings and objects through history. Beginning with old pieces in the imperial collection, and then private collections, and then turning to writings about old things and places, including travel accounts, one learns that engaging with the past is inherent to Chinese civilisation. Collecting, sharing, traveling, recording, and replication are all put forward as aspects of Antiquarianism.

Chapter three explores these issues outside China in order to assess their impact in China. The author begins by explaining that modernisation in China was a response to the presence of the West in China, with positive and negative implications and results. European merchants and missionaries had been in China since the period of Mongolian rule (1271–1368), but question of national heritage took hold beginning in the late 19th century. Specifically, conservation, collecting, archaeology, museology, and anthropology entered China with Western researchers and scholarship. Knowledge and practices of the West were sometimes transformative for Chinese researchers and practitioners, but Western vandalism of cultural heritage occurred at the same time. The resulting interplay between traditional Chinese values and newly introduced foreign practices, Zhu argues, caused China to move far beyond antiquarianism and develop its own attitudes and practices. The result would be a national cultural heritage that worked for China. In response to widespread looting by Europeans, especially of Buddhist cave sites, institutions to protect cultural heritage rose. China Monuments Society was established in 1908 with the support of ambassadors from France, Russia, Japan, and the Netherlands. The American Archaeological Society launched a campaign to protect and conserve important cultural sites. The Ancient Relic Management Committee was established in 1928. 1930 saw the enactment of the Preservation of Antique Objects Law. All of them were in line with European policies such as the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, but were formulated to address Chinese entities such as Buddhist cave-temples. Europeans and Western-trained Chinese were working in China in the early 20th century, especially as archaeologists, but China persisted in its own brand of modernisation. The Guocui Movement, aimed at preserving the uniquely Chinese concept of National Learning, emerged. One of the most important developments of Chinese engagement with its cultural past was the rise of National Museums.

The societies and museums led to what the author refers to as the Heritage Industry, the subject of chapter four. Its beginnings were immediately after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966–1976) posed an unprecedented challenge to cultural heritage preservation, a cultural rupture, a process aptly described by the author as ‘forgetting and remembering the past’. Major decisions about cultural heritage preservation as well as engagement with international programs, agencies, and protocols were on hold until the reopening of China to the West in the 1980s. From that point on, initiatives and policies were rapid and decisive. Sites associated with cultural heroes or historical narratives dating to the third and second millennia BCE were rebuilt as heritage sites, becoming loci of national building and international tourism. By 2023, China had 57 UNESCO World Heritage sites. A temple to China’s legendary ancestor Yu the Great, Confucius’s birthplace, and the excavation sites of Liangzhu jade, Anyang, and Sanxingdui are examples. Here the scholar Yujie Zhu comes forth. The rapidity and packaging, he assesses, have given way to a mass production of the past, and even if spatial beautification is a result, disenchantment is equally present. Cultural heritage preservation in China, one reads approximately halfway through the book, is easily overtaken by consumerism, sometimes in the name of exoticism, tourism, and commercialism. Beyond them, he emphasises, China’s past is increasingly digitised, a standard practice in the ‘heritage industry’.

The next four chapters focus on specific sites where different versions of cultural heritage have been implemented. Tianyi Pavilion is the first, the subject of chapter five. Tianyi Pavilion refers to one building in the residential estate of Fan Qin, a 16th-century man of great wealth in the beautiful southeastern coastal city Ningbo. The building was his private library. The first stage of heritage preservation occurred after the Pavilion builder’s death, for Fan had willed that only family members should be responsible for the library and that the library could not be divided. Even in the first half of the 19th century, only people surnamed Fan were permitted to enter Tianyi Pavilion. That this was a case of an original owner’s request that was likely to outlive its viability is only one aspect of the preservation of Tianyi Pavilion’s cultural heritage. Physical preservation of this and other wooden buildings on the grounds was ever a concern. So were changing Chinese attitudes about book collecting, use, and copying. So was the involvement of the government, who turned here in the 18th century for works only preserved at the pavilion that would be included in the magisterial compilation of Chinese writings known as Siku Quanshu. Challenge to a traditional Chinese library came again in the early 20th century when the Western concept of libraries, particularly access, entered to China. The library survived the ‘Cultural Revolution’. The answer to the collecting aspect of preserving China’s past heritage was a Chinese one: Tianyi Pavilion is now a public museum.

Baosheng Temple and its collection, focused on its Buddhist statues, is the case study for preservation of the cultural heritage of a monument. Located in Luzhi, Jiangsu province, the Buddhist complex was founded in 503, destroyed in the mid-9th century, and restored through the efforts of a monk in 1013. Decline and natural disaster led to periods of widespread deterioration and rebuilding from then until total destruction (along with many other monasteries in south China) during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement in the mid-19th century. Intervention of a local convinced the Taiping army to save a few of Baosheng Temple’s buildings, perhaps an act one could call verbal preservation. Preservation in the early 20th century was for the purpose of expansion as an educational institution, an act in line with the replacement of the imperial exam system with a Western-style educational system that needed school spaces. The transformation was successful, but around 1920 it was noticed that largely ignored statues and murals that might date to the 8th century were in a building that had never been repaired. Intervention from a Japanese art historian in 1926 brought international attention to the statues. Then, a massive fire burned most of the temple complex the next year. Thereupon, US-trained architect Robert (Wenzhao) Fan (1893–1979) designed a reinforced concrete building where statues and murals were preserved to reflect much earlier styles. Baosheng Temple did not fare well during the Cultural Revolution. Today, however, it is a heritage, rather than religious, site whose old objects are in an on-site museum, as well as a national tourist site that brings revenue to the region.

The next case study, in chapter seven, is called Reproducing the Past, but it involves much more than simple reproduction. The subject is the Orchid Pavilion, the location of a literati gathering in 353 that included China’s most famous calligrapher Wang Xizhi. Wang Xizhi’s Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering is known not only for its promulgation of literati theory, but equally for the style of his calligraphy and for the gardens and water of its setting. Zhu interweaves site, calligraphy, the socialisation of educated friends, and the historical event to expound on how all four aspects have been influential in the preservation and interpretation of cultural heritage in Japan as well as in China. This extremely interesting chapter also addresses excavation at the site and public consumption of culture.

Liulichang in Beijing is the last of the case studies. It is used to discuss how the past is exchanged. Liulichang was where scholars and antiquarians bought writing materials, books, and antiques in the 18th and 19th centuries. Through Liulichang, Zhu discusses the evolving nature of the literati, appreciation of old objects, commercialism, and a Beijing neighborhood from late imperial to Republic of China to the Maoist era to today. The chapter is an opportunity also to discuss huiguan (guilds), where merchants, scholars, and aspiring scholars stayed with sojourners from their native places while in Beijing, as well as the role of the marketplace in festivals, and temple fairs in cultural heritage. Liulichang is shown to be a place the Chinese government could support because a past use could transform into a modern shopping space.

The book is well organised and so well expressed that a reader has no reason to challenge its conclusions: the past is continuously remade through heritage; a fascination with the past is deeply rooted in Chinese civilisation, rendering preservation an inherent cultural value; Western principles of preservation worked well in China’s 20th century yet have transformed into Chinese versions in this century; China’s arts, whether calligraphy, Buddhist statuary, or garden building, offer natural paths for cultural heritage preservation; museums and libraries are prime agendas for China today, and both are inherent institutions of cultural preservation. Finally, the author tells us the future studies for which he has laid groundwork: a comparison of tangible and intangible past, authenticity, and the role (or lack) of creativity in transmission of past cultural heritage, in other words, the future of the past.

Cultural heritage, the inevitable reconfiguration of the past in the process of defining, understanding, and assessing it, and how to responsibly accomplish restoration or renovation of a site that is embedded in a complicated historical past have long been on the minds of planners, preservers, and theorists. The many writings about the subject and key projects are taken into account in China’s Heritage through History. The success of the book is that its subject is the Chinese version of cultural heritage. After reading it, the necessity of the word history in the title is obvious, for the four examples of reconfigured pasts are uniquely Chinese versions of systems with parallels in many other parts of the world.

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Abbreviations

UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation

ICOMOS

International Council on Monuments and Sites

1

Liu Chang, The Forbidden City (Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2012) provides this kind of information. Yangshi Lei, the notes and drawings of the renowned Lei family whose members were in charge of rebuilding at the Forbidden City and other Beijing monuments beginning in the 17th-century, are unique and uniquely important in understanding reconstruction and preservation, but only for imperial monuments in Beijing.

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Reference

Liu, Chang. The forbidden city; 2012; Beijing, Tsinghua University Press: