Harriet Evans - Michael Rowlands - Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China-Lexington Books (2021)

Grassroots Values
and Local Cultural

Heritage in China
Grassroots Values
and Local Cultural
Heritage in China
Edited by Harriet Evans

and Michael Rowlands
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Names: Evans, Harriet, editor. | Rowlands, M. J., editor.
Title: Grassroots values and local cultural heritage in China / edited by
Harriet Evans and Michael Rowlands.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021020474 (print) | LCCN 2021020475 (ebook) | ISBN
9781793632739 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793632746 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cultural property—Protection—China—Citizen
participation. | Local history. | Nationalism and historiography—China.
| China—Civilization–2002- | China—Social life and customs—2002- |
China—Historiography.
Classification: LCC DS779.43 .G84 2021 (print) | LCC DS779.43 (ebook) |
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020474
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Contents
List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Grassroots Values: Issues, Questions and
Perspectives on Local Heritage 1
Harriet Evans and Michael Rowlands
1 hat and Whose is Local Heritage? Perspectives from
W
Everyday Lives in an “Old Beijing” Neighborhood 17
Harriet Evans
2 ncountering Virginia Woolf in Dashalar: Heritage Quests
E
and Local Efficacies 37
Beverley Butler
3 ediscovering “Huangshan” in a Heritage Context:
R
Spatial Strategy and Invisible Locality 69
Luo Pan
4 “ Slave(s)” to the Great Museum: Heritage, Labor and
Ethics in the Jianchuan Museum Complex 91
Zhang Lisheng
5 etween State and Local Residents: Heritage Perspectives
B
and Their Combination in Quanzhou, Southern Fujian 115
Stephan Feuchtwang
6 aming the Living Heritage in Quanzhou
N 133
Michael Rowlands
v
vi Contents
7 ommitments to the Past: Cultural Transmission in

C
a Naxi Village 159
Peter Guangpei Ran
8 hreads of Time in a Small Naxi Village: Women, Weaving
T
and Gendered Dimensions of Local Cultural Heritage 183
Harriet Evans
9 estruction, Devastation and Reinvented Tradition in
D
Heritage Construction in Dukezong, Shangri-La 209
Wu Yinling
10 rom “Cultural Relics” to “Sacred Objects”:
F
A Case Study of Local Heritage Protection in a Tibetan
Buddhist Monastery 231
He Beili
Afterword 255
Wang Mingming
Index 271
About the Contributors 279
Figures
Figure 0.1. map of the locations and respective chapter

A
numbers of the field sites in this book,
courtesy of Haina Zhou 2
Figure 1.1. ntering a “big cluttered courtyard,”
E
courtesy of Jia Yong 20
Figure 1.2. Inside a big cluttered courtyard, 2009, author’s photo 27
Figure 2.1. ostcard from Chen Ke Exhibition,
P
2011, author’s photo 57
Figure 2.2. usts of Virginia Woolf and Rabindranath Tagore in
B
Bloomsbury, London, courtesy of David Francis 64
Figure 3.1. Hui style village, author’s photo 70
Figure 3.2. iyang in the Lane: a complex with old Huizhou
L
and modern styles, author’s photo 83
Figure 3.3. Drum dancers of both genders, author’s photo 86
Figure 4.1. ast-iron arch at the entrance of the Jianchuan
C
Museum Complex, author’s photo 93
Figure 4.2. uilders working on the early JMC museums in 2005,
B
courtesy of the Jianchuan Museum Complex 100
Figure 4.3. an’s comments on Vice-Director Yuan’s April 2014
F
work report, author’s photo 105
vii
viii Figures
Figure 6.1 Map

of Quanzhou with Jubao Chengnan indicated.
Quanzhou South Street Print made by Quanzhou
Engineer Bureau, 1922 135
Figure 6.2. Ideal
image of Quanzhou in the 19th century—
Quanzhou as Venice of the East, author’s photo 137
Figure 6.3. Visitors to the Fumei Temple, author’s photo 153
Figure 7.1. A view of Zheba Valley, author’s photo 163
Figure 7.2. Papermaking, photo by Harriet Evans 167
Figure 7.3. Sacred spring well, author’s photo 174
Figure 8.1. M
en preparing the pig for cooking for the funeral
banquet, October 2014, author’s photo 186
Figure 8.2. N
axi women setting up temporary looms for
filming, author’s photo 196
Figure 9.1. D
ukezong surrounded by the county town of
Shangri-La, author’s photo 209
Figure 9.2. Tibetan Scriptures Hall, Dukezong, author’s photo 211
Figure 9.3. T
urtle Mountain Park, by Moonlight Plaza,
Dukezong, author’s photo 217
Figure 10.1. Panorama of the Samye Monastery, author’s photo 234
Figure 10.2. “Like Me” statue of the Lotus Master created
A
during the Tubo period, author’s photo 240
Figure 10.3. onks performing the purifying rite during the
M
consecration ceremony, author’s photo 244
Acknowledgments
This book has traveled a long, meandering and sometimes troublesome jour-
ney from its early beginnings in 2011, involving many twists and turns and
comings and goings. That it is finally being published is due to the support of
many individuals and institutions.
We first want to acknowledge our immense gratitude to the Leverhulme
Trust for funding the ethnographic research on which this volume is based,
and for their patience in enabling us to change the design of the project when
our own circumstances so required. We also thank the British Academy and
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for supporting the establishment of
a research network under the Co-reach Scheme in 2010–2011, which estab-
lished the foundations for the subsequent Leverhulme Project.
There are many individuals who in different ways have contributed to
discussions that now take shape in this volume: Daniel Abramson, Bao
Jiang, Paul Basu, He Shangli, Paul Kendall, Erik Mueggler, Edwin Schmitt,
Sun Jing, Marina Svensson, Tang Yun, Wang Cangbai, Wang Shuli, Weng
Naiqun, Nancy Xiong, Zhang Yuan, and Zhu Yujie. Special thanks go to
Professor Yang Zhengwen, director of the Anthropology Institute of the
Southwestern University for Nationalities, Chengdu, for generously hosting
an initial workshop in 2013.
We have greatly benefited from Professor Wang Mingming’s insights and
support in contributing to the planning of this project, and particularly in his
willingness to involve members of his PhD cohort in what became an inspired
joint research program. He also gave advice in deciding on the sequencing
of the chapters in this volume. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Zhang
Lisheng, without whose patient and diligent contribution to translating, edit-
ing and formatting, this volume would not have seen the light of day. We also
ix
x Acknowledgments
thank Mark Czeller who stepped into the breach at the last minute to complete
the copy editing.
Susan McEachern, senior executive editor at Rowman & Littlefield, was
the first to suggest publishing this volume with Lexington Books. Many
thanks to her for her support over many years. Finally, we thank our editor
Eric Kuntzman, and his colleagues Kasy Beduhn and Mikayla Mislak.
Introduction
Grassroots Values: Issues, Questions
and Perspectives on Local Heritage
Harriet Evans and Michael Rowlands
What is cultural heritage in China today? Is it a discourse, a domain of social,

cultural and even political life? How useful is it to us in thinking about how
grassroots groups and communities talk about and live what they understand as
those crucial elements of their own cultural practices which are essential to mak-
ing their lives meaningful—in other words, how they live and die? What kinds
of relationship between past, present and future are invoked by the term? Domi-
nant top-down practices of cultural heritage in China are accompanied by the
massive construction of museums, competition for United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognition, and projects of
heritage tourism designed to boost regional and local incomes. In recent years
they have also been associated with the ambitious program of nationalist expan-
sion associated with the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative.1 At the grass
roots, the lives of local communities across the length and breadth of China have
been radically transformed by official heritage projects, most notably through
their insertion into local economies. But how do those local communities, both
directly and indirectly drawn into these projects and their discursive effects,
approach the issue of what to preserve from the past to transmit to the future?
To what extent and in what ways do people at the grass roots whose lives are
framed by very different interests to those of the architects of big projects of
“cultural heritage,” engage or not with the language of “cultural heritage”?
In responding to these questions, this volume looks at the diverse range of
local cultural knowledge that underpins ideas about the transmission of cul-
tural practice and belief. As our title suggests, our main concern starts with
the grass roots as a social, material, spatial and emotional arena of everyday
life and relationships where cultural beliefs seen as essential to the livability
and sustainability of life are articulated by the people who hold them. The
local emerges as a site of negotiation between state, entrepreneurial and local
1
2 Harriet Evans and Michael Rowlands
community interests in an economic, political and cultural context in which,

under the impact of neoliberal globalization, heritage practice in China has
been transforming local social, economic and cultural life and reshaping
domestic and global notions of China’s national identity. Largely based on
long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Chinese anthropologists, the
volume approaches the local not as a fixed spatial definition of place but as a
shifting arena of everyday life and belonging profoundly—if not always evi-
dently—shaped by translocal and transcultural forces, underpinning ordinary
social interactions at the grass roots.
The research contributing to this project covers areas throughout China,
stretching between Beijing in the north, the southeast and the southwest
through to the Tibetan Autonomous Region.
While each chapter addresses a specific locality, shown in figure 0.1, our
research overall interrogates the meaning and efficacy of heritage as a series of
multiple, converging and conflicting creative practices and possibilities. Given
the pervasive power and appeal of the state’s ambitious projects of museum
Figure 0.1. A map of the locations and respective chapter numbers of the field sites in
this book, courtesy of Haina Zhou
Introduction 3
building and world heritage recognition, a dominant discourse of “cultural

heritage” (wenhua yichan) has percolated unevenly through to local people’s
experience of how they negotiate ideas about cultural preservation and conser-
vation. Across different geographical sites from powerful centers of national
heritage value, such as Quanzhou in Fujian Province, or Huangshan in Anhui
Province, through to small Naxi communities off the beaten track in northern
Yunnan, wenhua yichan is bringing a new focus to people’s ideas about the
value of their own local cultural practices, their conceptualization of their pasts
and what then becomes a value of loss (Maags and Svensson 2018).
Heritage in the terms developed and disseminated under UNESCO has
long been seen in some top-down way as a discursive category born of pro-
tocols and conventions, their realization in specific circumstances and their
social impact (Smith 2006). One purpose of this volume is to critique the
ways in which heritage has been subsumed under categories increasingly
refined around their relevance for social, economic and environmental poli-
cies. Indeed, a recent “turn” in heritage studies explores the role of heritage in
preserving the future of the environment, at a time of global uncertainty and
transformation (Harrison 2020). In line with UNESCO’s language of inclu-
sivity and participation, there has also been increasing interest on the part of
the architects of dominant heritage discourse in “listening to” and “respond-
ing to” local articulations of heritage needs. This is far from a simple matter
or process, and we address the extent to which this “listening to” is done
through senses mediated by a heavy routinization of global heritage language.
The discourse of cultural heritage has brought a precision to local questions
about what people need—even who people are—that may be threatened and
that they may be in danger of losing. It goes beyond the conceptualization
of the local as the spatial, economic and political iteration of the global (Ap-
padurai 1990; Dirlik 1996) to access the grass roots in asking what matters to
people—what they see as of enduring value—and therefore worth preserving
and changing in order to preserve.
In the context of the current “turn” back to tradition in China, the top-down
discourse of heritage also redefines—even invents—tradition in light of the
new heritage projects that have been emerging across the sites of our research
and beyond, leading to what, echoing Hobsbawm and Ranger, can be thought
of as the “invention” or “the newness of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger
2012). This is most prominently described in Wu Yinling’s analysis of the
restoration of Dukezong as a Tibetan “old town,” and in Luo Pan’s account
of the transformation of Huangshan Mountain from a place of spiritual refuge
and freedom into a heritage tourist site favored by national political leaders. It
is also the backdrop to long-term Dashalar residents attachment to the dilapi-
dated place of their lives and memories even though they did not necessarily
still live there, and in some instances at least would gladly have moved to
better accommodations had they had the chance.
The political context in China and globally has shifted significantly since
2012, and China’s heritage boom has acquired an increasingly ambitious
nationalist stamp, to the point that from the perspective of official versions
of history and heritage, there is a noticeable tendency to narrate regional and
ethnic diversity according to the rubric of a channeling of historical, spatial
and cultural differences into a unitary articulation of a long, continuous civi-
lizational history (Wu and Hou 2015) . To achieve this, China has developed
a unique authorized heritage discourse, in particular embracing the UNESCO
Intangible Heritage Convention of 2003 (Gao 2014). While from this per-
spective, the distinction between state and local could appear quite marked,
the centripetal articulation of civilizational history is invariably present and
quite internalized at the local level, most notably in Han areas, as is the state.
Yet it coexists with other forms of temporalities. This foregrounds the lo-
cal as a site where the plurality of space, cultural practice and temporality
materializes through multiple relationships, objects, agencies and forms of
knowledge.
This volume further demonstrates that the local and temporal diversity
covered by the individual chapters converges in giving a very clear sense of
a gendered world, where routinized practices and products of work, labor,
family and social relationships and everyday rituals, are inseparable from
gendering acts and concepts. The next two chapters on a small neighborhood
in central Beijing followed by Evans’s later chapter on a small Naxi village,
address this explicitly. In others, there are clear “boundaries” of cultural
practice and social behavior, the status and importance of which are accepted
as natural by local people. Across time and generational difference, however,
mobility and changing access to the market and to materials used in daily so-
cial life mediate the experience of these “boundaries” such that they become
more liminal and fluid.
In what follows in this introduction, we elaborate what we see as the main
themes cutting across the different chapters in this volume. We begin with
the local.
LOCALITY
Across our different sites of inquiry, the “local” appears in different forms
and spaces—the remote rural, the urban neighborhood, mainstream heritage
sites, and the museum town. We accept that any idea of locality is a consti-
tuted act involving mixings and entanglements crossing multiple boundaries.
Introduction 5
The transcultural connections to locality are formed as multiplicities of fluid

dynamics. Particular localities will be the outcomes of entangled forms of
cultural interactions and exchanges constituted over long periods, that maybe
realized in different places as frontiers, ports, markets, metropoles, yet lo-
calized as tropes in webs of social relations. While nothing is “pure,” what
contextualizes, historicizes and localizes the cultural tropes in such webs are
humanmade and can be profound and intentional. We repeat Mauss’s clas-
sic dictum: “Societies live by borrowing from each other, but they define
themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance” (Mauss
1920, 242–251).
Moreover particular persons who are able to act as cultural brokers trigger
these acts of transculturation. Our volume begins with a paired contribution
by Evans and Butler on Dashalar as such a site of borrowing and fluidity
from which a long-term historicized sense of locality has formed. As a place
for the constitution of “Old Beijingers’” shared memory, their rejection of a
fixed, essentialized idea of “Old Beijing” and their awareness that the term is
used very differently—has been “reinvented”—in the fixities of official heri-
tage discourse, promotes a contextual localizing of cultural tropes within a
global net of social and economic interactions. What Butler calls the “effica-
cies of heritage,” realized as a particular locality—Dashalar—also articulate
the experience of an aesthetic triggered by a shared encounter between the
Bloomsbury set in 1930s China and its re-presentation as a pop-up installa-
tion in Beijing Design Week in Dashalar in 2011.
As noted above, we move from the conceptualization of the local as the
material, social and political arena where the effects and meaning of global-
ization are realized, to focus on the local as the site constituted of grassroots
practices and passions. Locality contains the expectation that the meanings
and parameters of place and space at different levels of inquiry and experi-
ence must be negotiated and discovered, not assumed. The concept gives rise
to challenging questions about how we identify spatial, social and cultural
boundaries, lines of inclusion and exclusion, representation and authority.
As place, locality is a “centre of belonging” (Feuchtwang 2004), physical,
sensory and cosmological, that is always made and remade, the cultural
value of which is not necessarily shared or understood in the same way by all
those who live in, move through or occupy it, or who ritually revere it, even
though they may use the same name and physical parameters to describe it.
Following Doreen Massey, place and space are constituted through and by the
intersecting relationships of the people, bodies and objects that occupy and
traverse them, across time (Massey 2005). With reference to the main theme
of this volume, the local is also identified by different levels of hierarchy and
authority, as a site of inquiry and intervention by official agencies responsible
for promoting cultural heritage projects, as a site of negotiation between dif-

ferent state, entrepreneurial and local community and private interests, and as
a site of everyday life, belonging and ethical attachment where its material,
spatial, sensory and ritual character is taken for granted in ordinary local so-
cial interactions and relationships. A principal difference lies in the control of
authorized and non-authorized expressions of the past. Rowlands’s focus on
local cultural elites in Quanzhou define an intermediary level of cultural elites
who, embedded in Minnan culture and language, authorize their interpretation
of the histories of Quanzhou. A local cultural elite is able to justify their status
through promising the protection of a specific form of local heritage by adapt-
ing the language of authorized discourse to both convey and legitimize it.
The various identifications of the local imply different claims to authority to
represent and protect the “authentic.” By extension, they have significant im-
plications for understandings of what heritage value is and how it is identified.
China’s long history of state involvement in local affairs gives the notion
of “locality” a particular significance of scale affecting the articulation of lo-
cal cultural knowledge and local heritage initiatives. It involves a sense of lo-
cal (difang) customs and beliefs as distinctive as well as potentially disturbing
and subversive values, but within the traditional cosmology of “tianxia” (all
under heaven) it may simultaneously acquire a metonymic value as China.
Long-term familiarity with the state’s local presence feeds into contemporary
expectations that local communities integrate state policy in their practice.
A new vocabulary of cultural heritage (wenhua yichan) has introduced new
ways of conceptualizing the past and how historical sites and cultural tradi-
tions are imagined, valued and interpreted. Yet, at the same time, the material,
spatial and cultural exchanges of everyday local life offer “grassroots” alter-
natives to top-down articulations of the local, expressed in ideas of cultural
value that draw on the centrifugal forces of local custom and in negotiations
with, as well as resistance to, official agencies. The chapters in this volume
reveal cultural practices and initiatives sometimes associated with the domi-
nant language of “cultural heritage” that are positioned in a web of local rela-
tionships, connections and practices involving neighborhood/community res-
idents and state officials, entrepreneurs and even army personnel. The forms
of knowledge and belief indicated in these cultural practices are by no means
uniformly, if at all, articulated as “heritage.” Their sustainability depends on
grass roots—always multi-layered—accommodation of the state’s commer-
cial and political interests and negotiation of complex relationships between
individual, community and party-state agencies through reconfigurations and
even avoidance of, rather than overt resistance to, top-down heritage poli-
cies. How these cultural practices emerge from such negotiations necessarily
influences their character, while the shifting relationships and often opaque
Introduction 7
boundaries between “private” and state they exemplify suggest new forms
of attachment and belonging that constantly redefine the notion of the local.
Another feature contributing to the incessant redefinition and reproduction
of the local concerns what Ran, drawing on Feuchtwang and Rowlands’s
recent work, identifies as “encompassment” (Feuchtwang and Rowlands
2019). Whether in the form of external commercial influences on local artisan
practices, or in the absorption of external knowledge through physical mo-
bility and migration, or the deployment of external “experts”—as Rowlands
demonstrates in his chapter—practices of “encompassment” produce shifting
translocal connections, bringing the outside into the inside in ways that medi-
ate but do not obscure the core meaning of the inside as underpinning the real
meaning of individual subjecthood.
Butler also develops this theme of translocal currents in defining what she
conceptualizes as “efficacies of heritage” expressed in different material and
ethical forms. In conditions of rapid change involving physical and emotional
dislocation, such as are described across the chapters of this volume, the ef-
ficacies of place in the local in the terms we use above, may be associated
with experiences of collapse. Attachment to place as an embedded form of
knowledge giving substance and meaning to local lives is thus revealed as a
kind of potent heritage.
TEMPORALITY, HISTORY AND AUTHENTICITY
Time, as Doreen Massey reminds us, is remembered through spatialized

events and relationships. It is what gives a weight, almost a sense of interior-
ity, to people’s identification with the place and history of their neighborhood.
Many of the people and communities we have come to know in the course of
our research for this book have been living in conditions of extremely rapid ma-
terial, spatial and social change, including literal disappearance—(“collapse”)
of the homes where they were born and grew to adulthood—with profound
and sometimes disturbing effects on local and family relationships and on
how individuals live their intimate networks and themselves—on their sense
of self. After years of being subjected to the aggressive imposition of party-
state controls during the Mao era in the form of political campaigns and the
suppression of local cultural practices, the changes in the past two decades
or so include a relative tolerance of local belief systems, as long as these
don’t transgress acceptable knowledge boundaries and can contribute to local
economies in the form of heritage tourism. The adoption of the Intangible
Cultural Heritage discourse (ICH) means that many cultural practices, previ-
ously seen as “superstition” have been re-branded as “cultural heritage” (Gao
2014; Liang 2013). The heritagization of local practices, mediated through

local elites, has become an important part of linking the local “ethnic” to
the formation a historical national culture. Both Ran and Evans show how
dongba ritual and writing, set in the revival of dongba culture in Lijiang, are
distinct elements of a wider national revival, expressed most recently as the
“China Dream” by President Xi Jinping.
However, a discussion about grassroots approaches to what others might
call “cultural heritage,” gives rise to many questions concerning how people
narrate their histories, whose voices narrate them, and what and how to
transmit and preserve as the condition of local cultural survival. What under-
standings of the relationship between the past, present and future contribute
to these decisions? In other words, what are the temporal differences mediat-
ing how people in differently placed communities come together in ascribing
value to some memories and some objects, but not others? How are these
decisions mediated by local gendering processes and practices? And what do
these differences mean for agents of and claims about “authenticity” (Zhu
2015)?
In conditions in which the material and spatial evidence of the past has been
destroyed or transformed beyond recognition in and to long-term local com-
munities—as is the case in all the sites discussed in this volume—whether
in natural or man-made disasters or political campaigns, decisions about and
practices of preservation are necessarily framed, at least in part, by what is
remembered of the past and what is desired for the future. In turn, elucidation
of this depends inter alia on how time is conceptualized. Our research reveals
important departures from the material qualities associated with the linear
notion of time underpinning dominant UNESCO-inspired heritage meanings.
He Beili’s chapter, for example, reveals a temporality that is fundamentally
at odds with the conceptual regulation of time as a chronologically ordered
sequence of materialized and social events that then can be associated with
notions of commercial value. She argues that the “density of time” inscribed
in local Tibetan Buddhist practitioners’ worldview is like “a narrow bottle-
neck through which the fine sand of time flows from the beginning to the
present.” It is this hourglass-shaped temporality that sustains local people’s
accounts of the building of the monastery, and also explains monks’ assertion
that the monastery’s entire history can be found in the life story of the Lotus
Master. Every repair since the monastery’s creation has been an “offering” or
a “return” to its history, rather than a contribution bringing “new things” to
a “renewed” history. The material form of the years between the beginnings
and the present of the monastery thus disappears into insignificance. Hence,
a recently taken photograph of what is claimed to be an original statue dating
back a long time can become as spiritually powerful an object as the “authen-
Introduction 9
tic object” itself. This clearly contrasts with apprehensions of time as crucial
to the authenticity of object, inscribed in the material conservation of past
object to resemble its former self.
Temporality also becomes a contested category linked to competing and
contingent notions of historical time. Hence, as Wu Yinling describes, the
narrative of Dukezong’s history as a Tibetan “old town” going back one
thousand three hundred years commonly features in tourist websites to add
weight to the authentic mystique of Dukezong’s ancient traditions. This is
challenged by the literal materiality of Dukezong’s three-hundred-year-old
buildings predating the reconstruction of the town around the millennium.
Even more striking a version of history for claims to the “authenticity” of the
“old town” reconstructed since the fire of January 2014 is the material reality
that many of the town’s buildings that have been “restored” date back to little
more than twenty years.
Temporality and attributions of historical time are further inscribed with
local spiritual, mystical and political meanings of place. Hence, part of the
tourist mystique of Huangshan lies in its historical reputation as a site of
refuge and freedom for individuals exiled by state authorities as well as for
poets and artists seeking inspiration from spectacular natural beauty. Huang-
shan’s historic mystical charisma was then confirmed, in a different form,
by the architect of China’s post-Mao market reforms, Deng Xiaoping, when
he announced it to be a crucial center of commercial development. Zheba
people’s implicit invocation of the spiritual purity of their cultural practices,
in contrast with the vulgar commercialization of Naxi culture in Lijiang, in
part rests on the spatial sanctity associated with Aming, the legendary founder
of Naxi culture.
Claims about authenticity are key to UNESCO-type approaches to cultural
heritage preservation and explain the huge investment of research, artisan
skills and funds oriented to projects of cultural preservation and conservation.
However, this too, is a contested term. Zhu, for example, treats authenticity
as inseparable from the conditions set for inclusion in the World Heritage
Convention’s inscription procedures and their local evaluation (Zhu 2015).
These standards, he and others would maintain, are deeply embedded in
the state imposition on local communities of UNESCO inspired values of
authentication. In contrast, some scholars in the Chinese context argue that
the “authentic” (yuanshengtai) may be best understood as a component of a
national discourse of cultural authority shored up by tradition (Weng 2010),
as pointed out by Ran in this volume. Indeed, the translocally mediated dis-
course of cultural and ecological authenticity has been so socially pervasive
and persuasive in recent years that its “essential logic” has gone unquestioned
(Kendall 2019, 77). In conditions where cultural heritage offers substantial
economic returns, the evocation of “authentic traditions” may be absorbed

to cement a subjective and collective sense of belonging that paradoxically
both reproduces and seeks to resolve possibly conflictive competition for re-
sources. Moreover, such competition is fed by the state’s increasing interest
in asserting control over “cultures” by investing more and more in heritage
building projects associated with groups and communities, including ethnic
minority communities, long reviled for their “feudal” and “superstitious”
beliefs. Understood as everyday practice of what Rowlands calls “living
heritage,” for example, in domestic and social labor, as well as in ritual prac-
tice, the authentic is clearly inscribed with gendered meanings, establishing
boundaries or space shifters in the preservation of local practices by people
ensuring that those practices are contained within special domains and local
responses to everyday life.
The authentic may reside in rituals of respect in sharing tea with former
colleagues, as Rowlands describes. It may also reside in what is materialized
as an “aesthetics of life” in the village of an individual’s birth and upbringing,
as Feuchtwang describes. Again, claims to authenticity may be cemented by
appeals to a spatially shifting idea of the outside, in the form of bringing in
expertise of local intellectuals and heritage practitioners, or of appealing to
diasporic yearnings of belonging.
MORAL COMMUNITIES, ETHICAL IMAGINARIES

AND LIVED REALITIES
Attributions of authenticity carry with them implications of moral value and

ethical commitment that may be crucial to individual and collective senses of
the sustainability of local life. Indeed, authenticity is so identified with state-
imposed rules of evaluation, that the ethical creates a crucial and protective
boundary between state-imposed authenticity and the performance of local
efficacious practices, as Evans’s and Butler’s chapters reveal. Maintaining
such a protective boundary may emerge out of a core of respect for ancestors
as a moral endeavor, as Ran’s and Rowlands’s chapters suggest. As such,
it has nothing to do with authenticity. Rather, the morality of everyday life
emerges as the protective boundary against outside imposition. The structural
situation of local elites within the unstable terrain of this boundary explains
their “trickster” qualities of facing both ways at the same time.
With reference to heritage practice, local decisions about the preservation
of site and object may be associated with ritual practices which encapsulate
an existential struggle for ethical living, always mediated by differences in
generation, gender and ethnicity and, as many chapters in this volume reveal,
Introduction 11
by social and political status. The idea of the ethical may also be associated
with the sanctity of place and hence with the virtue of association with place.
The ritual or other practices oriented to respecting place are fundamental to
what Mueggler described as “how people inhabit their most intimate sur-
roundings in the face of loss or violence” (Mueggler 2001, 20). Heritage
preservation may thus emerge as a kind of recognition of ethical claims and
practices; it becomes efficacious as a source of ethical affirmation, to the
idea of what Beverley Butler, as mentioned above calls “heritage efficacy.”
In the terms developed by Rowlands in this volume, and elsewhere by Ran,
the preservation of house is the material core of the capacity to honor the
ancestors, and hence, the well-being of the living (Ran 2018). As Ran nar-
rates in this volume, the notion of authenticity also acquires valence through
processes of myth-making as a mode of sanctifying place as a site where
the mythical/divine power of place can be experienced as a draw to heritage
tourists, as, for example, in Lijiang, Shangri-La, Dukezong and Huangshan.
The gendered characteristics of the implications of moral value and ethical
commitment in heritage practice, however this is defined, become particu-
larly evident in the privileging of men, also by virtue of their age, as sources
of spiritual authority and social and political status. They commonly emerge
in public displays of heritage projects as the guardians of local efforts to
preserve and transmit the past as a moral endeavor. Hence, Feuchtwang
mainly describes individual men, former officials and entrepreneurs, who as
members of the local elite, see their role in protecting and reproducing local
cultural practices as a form of acknowledging their profound respect, both for
the places that nurtured them to become successful entrepreneurs and public
figures, and for the moral qualities of the “old gentry” tradition with which
they identify. This is a key aspect of male cultural elites defining their moral
value as old gentry, as argued in Rowlands’s chapter. A contrasting example
is the founder-director of the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Zhang Lisheng’s
chapter, who announces his role as keeper of the “truth” of China’s twentieth-
century history, not so much with reference to place in any specific terms but
to his patrilineal respect for his father. By contrast, it is the older women who,
in Rowlands’s research, emerge as the guardians of the material fabric of the
house as the essential site of connection with the ancestors and spiritual well-
being. In their different ways, these examples reveal how local senses of the
ethical are inseparable from the gendered worlds in which they are situated.
Another aspect of local articulations of the ethical can be narrated through
the concept of “encompassment” that Ran discusses, drawing on Feuchtwang
and Rowlands’s recent work (2019), to refer to assertions of local cultural
meaning that bring the outside in, without endangering the core inside. “En-
compassment” thus emerges as a concept that is useful in our attempts to think
about how ideas about the survival and sustainability of local life may be
upheld, in conditions and environments of intense and extensive change char-
acterized by shifting mediations between the local, the national and the global.
ETHNIC BOUNDARIES: WHOSE AND WHERE?
Significant attention in this volume goes to the experience of ethnic com-

munities, or what in Chinese discourse are called “minority nationalities”
(shaoshu minzu). For the purposes of our discussion here, it is important to
note how the “multiethnic” character of the Chinese state, consisting of fifty-
six officially designated “minority nationalities” is colorfully revisited in
“heritage performance” and utilized for commercial advantage across China.2
It is particularly vibrant in southwestern China—the broad region in which
three of the ethnographies in this book are situated—where the mix of ethnic
minorities is an omnipresent feature of village life. Inspired particularly by
Stevan Harrell’s work on the center’s “civilizing mission” vis-à-vis “national
minorities,” Wang Mingming has traced the 1980s revival of interest in
studying the “ethnicities” of southwest China in the context of shifting state
policies on the expressions of ethnic (and religious) difference (Wang 2012).
Or as Erik Mueggler put it in his moving study of the Yi people in southwest
China “studies of ethnicity [in China] have repeatedly shown how local iden-
tities are forcefully produced or molded by state policies” (Mueggler 2001,
126). Under the impact of the powerful commercial appeal of the discourse
of cultural heritage, the ethnic mix of the southwest is now a lucrative arm of
local heritage tourism, and notably often in highly gendered terms, as many
have argued (Schein 2000; Zhu 2018).
For the purposes of our present discussion, the chapters in this volume
reveal a tension between the centripetal orientation of a national assertion
of “Chinese” tradition and civilization, powerfully reproduced in large-scale
heritage projects; the subjective experience of everyday life in non-Han
communities—of what Kendall has termed “identities on the ground”—that
outsiders identify as “minority nationalities”; and, drawing again on Ken-
dall’s conceptualization, ethnicity as a process in the production of social
space and relationships (Kendall 2019). Consciously utilized for commercial
advantage, whether in museum displays or in “intangible heritage” perfor-
mances of ethnicity sometimes appear in terms that seem stilled by historical
narratives, as Wu Yinling argues in her analysis of the reinvention of Duke-
zong as a Tibetan “old town.” The reinvention of historical narratives of eth-
nic traditions is then repeatedly rehearsed in the tourist literature until it be-
comes accepted as “truth.” As such, it is naturalized in the narrative and visual
processes producing the boundaries between and reifying ethnic categories.
Introduction 13
However, “on the ground” the situation is very different. There, the com-
peting affective stakes of identifying with local “ethnic” identities on the one
hand, or with the opportunities for social and cultural capital offered by iden-
tifying with dominant Han culture on the other, may present individuals with
troubling choices, as Ran’s description of the Smart One poignantly reveals.
SEQUENCE OF THEMES
The chapters of this volume weave the above major themes in a sequence
that traces an intersecting story of place, dislocation, ethnicity, everyday
cultural and ritual practice and individual agency through different levels of
negotiations with state policies of cultural heritage. We group the chapters
under four loosely defined themes or strands. We start with those instances
where the dominant modernizing heritage discourse has to different degrees
and in different ways reframed local narratives and identifications, producing
shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in a fluid web of translocal
and transcultural forces and influences. The first two chapters on Dashalar
are paired to give an ethnographic glimpse of how the local is formed and
experienced over time through multiple translocal flows and exchanges, in-
cluding between the Crescent Moon Society and the Bloomsbury circle, yet
simultaneously produces what comes across as insular attachments to place
in long-term residents’ self-description as “Old Beijingers.”
We then move onto those where a dominant heritagization discourse has
an encompassing but not necessarily complete effect in claims of moral
virtue. Luo Pan’s chapter focuses on the mystical transformation of Mount
Huangshan after Deng Xiaoping’s visit and his declaration of the entrepre-
neurial role of tourism as a development strategy. Zhang Lisheng’s study of
the Jianchuan Museum Complex (JMC) is overtly the most complete account
of a constructed heritage tradition in the service of “historical truth” based
on the vision and charisma of a single cultural entrepreneur, Fan Jianchuan.
Nevertheless, he, as the founding director and curator of the JMC, is increas-
ingly met by unspoken resistances from his staff who, under Fan’s direction,
are effectively denied the possibility of promoting a more contested space of
entanglements and negotiations over time. A third strand includes chapters by
Stephan Feuchtwang and Mike Rowlands that show how ideas of history and
its associated modernizing heritage discourse are mediated and reinterpreted
through the involvement of officials, heritage experts and local cultural
elites. In different ways these make claims to be acting ethically in their re-
mediations of heritage and history, yet their “Janus-faced” character means
that for complex reasons, they do not fully, if at all, transform everyday
local life experiences, the preservation of which continues to be the subject

of intense and gendered concerns. The idea of the local is clearly segregated
in some people’s responses to heritage events as endangering the occasions
marked off ritually as life stages, the calendar and anniversaries. As Row-
lands’s chapter reveals, the secular and the religious/sacred overlap in these
instances when the secular aura of the museum and the ritual efficacy of the
temple support ideals of immortality.
Finally come those chapters about “cases” where there has long been an
often strong awareness of the impact of modernizing discourses, the latest
manifestation of which is the authorized heritage discourse and its associ-
ated effects on tourism. Here there is a clear spatial segregation between
grassroots ideas about authenticity and the entrepreneurial impact of tourism
and changing local economies. The boundaries created and mediations across
them form the focus of the Ran Guangpei’s and Harriet Evans’s chapters on
Zheba. Wu Yinling’s chapter focuses on the devastating effect of the 2014
fire and the local rebuilding of Dukezong’s “old town” along the lines of
a more explicit, if reinvented, ideal of Tibetan tradition. By distinguishing
restoration/reinvention of Tibetan tradition as a local version of the modern-
izing heritage discourse, she shows that this is never complete because other
competing ideas of heritage and restoration are in play. He Beili’s chapter on
sanctification demonstrates a grassroots means of reaching out to harmonize
with innovations from the outside, in response to top-down impositions of
heritage value as defined by official heritage discourse.
NOTES
1. OBOR, “the brainchild of Chinese President Xi Jinping, is an ambitious eco-

nomic development and commercial project that focuses on improving connectivity
and cooperation among multiple countries spread across the continents of Asia, Af-
rica, and Europe. Dubbed as the ‘Project of the Century’ by the Chinese authorities,
OBOR spans about 78 countries.” https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/one-belt
-one-road-obor.asp, last visited on November 27, 2020.
2. There is a rich literature on the complexities and criteria of the PRC’s 1950s
project to classify “minority nationalities.” For a useful summary of this, see Kendall
2019, 38–41.
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Introduction 15
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Chapter One
What and Whose is Local Heritage?

Perspectives from Everyday Lives
in an “Old Beijing” Neighborhood
Harriet Evans
Zhang Huiming lived with her husband and grown-up son in a dazayuan (big
cluttered courtyard) off Dashalar’s West Street, just southwest of Qianmen
at the southern end of Tian’anmen Square in central Beijing.* This was the
courtyard where Huiming was born in 1954 and where she was brought up.
It had been the home of her maternal great-grandparents and grandparents,
before which it had been a provincial association lodge (huiguan) for students
and businessmen from Jiangxi Province in southern China. Huiming was di-
agnosed with polio when she was six years old, and as an adult was officially
registered as disabled. Her husband Wang Wenli, one of five sons of a small
shop owner in a nearby neighborhood, moved into Huiming’s courtyard when
they married in 1979.
Both Huiming and her husband were proud of Huiming’s ancestral pres-
ence in her courtyard. Wang Wenli was employed by the official Travel
Agency (lüxing she) as a pedicab cyclist taking tourists around the heritage
sites of central Beijing, so he had accumulated considerable knowledge about
the history of “Old Beijing.” He was an accomplished calligrapher. He also
enjoyed giving monologues about the history of the heritage sites and build-
ings of “Old Beijing.” His intellectual and cultural skills had earned him the
nickname of “Old Professor” in the neighborhood. They also granted him a
certain cultural capital that others I knew in Dashalar acknowledged but did
not themselves enjoy.
The first time I visited Huiming and her husband, their dazayuan was in
a dilapidated state. Their home was a room of less than twenty-four square
meters divided into a living room and a bedroom by a large dresser and a
curtain. It was sparsely furnished with a small table and chairs, a single bed-
cum-sofa, a washstand, fridge and television. Though extremely tidy, it felt
damp. To my eyes, the rest of the dazayuan looked like an unruly jumble of
17
18 Harriet Evans
cooking pans, washing basins, bicycle wheels and potted plants. Outside on
the lane, the scene was even more chaotic, with an overhanging tangle of old
wires presenting passers-by with a hazardous aerial obstacle course.
Huiming’s disabled status gave her and her husband the opportunity to re-
locate to an apartment inside the third ring road, a much more central location
than that which most low-income relocatees could access. However, neither
she nor her husband wanted to leave the home to which she had been attached
throughout her life. Wang was also uncertain about the amount of compensa-
tion they stood to receive if they moved. Then, in 2010, in line with official
regulations granting special treatment to disabled people, the local govern-
ment decided to repair and redecorate their home. By the summer, their home,
including its roof and floor, had been refurbished. With white paint on the
walls, and a new brightly colored cover Huiming had bought for the bed, it
looked much brighter and more comfortable than before. The only thing that
was missing, Wang laconically commented, was a bathroom.
After more than thirty years of marriage, Huiming and her husband agreed
that they shared a pragmatic approach to their differences which established
a solid basis of mutual understanding, enabling them to weather potential
conflict. One area where this applied became evident in conversations about
current affairs when Wang showed his impatience at Huiming’s efforts to
offer an opinion on matters about which he claimed the authority to speak
and decide. He often used to tell her, in no indirect terms, to be quiet, since
she didn’t know what she was talking about. In response, Huiming backed
down, unwilling to fuel open argument. Wang’s appropriation of the “right
to speak” manifested a particular aspect of the gendered character of the “Old
Beijinger” which I discuss a bit more in a later section.
I begin this chapter with this ethnographic description because it encap-
sulates a central paradox that the heritage reconstruction of “Old Beijing”
presents to its long-term local residents, some of whom have absorbed the
discursive language of “Old Beijing” in their attempts to sustain a living
against the assault of the competitive market: the official heritage regenera-
tion of “Old Beijing” offered a source of livelihood to locals like Huiming
and her husband at the same time it eroded it, through its destructive effects in
demolishing the physical fabric of the old lanes, alleys and courtyards under
the state-led program of “chaiqian” (lit. demolition and relocation). The lives
and experiences of other long-term residents of Dashalar I knew manifested
other kinds of contradictions and ambiguities in their self-identification as
“Old Beijingers.” This ethnographic snippet also offers a glimpse of a pro-
foundly gendered aspect of local attachment to the idea of “Old Beijing.” I
shall return to these arguments in later sections.
What and Whose is Local Heritage? 19
NOSTALGIC HYPE AND HERITAGE MEANINGS
Huiming’s and her husband’s attachment to the courtyard of Huiming’s child-

hood brings to mind to the nostalgic hype about the loss of “Old Beijing”
between the 1990s and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Only after the event of
the literal physical disappearance of “Old Beijing,” as entire neighborhoods
were razed to the ground to make way for glossy new multi-story shopping
malls, did policy makers, domestic and international NGOs and heritage
personnel begin to link the capital’s property boom and its associated ef-
fects with the destruction of a unique architectural and cultural heritage. The
media nostalgia following the literal material disappearance of “Old Beijing”
linked the erasure of local neighborhoods with the destruction of an irreplace-
able architectural and cultural legacy, encapsulated in images of picturesque
courtyards and gray-walled lanes (hutong). With the publishing sensation of
Liu Xinwu’s Siren Zhaoxiangbu (My Private Photograph Album) that hit
major cities in China after its initial appearance in 1988, the 1990s saw a
flurry of best-selling publications featuring themes of loss and absence such
as Old Photographs and Old Albums (Hillenbrand 2020, 94). Although ini-
tially, cultural critic Liu’s project had a very different aim, his monochrome
photographs generated a mood of seductive nostalgia for Beijing’s lost past
that spread through volume after volume of black and white photographs
of picturesque courtyards (siheyuan) and gray-walled lanes (hutong). In
Dashalar, the “Old Beijing” neighborhood of the title of this chapter, a more
poignant nostalgia that spoke to lived experiences of loss of the immediate
neighborhood, reached out from the black-framed monochrome photographs
of local “Old Beijingers” that lined the walls of a well-known local restaurant.
The photos were taken by Jia Yong, the restaurant’s successful manager, a
man who had grown up in the neighborhood, and was a well-known figure
in the local community (Evans 2020).1 These photos, in contrast with those
published commercially to cash in on the heritage appeal of the moment,
revealed an intimate and affectionate knowledge of everyday life in the tiny
alleys of the neighborhood. Just as Susan Sontag attributed to the black and
white monochrome photograph a sense of age, historical distance and aura
(Grainge 1999), Jia Yong’s photographs made a direct appeal to the restau-
rant’s clientele—young and old, local and foreign, students, migrant workers
and local officials—as they came and went.2 Indeed, Jia Yong’s black and
white photographs, such as that in figure 1.1, were widely known as the sig-
nature feature of his restaurant, written up in international tourist guidebooks
of Beijing and significantly contributing to his commercial success.
20 Harriet Evans
Figure 1.1. Entering a “big cluttered courtyard,” courtesy of Jia Yong
Behind the commercial, historical and affective impulse explaining the ap-
peal of this nostalgia are divergent views about how to grasp what heritage is
or as Butler asks in her chapter in this volume, what it does. On the one hand,
backed by global capital, national and local governments, urban planners
and property speculators eager for the lucrative returns from international
recognition for heritage protection, adopt a practice of “cultural heritage pro-
tection” emphasizing investment and management in the pursuit of economic
and nationalist gain, while local residents’ interests in conserving a past for
their existential well-being in the present and future are ignored. There is
an important overlap in such arguments between local residents’ anger, hurt
and cynicism about the processes of urban transformation swallowing up
their neighborhoods and the ontological and emotional sense that their local
values and cultural practices are being destroyed. In stating this we need to
bear in mind the often fractious effects on everyday family life and individual
well-being generated by the relentless noise and detritus of demolition and
construction. However, local responses to, and even protests against the plans
and practices of governments and property speculators are not synonymous
with a nostalgic desire to preserve or conserve their neighborhood homes in
the form of cultural traditions and material forms that “freeze moments of the
past of a place” (Massey 2005, 115). Nor, on the other hand, do they neces-
sarily correspond with the assumption of an interchangeability between the
values accorded the past in personal memories and family histories and the
idea that there are neighborhood heritages in the form of physical sites/places
worth conserving. As Rowlands’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, any
such proposition would have to be based on ethnographically sourced ideas
about what is worth conserving in material terms—in the form of buildings
or temples, lanes or monuments, for example—on the part of those who
consider themselves to belong to, or culturally own, the neighborhood in
question. Though there are important intersections between them, local and
personal histories and cultural practices are not, in themselves, heritage.
Cultural heritage (wenhua yichan) was not a familiar part of the vocabu-
lary of long-time subaltern residents of “Old Beijing.”3 If it did occasionally
enter into conversation, it was generally, if implicitly, to sustain the view that
cultural heritage and the aggressive impositions of government and capital
were two sides of the same coin. As I explain below, it also conjured up the
visible forms of the material and social exclusions to which these long-term
disadvantaged residents were subjected in a neighborhood they called their
own. These exclusions can be understood as forms of epistemic violence
done to locals’ ontological and affective “ownership” of everyday cultural
practices. However, in this chapter I do not seek to engage in a discussion
about whether the exclusionary practice of heritage can only, or necessarily
has to, serve the interests of national and global capitalism through appealing
to international tourism and its place in the national GDP, against the interests
of local communities. Moreover, such a binary opposition between alterna-
tive meanings of heritage corresponds neither with how they are experienced
and lived on the ground, nor with my own analytical take. Rather I want to
rethink the term “heritage” not for what it is, but rather, for hermeneutic pur-
poses, as a term that is useful to “think with”—that helps us apprehend local
people’s attachment to the idea of “Old Beijing,” while simultaneously decry-
ing its reemergence as a form of lucrative commercial tourism in line with
the “visions” of the official discourse of heritage conservation. I do this by
applying what Butler in this volume and elsewhere calls a kind of “efficacy,”
to refer to how the notion of “heritage” can be extended to offer possibili-
ties of recognition of and solidarity with a group of local people who have
22 Harriet Evans
been caught in the cross-fire of global capitalist competition, political power,

socio-economic disadvantage, precarity and social discrimination.
“Heritage studies” have now entered the social sciences in the form of
courses and research projects inspired by a range of diverse political com-
mitments and ethical principles. Postcolonial interventions to interrogate a
“bottom-up” approach have opened up new theoretical approaches to concep-
tualizing the modalities of heritage articulated by local subaltern communities
in their everyday lives and rituals. Following these approaches, my aim in this
chapter is to think about heritage not so much as conservation of the past and
transmission of that past into the future, but as ethical recognition of a com-
munity’s varying identifications with its own past, through acknowledging
the lived, physical “realness” of its members’ spatialized and affective sense
of belonging to place—of being “in place,” as Butler puts it in her chapter—
over time. In so doing, I argue that local long-term residents’ apparently un-
problematic self-description as “Old Beijingers” revealed a sometimes con-
tradictory and ambivalent range of meanings, from the commercial leverage
it offered to some, to the experiences of others, particularly the elderly, for
whom an embodied and sensory form of attachment to Dashalar was rooted
in their personal and family history of the neighborhood as the only or central
place of experience and belonging they had known. For some of those I knew,
the uncertainties about demolition of their neighborhood became the source
of an unknown and unthinkable future. For others, they signified a longing
for escape. For the oldest person I knew there, Old Mrs. Gao, they signified
the end of life, as I describe below. The impact of these uncertainties was
particularly felt by older local people. Most, if not all, of the better educated,
digitally savvy, younger people who had grown up in the neighborhood had
taken the opportunity afforded by the market to move out, either for employ-
ment elsewhere or through marriage.
Over the years when I made regular visits to the neighborhood, the pace
of its demolition and reconstruction gathered steam, most noticeably around
the time of the 2008 Olympics. However, this process seemed to be quite
random, with single lanes and buildings being targeted for demolition without
any discernible plan. The famous Qianmen Avenue on the north-south axis
at the eastern end of Dashalar was refurbished in faux-Republican style and
re-opened as the heritage epitome of a commercial version of “Old Beijing”
on 7 August 2008, the eve of the opening of the Olympics. At the time, many
of its glass-fronted shops were empty although they soon became occupied
by famous global brands, from Louis Vuitton to H&M. Video footage taken
by Jia Yong of the opening ceremony of officials’ speeches featured derisory
comments by long-term locals. “You call that ‘Old Beijing?’” one asked rhe-
torically. “What’s the idea? To build another fancy shopping street? And why
white lanterns, not the traditional red lanterns?” The main commercial center
of Dashalar was also widened and the facades of its old shops were rebuilt
in a down-market version of Qianmen Avenue. However, regeneration of the
western part of the neighborhood where I had been conducting my research
was much slower. The facades of some of the buildings on West Street were
refurbished in the uniform gray of Republican-style Beijing in time for Na-
tional Day on October 1, 2009, but my local acquaintances continued to live
in the cramped dwellings off West Street where they had been for decades.
Locals’ derision of the new “Old Beijing” taking shape around them in-
cluded their indifference toward the cool bars and displays that featured in
Beijing’s Design Week, the event and moment that provided the ethnographic
point of departure for Butler’s discussion about “Woolf in Dashalar” in the
next chapter. In response to my suggestion that they accompany me to visit it,
they asked me why they would want to since it had nothing to do with their
lives, and in any case, it was a show for foreigners, not for local people. The
unspoken assertion—their implicit default position—was that their precarious
status in the shifting spaces of the informal economy confirmed their absence
from such displays, while they retained the moral high-ground as the “true”
“Old Beijingers.” In what follows, this chapter explores the paradox of their
derision of what the government claimed as “Old Beijing” and their reme-
diation of the term as a form of self-affirmation. While they were viscerally
aware that the official modernizing discourse of “Old Beijing” was a heritage
invention from which they were excluded, they nevertheless reclaimed the
term as a mode of demanding recognition for their status as the long-term
“owners” of their neighborhood. While, for some, such identification could
bring in an income, this was not inconsistent with their appropriation of the
discursive term as a mode of self-description and as a kind of antidote to the
violent and destructive claims on their lives and beings of the local effects of
neo-liberal globalization.
The idea of heritage that I develop in this chapter emerges as a potency
that is revealed and experienced through association with the material and
affective agency of place. In conceptualizing heritage in this way, I draw on
Beverley Butler’s proposal to recast heritage away from its conventional pre-
occupations with preservation and conservation of an authentic past, whether
in material, spatial or performative ways and to rethink it as “constellations
of cultural [and . . .] emotional experiences and engagements” (Butler 2016,
113), grounded “in place.”
24 Harriet Evans
PLACE AND PEOPLE IN DASHALAR
The place in question is Dashalar, a small neighborhood of Beijing’s popular

“South City” that has recently re-arisen from the rubble and detritus of years
of neglect and more recently demolition (chaiqian) into a patchwork of gentri-
fied sites of leisure and pleasure. In the process, the neighborhood has been
given new life with cool bars, walkways and ultra-modern glass and granite
shopping malls, along with exhibitions displaying prototypes of architectural
design to replace the dazayuan and “pop-up” explorations of the shifting trans-
local forces and influences that inspired Butler’s contribution to this volume.
The lives of the people I knew in Dashalar were intimately bounded by the
place where they lived; indeed, for some, everyday life in the neighborhood
had an almost insular character, so rarely, if ever, did they leave it. Never-
theless, Dashalar had long been a kind of melting-pot of diverse translocal
forces. Between the late Qing (1644–1911) and early Republican eras in
the 1920s and 1930s, situated just to the west of the main north south artery
bringing merchants and travelers into the center of Beijing, and with a mixed
and mobile population of Han, Manchu and Hui Muslim people, Dashalar
was a place where famous opera singers and court officials crossed paths with
beggars, prostitutes and the down-and-out looking for opportunities to make
a living among the vibrant mix of people in the neighborhood. By the time
of Beijing’s Design Week in 2011, the character of this translocal mix had
expanded to incorporate global flows and forces, radically altering the flavor
of its translocal constitution. Both, however, in their different ways confirm
the wisdom of Mauss’s early argument noted above in chapter 1, that “societ-
ies live by borrowing from each other,” despite their members’ disavowal of
such (Mauss 1920, 242–251).
When I first started my research in Dashalar, it was impossible not to be
struck by the physical contrast between the awe and might of the political
and spatial center of the Tian’anmen Square, just a stone’s throw away, and
the scruffy deprivation of this crowded neighborhood. Yet, its local residents
had long been used to the depletions effected by this contrast. Between the
mid- to late-1950s, the enlargement of Tian’anmen Square, followed by the
construction on its east and west of two of the state’s signature “Ten Great
Buildings” involved the demolition of tens of thousands of old buildings and
a massive resettlement program. Between then and the 1970s there was no
improvement in Dashalar residents’ conditions of existence. Overcrowding,
poverty and financial constraints on Xuanwu District, known as the poorest
of inner Beijing’s districts, meant that policies to upgrade dilapidated housing
came to nothing. Under a policy of “not letting the roof fall in, not letting the
walls collapse, but repairing serious leaks,” the area suffered from endemic
neglect (Evans 2020, 39). While the power of the state had thus long made
marginalization from its benefits an everyday reality for the people of Dasha-
lar, by the 1990s, the aggressive effects of market competition, spurred on by
global capitalism, had shifted the boundaries of their marginalization, push-
ing many, if not most, into unemployment and economic precarity. In 2010,
the exclusion of Dashalar locals from the benefits of the global market was
tellingly symbolized by a large sign standing in the middle of the exit from
Dashalar’s main Commercial Street (Shangye Jie) onto Qianmen Avenue,
displaying diagrams of activities and items prohibited in the glitzy splendor
of the newly refurbished Avenue.
With their long-term, even lifelong residence in the small neighborhood
of Dashalar, my acquaintances’ attachment to it lay at the heart of their
self-description as “Old Beijingers.” Huiming and her husband found rela-
tive comfort in the immediate environs of their home. Jia Yong, the local
restauranteur and photographer I introduced above, was the only local person
I knew who had made a go of his engagement with market competition. He
lived with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and their baby son in an apartment
in a large new gated residential community in the southern suburbs of the
city. Most days, Jia Yong drove into Dashalar in a large four-by-four. His
working life revolved around his role as local restauranteur and photographer.
His residential separation from Dashalar did not fundamentally displace his
place-based attachment to the neighborhood where he grew up and honed his
entrepreneurial skills. Even those who loudly asserted their desire to leave the
neighborhood found themselves stuck to it, for diverse reasons, as I explain
in the brief ethnographic accounts below.
Dashalar was designated a cultural protection area along with many other
districts under the Cultural Asset Protection Law of 1980 that controlled
the height and design of new urban buildings. Given the dilapidated state of
Dashalar, this effectively meant that little changed. Nor did it mean conserva-
tion of the previously famous sites in the neighborhood, including its Guan-
yin (Bodhisattva) Temple on West Street that had been left in ruins since the
Cultural Revolution. Elsewhere in central Beijing, the notion of a “cultural
protection area” commonly signified the demolition of old single-story hous-
ing, the dislocation of its residents and the reconstruction of the neighborhood
in a gentrified heritage version of its past appearance. A friend who around
the time of the Olympics worked for the Beijing Cultural Protection NGO
commented that laws were repeatedly made and replaced depending on the
officials in charge. Furthermore, given that few local courtyards were specifi-
cally named as “cultural protection sites,” leaseholders had little possible re-
course to law to uphold their opposition to demolition. A successful plaintiff
in a case against the Xuanwu District government in 2006 only managed to
26 Harriet Evans
prevent demolition of his dazayuan because he managed to unearth a legal

document drawn up years beforehand identifying it as a “cultural protection
site.”4 His attempts to support an elderly neighbor in his attempts to prevent
demolition of his beautiful courtyard, came to nothing.
Dashalar’s current form dates back to the early millennium with the widen-
ing of the north-south Meishi Street due west of Qianmen Avenue, leading to
the demolition of many small shops and the dislocation of residents from their
homes.5 The reconstruction of its main eastern part, now called Commercial
Street (Shangye Jie), followed, with new facades and paving completed to
coincide with the reopening of Qianmen Avenue in 2008. Housing some of
Beijing’s most famous artisan crafts, silk, tea and medicine shops of the late
Qing and early Republican eras, Commercial Street is now the popular hub
of throngs of domestic and international tourists fascinated by the appeal of
“Old Beijing” for prices they can afford.
However, due to overcrowding, financial constraints and what many local
residents saw as local planners’ mismanagement, the redevelopment of the
western section where my fieldwork was centered, did not start seriously until
2007, and then in what seemed to be a very piecemeal fashion.6 Shop own-
ers were ordered to take their wares off the street, and to refurbish their shop
fronts with new signage and gray paint, at their own expense. Street vendors
and pedicab cyclists were no longer permitted to continue their trade, and
were cleared from the lanes as the city prepared for the Olympics by launch-
ing a campaign of urban “beautification.” Reconstruction of West Street, also
known as Guanyin Temple Street, began in the winter of 2008–2009, and the
street was officially “re-opened” on National Day, October 1, 2009. The bull-
dozers were still digging up this street when I visited it in June 2009, leaving
no pavement for pedestrians to access the shops lining it, even though they
still remained open for business. Migrant workers worked throughout the in-
tense heat of the day into the early hours of the morning to excavate the street,
often only a mere meter or so away from the bulldozer shifting piles of earth
to make way for the new pipelines. The local district (Xuanwu) government
was responsible for financing the road development and the refurbishment of
the state shops and businesses.
The individual and family histories that I narrate in Beijing from Below
are of lives that were spatially and temporally shaped by long-term residence
in the neighborhood’s cramped dazayuan. These were former Beijing-style
courtyards (siheyuan) that had long ago been divided into single or two room
dwellings filling the inner spaces, as seen in figure 1.2.
Most of the people I knew were born and brought up in the neighborhood,
though a number of the women moved into it when they married. Commonly
described in media and academic literature as Beijing’s diceng shehui (lit.
Figure 1.2. Inside a big cluttered courtyard, 2009, author’s photo
bottom level of society or “underclass”), many of the locals of what was one
of Beijing’s poorest urban areas for more than half a century can be thought
of as the capital’s urban subalterns. Some had inherited their subaltern status
under the yoke of military and foreign power during the war-torn decades of
the 1930s and 1940s. Others were excluded from access to formal recogni-
tion as members of the urban working class due to political, social and fam-
ily circumstances after 1949, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
was founded under the Communist Party of China (CCP). Between the early
1950s and the early 1980s, some of them were formally employed under the
system of state allocation of jobs in local factories, wholesale depots or shops.
Others had short-term jobs in small-scale workshops organized under the aus-
pices of the neighborhood committee ( juweihui). With very few exceptions,
as market reform progressed after the 1980s, their lack of education and vul-
nerable social and political status added to their disadvantage by condemning
them to failure in the challenging stakes of commercial competition. Into the
1990s, the closure of local small-scale state enterprises left many of them
unemployed, exposing them to conditions of extreme precarity. Hence, while
poverty and political disadvantage largely excluded them from recognition as
stable members of the working class during the Mao era, their marginalization
28 Harriet Evans
from the possibilities of access to commercial success under market reform

further underlined their subaltern status as overlooked, forgotten, silenced yet
stubborn subjects of history.
Most of those I knew did not have the material or social resources to leave
the area, and Old Mrs. Gao, the oldest person I knew there had not left the
neighborhood at all between 1937 when she married into it and 2011 when
she and her daughter-in-law had to move out. Few of the men had stable jobs,
or even jobs at all. Some did their best to pick up a few cents here and there,
rolling up paintings and scrolls to put into boxes, for example, or decorating
trinkets at paltry piece work rates to sell to tourists around the time of the
2008 Olympics. Over the years of my research in the neighborhood, I used
to bump into these people out and about in the lanes, looking for new op-
portunities to see them through. Old Mrs. Gao’s youngest son, Young Gao,
whose poor health made him unfit for work, spent most of the day sitting at
home watching television alongside his elderly bedridden mother. Depressed,
he used to perk up when visitors turned up, giving him the excuse to have a
cup of the sorghum liquor he kept in a plastic bottle at his side. Most of the
able-bodied women were employed, working long and exhausting hours as
hotel and shop cleaners or washing up in restaurants. None of their jobs were
long-term, and few received any benefits in the form of healthcare packages
or pensions. At most they received the state’s basic subsistence allowance
(dibao), although this seemed to have been paid very sporadically, depend-
ing on the ups and downs of family income. The women tended to change
their jobs every few months, if they found an opportunity that paid a bit more
or was nearer to home. Apart from Huiming, who was officially registered
as disabled and received a disability allowance, there were only two other
women I knew well who did not work. Old Mrs. Gao was in her mid-eighties
when I first met her and had just returned home from a spell in hospital. She
was, in any case, totally illiterate and claimed that she had never possessed
the skills necessary to obtain stable waged employment in a work unit. The
other was the elderly mother of Zhao Yong, a local man, who suffered from
severe mental health problems making it impossible for her to work in any
capacity. During the day, Zhao Yong and his wife, Qian, took it in turns to
look after her. However, their income was unreliable and a source of constant
concern and discussion. They tried to make a living as unlicensed pedicab
cyclists and as vendors of Buddhist trinkets from a tiny mobile stall. They
only stopped these activities when street vending in the neighborhood was
prohibited in the run-up to the Olympics. Zhao Yong used to spend quite a bit
of time away from home “on business,” as he put it. It was only much later
on that I discovered that this included scavenging for useful odds and ends in
the nearby environs.
Social outings, whether for men or women, were a rarity. Relatives and
neighbors used to come and go in local homes at times of family celebrations
and crises. Near neighbors occasionally dropped into each other’s homes to
pass the time of day, to get troublesome issues off their chests, and sometimes
as an excuse to have a drink. In general, however, there was little sense of
conviviality between households even in the same dazayuan. On the contrary,
Huiming spoke for many when she voiced her regret at the disappearance of
the popular practice of dropping by people’s houses (chuanmen) that used to
happen around Chinese New Year and other festive moments.
The nostalgic descriptions of Beijing’s old lanes and courtyards featured
in Beijing’s tourist websites depict a picturesque way of life to which few
locals subscribed in their memories of their recent pasts. With the sole ex-
ception of Jia Yong, all the people I knew well lived in crammed dazayuan,
with no heating or hot water, sometimes with three to four people living in
one room, and with a single hob or a shared outside kitchen. None of my
acquaintances had their own toilet or shower. Within the dazayuan, the lack
of any clear boundaries between the dwellings of the inhabitants made life
there extremely complex. As Zhao Tielin, the independent photographer
who introduced me to the neighborhood in 2005 commented, they generally
all knew each other’s names and occupations, where their children attended
school and what kind of people visited them. In contrast with what Huiming
used to nostalgically reminisce as the “good old days” of the Mao era when
neighbors would leave their doors open and shoot the breeze out in the lanes,
the spatial arrangement of the dazayuan and the hutong could become a
hotbed of gossip about local relationships and family quarrels, and residents
often came into conflict.
The sense of home and neighborhood—men sitting on small bamboo
stools out on the street in the summer evenings, friends dropping into each
other’s homes to pass the time of day, eating and drinking with friends in
local small eateries—that my acquaintances ascribed to the notion of “Old
Beijing” and to themselves as “Old Beijingers” gave way long ago to what
many of them described as the untrusting competitiveness engendered by the
struggle for market success. “We may have more to eat and a bit more money,
but we do not feel at peace” ( jingshen shang bu anjing), was the comment
of one man, an unlicensed pedicab driver, as he reflected on the precarious
uncertainties of his existence. Many former residents, particularly younger
residents, moved out some years ago to live in the standardized prefabricated
high-rise apartment blocks that surround the city’s outer ring roads. Some I
knew would gladly have moved elsewhere if the government had provided
the resources for them to be able to do so. These featured individuals whose
household registration (hukou) named their Dashalar addresses, so they were
30 Harriet Evans
potentially entitled for compensation and relocation, but they lived in dwell-
ings that were so small that the local government payments fell far short of
what they needed to purchase or rent property elsewhere. Those who rented
their property, moreover, were not eligible for compensation. Zhao Yong,
who shared a single room divided into two in a dazayuan with his mother,
his wife and teenage stepdaughter, opined that if he were the government, he
would have demolished the entire area to rebuild it so that the local residents
could continue to live there in less fraught conditions.
A constant if sometimes reluctant and fractious physical occupancy—
being “in place” as Butler puts it—of the place of home and neighborhood
thus characterized the daily lives of most of my Dashalar acquaintances. If the
language of “heritage” were to have any meaning for them, it was implicitly
inscribed in their absorption of a key term of dominant heritage discourse in
their self-description as “Old Beijingers.” Beyond this, its meaning can be
extended into a kind of ethical recognition of their sense of belonging to and
cultural and emotional ownership of memories, family histories and relation-
ships deeply embedded in the place of Dashalar across time.
GENDERED VERSIONS OF “OLD BEIJING” IN DASHALAR
One version of the self-description as “Old Beijingers” that I came to un-

derstand as a constant aspect of the everyday domestic life of my Dashalar
friends was highly gendered. One of the clichés about Beijing men—and I
mean, literally, men, whose sense of self as a man has been framed by grow-
ing up and living in the patriarchal “old master” (yemen) culture of Beijing—
describes them as loud, dominating and endlessly pontificating about the “big
things” (da shi) of life.7 As the acknowledged head of the family ( jiazhang),
the typical Beijing man—the patriarch—would stereotypically have his food
served first, would appropriate the right to conduct and steer conversation,
and would insist on others’ respect of his voice and authority. A tourist ver-
sion of this stereotype used to be displayed in the pedestrian thoroughfare
of Dashalar’s Commercial Street, in a larger-than-life bronze sculpture of
gowned men sporting scholars’ caps, sitting on stools and playing a game of
Chinese chess.
Played out in the social performance of the middle-aged Beijing men
I knew in Dashalar, this cliché emerged in contradictory, and necessarily
partial ways. As I’ve noted above, most of the able-bodied women I knew
were employed, though in short-term jobs, and undertook the lion’s share
of the caring and domestic tasks at home. Their pride in their independence
took various forms. Young Gao’s wife decided to go against her husband’s
wishes to take her bicycle into Tian’anmen Square in early June 1989. Zhao
Yong’s wife took herself without her husband on a group tour to Hong Kong
in the early 2000s. Hua Meiling, a woman in her mid-fifties who inherited a
traumatic past of violent abuse by both her father and deceased husband, and
three years’ detention for prostitution in the early 1980s, claimed her virtue
as a hard-working single mother struggling to make ends meet to keep herself
and her daughter going. For years she had been the mistress of Brave Li, a
man she described as strong and protective. Yet, despite their spirited inde-
pendence, and their occasional critical remarks about their menfolk’s short-
comings, these women all deferred to their husbands/lover when required to.
Zhao Yong married Qian in 2000, a year after Zhao divorced his first wife
because, he said, she was unfilial to his mother. Qian’s first husband and father
of her daughter had died three years beforehand. The material considerations
of an exchange of Zhao Yong’s support of Qian and her daughter and Qian’s
help with her mother-in-law eventually spawned a kind of companionship of
give and take on both sides. Qian had a number of different jobs over the years,
including riding a pedicab, washing up in a nearby restaurant, and caring for
an elderly man in the neighborhood. Without access to professional help for
his mother’s psychotic episodes, Zhao Yong was absolutely committed to
caring for his mother as a moral obligation that he, her son, and male “head
of the household” had to shoulder. He also loved to expound his views about
“big things”—Confucianism, family, education and human rights—and in
me, he had a willing listener. In response, Qian generally used to fall quiet,
in silent acknowledgment of her husband’s entitlement to speak. However,
her deference to her husband masked tensions that she rarely allowed me to
glimpse. On one occasion, she hinted at his possibly shady activities, when she
mentioned that he often used to go out, without telling her where he was going.
Zhao Yong’s social and economic circumstances had been dominated by
adversity throughout his life. If for Qian, her deference to her domineering
husband as he waxed lyrical about his “big things” seemed inconsistent with
her hardworking independence in bringing in an indispensable part of the
household income, it was also a mark of recognition of him as a man claim-
ing a certain status which the world in which he lived had consistently denied
him. Zhao Yong’s loud insistence on his right to speak can also be thought of
as his exercise of an agency in the local popular Beijing environment where
he had grown up. If this environment inscribed in him a particularly assertive
form of masculinity, by the time I knew him (and possibly before) this had
come to signify a vehement assertion of self and as such his refusal to suc-
cumb to the multiple pressures of his existence.
Jia Yong’s very public announcement of his status as patriarch alongside
his deep affection for the neighborhood that had nurtured his skills and talents
32 Harriet Evans
celebrated a similar mode of masculinity in a much more grandiloquent and

affirmative sense. Jia Yong is a large man, with a loud and infectious sense
of humor. As manager of what used to be a thriving restaurant, he often used
to host large gatherings of friends and acquaintances from the film and art
worlds. He would sometimes invite random people, including foreigners,
who had come into his restaurant and with whom he had struck up conversa-
tions about his photographs. These gatherings were frequently quite rowdy,
and fueled by large quantities of liquor and beer, became opportunities for
those present to sing in the style of the Beijing opera for which the neighbor-
hood had once been famous.8 Sitting on a high stool at one end of a number
of tables put together for the evening, Jia Yong was the acknowledged head
of a social world onto which he could bestow his largesse.
Jia Yong’s authority as a family man was no less acknowledged. He took
great pleasure in providing for his wife, son and grandson in the high-end
apartment he had bought in a recently built gated residential community in
southern Beijing. For a brief period, his son entertained the aspiration to be-
come a hip-hop dancer and had performed in a number of bars. Then when
he settled into in a stable relationship with his girlfriend, Jia Yong decided
that he needed to acquire professional skills, so appointed him as manager
of a small bar he had opened at the side of his main restaurant. The son had
little choice but to concur with his father’s wishes, but with an evident lack
of enthusiasm. He then married and when his wife gave birth to a baby boy,
they settled into Jia Yong’s home, until such a time as Jia Yong could buy
them an apartment of their own.
Jia Yong also used his status as family patriarch and restaurant patron to
extend his benevolence to young professionals who sought his advice. One
was a young bookseller in a nearby lane I got to know in 2012 when he
opened up a small old-style shop selling books and prints on Beijing. Over the
years his business expanded to sell small “Old Beijing” items such as Beijing
opera masks and writing brushes. He became a frequent visitor to Jia Yong’s
restaurant where Jia Yong was delighted to counsel him on his business strat-
egy. By 2017, this young bookseller had installed himself in an old courtyard
near the heritage zone around the Drum Tower and referred to himself as a
“small master” (xiaoye) in the “Old Beijing” tradition of yemen culture.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON
THE HERITAGE OF “OLD BEIJING”
In this chapter I have offered a glimpse of how the heritage of “Old Beijing”
can be understood in diverse and unexpected ways with reference to the phys-
ical and spatial fabric of everyday life in Dashalar. The lives of the people I
write about here and in greater length in Beijing from Below are unmistak-
ably defined through their place-based attachment to the neighborhood. In
describing the significance of this for their own sense of self, they refer to the
descriptor of “Old Beijinger.” Now, cheek by jowl with global brands of fash-
ion, food and art, such as Butler explores in the next chapter, the translocal
and transcultural constitution of this place is evident for all to see. However,
as I briefly suggested at the beginning of this chapter, “Old Beijing” itself
inherits an amalgam of translocal influences, that have expanded from being
territorially framed by the geopolitical boundaries of China to encompass the
global currents that can now be seen in Qianmen Avenue and Beijing Design
Week. Thus, the notion of “Old Beijing” itself is a contrasting constitution of
tightly defined, even insular, attachment to a particular place—a small neigh-
borhood called Dashalar—and its backstory of a legacy of fusion and mobil-
ity. The Old Professor was the only person I knew who still lived in Dashalar
and was able to benefit from the transcultural flows behind Beijing’s heritage
regeneration. Yet the cruel irony of his position was that the cultural and eco-
nomic capital he accrued through Beijing’s heritage reconstruction through
such flows simultaneously contributed to its erosion.
While the effects of the physical and sensory place of Dashalar differed de-
pending on the particular circumstances of individual and family, the rhythm
of local daily activities and conversations largely revolved around the mate-
rial spaces and places of their homes and immediate environs, from the walls
of their dazayuan rooms, to the ramshackle paths connecting their dwellings
to those of their neighbors in the same dazayuan, to the adjacent lanes and
alleys outside. The spaces of these connected places hosted their comings and
goings, their family quarrels, their teenage mishaps and their romantic long-
ings. Space and place were also key to the strategies local people developed
to make a living. Many of their money-making activities took place in the
gray informalities between the lawful and the illegal. Local knowledge of the
maze of narrow lanes permitted the unlicensed pedicab cyclist to evade the at-
tention of the local police as the sounds of their cars and vans drew near. Liv-
ing in close proximity sustained a network of information about short-term
job opportunities, new businesses and old ones closing down. The spatial-
ized materiality of what Feuchtwang called the “bounded territory” of place
(Feuchtwang 2004), of home and neighborhood, was an inseparable part of
local residents’ social and emotional being and experience. As bulldozers and
armies of migrant demolition and construction workers rolled into the neigh-
borhood, the threat urban transformation and its heritage versions represented
was much more than a physical one alone. When Old Mrs. Gao’s family gath-
ered in 2012 to celebrate her ninety-second/third birthday in the apartment to
34 Harriet Evans
which she and her daughter-in-law had moved after Young Gao’s death, she
responded to my greeting with a look of utter bewilderment in her eyes. For
an elderly woman nearing the end of her life, removed from the only place
she had lived in since 1937, her expression revealed more powerfully than
any words could the significance of Feuchtwang’s assertion that “dislocation
and displacement can be deadly” (Feuchtwang 2004, 25). Old Mrs. Gao died
in the spring of 2013.
Jia Yong’s attachment to the place of his childhood and his entrepreneurial
activities offers another perspective on place in demonstrating how place-
based attachments do not simply, or necessarily, depend on bodily inhabita-
tion of that place. They do not depend on physically being “in place.” Over
time, moreover, as the neighborhood of his childhood came more and more
to approximate the “Old Beijing” of the heritage industry, the nostalgic mood
created by his black and white photographs merged with the version of “Old
Beijing” available in the commercial celebration of Dashalar’s history in its
heritagization. While his photographs remained in the same place for years,
the changing environment of the nostalgia craze around him gave them new
and potentially lucrative meanings. Having started photographing local life
in monochrome long before the boom in heritage nostalgia, Jia Yong’s “Old
Beijing” grew on him with the times.
Another dimension to my friends’ experience of “Old Beijing” is what
Rowlands in his chapter calls the “living heritage.” We have seen that,
with few exceptions, the place of Dashalar—the “Old Beijing” of popular
tradition—described the spatial boundaries of my friends’ sensory, emo-
tional, social and gendered worlds. One aspect of this that was performed by
most of the men I knew in the neighborhood drew on the popular “yemen”
culture—that gendered dimension of “Old Beijing” and northern culture that
is associated with masculine qualities of loyalty, filiality, strength, authority
and face on what I have described elsewhere as a kind of “thick masculinity”
(Evans 2020). The social world of Dashalar where the Old Professor, Zhao
Yong and others had grown up was suffused with evidence of this, from the
booming cries of welcome to clients from gowned waiters standing in front
of their restaurants, to the groups of men sitting on low stools in the alleys
playing raucous games of poker, to the frequently loud exchanges between
men as they sat smoking and drinking around tables in local restaurants. The
performances of this masculinity that I have described above demanded and
received deference from their womenfolk in ways that seemed inconsistent
with the latters’ independence as income earners. While these women cer-
tainly gestured in the direction of a certain impatience with their husbands’
assumed entitlement to such behavior, they did not openly challenge it. To
have done so would have been tantamount to questioning their husbands’ role
as dependable “head of the family.” In this, it would have signified an assault

on values and commitments that lay at the heart of their husbands’ sense of
self. In these terms, Zhao Yong’s delight in showing off his own version of
yemen culture could be thought of as a performative aspect of “Old Beijing”
culture—a kind of performative “heritage efficacy”—that was utterly crucial
to his capacity to maintain a dignity in the precarious conditions of his exis-
tence.
My friends in Dashalar knew well that the heritagization of their neigh-
borhood was premised on their exclusion from its benefits. The encroaching
demolition of their dazayuan was literal evidence of the party-state’s disre-
gard for their livelihoods as long-term residents of the only center of belong-
ing and recognition they had known. Now, the “Old Beijing” to which they
belonged and claimed as their own, has almost entirely disappeared. In this
sense my friends’ self-description as “Old Beijingers” attached to the place
of their neighborhood in social and gendered relationships associated with
popular tradition can be understood as a call for ethical recognition of their
legacy as owners of their neighborhood history at the moment of its collapse.
For them, the “local efficacy” of “Old Beijing” as “living heritage” thus lies
in its redemptive, ethical and archival remediation as recognition of lives
otherwise hidden by dominant discourse.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In thinking about heritage, I have been inspired by many conversations with

Beverley Butler and my coeditor Mike Rowlands. I also thank Guangpei Ran
for supporting me through a serious illness to finish the writing project that
was published by Duke University Press as Beijing from Below: Stories of
Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center (Evans, 2020). Fuller versions of the
ethnographic detail in this chapter can be found there.
NOTES
1. Jia Yong is the real name of this restauranteur. While all the other names I use
are pseudonyms, in line with anthropological practice, the publication of Jia Yong’s
photos in my book and the need to accredit him properly made it necessary to use his
name. Jia Yong was very happy for me to do this.
2. The research for the chapter was continued on and off in Dashalar mainly be-
tween 2007 and 2014. The last time I visited there was in early 2017. The story of
Jia Yong, the restauranteur and amateur photographer appears in chapter 7 of Beijing
from Below. Old Mrs Gao’s story is in chapter 2, and Zhao Yong’s in chapter 3.
36 Harriet Evans
3. I am aware that my use of the term “subaltern” to refer to this disadvantaged

group is unusual in the field of Chinese studies. Space does not permit me to fully
explain my use of it here, but I have chosen it in preference to the “underclass” which
in both Chinese and English easily carries with it an implication of moralistic disdain.
For further relevant discussion see Evans 2020, 4–7.
4. Personal information from the plaintiff, January 17, 2010.
5. For an evocative account of the “reconstruction” of Meishi Street, see Ou
Ning’s film, Meishi Jie.
6. The deputy major of Beijing Municipal Government who had overall respon-
sibility for the reconstruction of Xuanwu District was dismissed from office in 2007
for corruption.
7. “Yemen” is a word composed of “ye” (master, gentleman) an old term of ad-
dress for members of the scholar-gentry class and the pluralizer “men.” Nowadays
the term appears in popular culture as a descriptor of the masculine qualities of the
Beijing patriarch.
8. This is an allusion to the famous Beijing opera singer and actor Mei Lanfeng
(1894–1961) who used to live in Dashalar and is now hailed as Dashalar’s most
famous historical figure of the twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Beverley. “The Efficacies of Heritage: Syndrome, Magics, and Possessional

Acts.” Public Archeology 15, 2–3 (2016): 113–135.
Evans, Harriet. Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center.
Feuchtwang, Stephan. “Theorising Place.” In Making Place: State Projects, Glo-
balisation and Local Responses in China, edited by Stephan Feuchtwang, 3–30.
Grainge, Paul. “TIME’s Past in the Present: Nostalgia and the Black and White Im-
age.” Journal of American Studies 33, 3 (1999): 383–392.
Hillenbrand, Margaret. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contem-
porary China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
Mauss, Marcel. “La nation et l’internationalisme” (Nation and Internationalism). Part
2 of “Symposium: The Problem of Nationality,” by Elie Halévy, Marcel Mauss et
al. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series) 20 (1919–1920): 242–251.
Ou Ning. Meishi Jie (Meishi Street), 85 minutes, distributed by dGenerate Films.
2006.
Chapter Two
Encountering Virginia Woolf

in Dashalar
Heritage Quests and Local Efficacies
Beverley Butler
INVITATIONS, DEPARTURES
On being invited to write a paper on local heritage and China, what imme-
diately sprang to mind was an unexpected encounter with “Bloomsbury in
China,” or more specifically, with Virginia Woolf, in the Beijing locality of
Dashalar.* This occurred when Professor Harriet Evans invited me and fel-
low heritage-quester Professor Mike Rowlands to visit in 2011. I remember
how, in sharp contrast to the sheer size, dramatic scale and visual-experiential
impacts of the iconic monumental sites of Tian’anmen Square, the Forbid-
den City, and the equally immense national museum complexes, the adjacent
locality of Dashalar was a more hidden space, constituted by a maze of
alleyways—the traditional hutong—and “home” to very different heritage
forms and forces. This was the context of a further, particularly “uncanny”
moment, when we unexpectedly stumbled across an exhibition “Home Is
Where the Heart Is” by contemporary Chinese artist Chen Ke.1 The instal-
lation that formed the core of the exhibition took as its point of inspiration
Virginia Woolf’s 1928 A Room of One’s Own (A Room [1929] 2014). As one
reviewer explained:
Woolf addresses the feminist movement through the assertion that a woman
cannot write fiction without money and a room of her own. Using Woolf’s
argument as a point of departure, Chen Ke invites us inside the psyche of a
young woman who has relocated to Beijing in an ambitious attempt to succeed
economically and socially . . . we cannot avoid the underlying sense of fragil-
ity and uncertainty, which echoes the reality for a generation of young Chinese
dreamers trying to make it in the big city. (Denton 2014)
37
38 Beverley Butler
This sudden discovery of Virginia Woolf in Dashalar had a particularly

profound impact on me. Indeed, its surprisingly lasting effects reemerged to
provide my own points of inspiration and departure for this paper. Having
worked at University College London for over twenty years I have enjoyed a
certain local intimacy with Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. My office, my
academic “room of one’s own,” is located in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury,
which heritage plaques testify to being the “home” of the Bloomsbury Group.
The heritage of this group of intellectuals and artists thus bestows upon the
locality of Bloomsbury a certain “spirit of place” (loci genius), a heritage “af-
terlife” and literary-intellectual “aura” that many visitors and locals alike seek
to commune with. Virginia Woolf typically emerges as the best known and
most iconic persona in the Bloomsbury heritage constellation and as such the
efficacious “center-point” of its complex creative cosmology, and ultimately
the vital “ancestor figure/spirit” of the group as modernist “secular-saint” and
“High Priestess of Bloomsbury.” The empirical experience of encountering
Woolf “out of place” in Dashalar, and the unexpected transposition of my
intimacy with Bloomsbury and Woolf onto this new locality, I argue, puts me
“in place” to engage in alternative efficacious communion with this “other”
Virginia Woolf as a particularly potent “muse” in Dashalar.
HERITAGE QUESTS, LOCAL EFFICACIES
In what follows I invite the reader to join me on a critical “heritage quest” to

look more deeply at the above dynamic motifs. I argue that “Woolf in Dasha-
lar” offers a powerful conduit, portal, bridge and “shared object” enabling
us to radically rethink “heritage” and the “local.” More powerfully still, the
figure of “Woolf in Dashalar” emerges as a significant locus by which “lo-
cal” heritage(s)—notably gendered experiences—can be best grasped in mo-
ments of collapse with the “translocal” and manifested in diverse efficacious
forms and forces. Most pertinent to the moral-ethical dynamic underpinning
our critical journey is how such heritage efficacies offer potential points of
entente and solidarity.
This context offers new insights into what I have elsewhere described as
the “efficacies of heritage” (Butler 2016). The quest for such “heritage ef-
ficacies” shifts the focus of heritage-questing from categorical statements
on “what heritage is”—typically top-down fixities/fixations of “Greater
Heritage”—to “what heritage does,” its effects/affects, particularly as popu-
lar forms and forces of “lesser heritages.” Moreover, these are entities mo-
tivated and underpinned by diverse promises of fulfillment and fulfillment
of promises. These encompass and collapse “imaginative worlds” with the
Encountering Virginia Woolf in Dashalar 39
“real” in diverse quests that, as we shall see, are marked by both colonizing-
possessional forces and, by contrast, quests for “heritage justice.”
HERITAGE INDUSTRY, BANALIZATIONS
Crucially, our visit to Dashalar coincided with its unprecedented transforma-

tion. Previously situated off the main tourist routes of central Beijing, it was
now undergoing the onset of intense changes, in which “heritage,” access to,
and possession of, its “efficacies” were core determinants. All heritage(s) are
marked by a series of contradictions, paradoxes and ambivalences, but those
that marked Dashalar were all too prevalent, crucially taking the form of dual
forces provoking sustained intensive and traumatic episodes of displacement
and dispossession to the “local.” Thus simultaneous mega projects emerged
in the form on the one hand of an intense top-down “Californianization of the
high street” epitomized by the shining newness of US-style shopping malls,
and, on the other, of a top-down “heritagification” couched as a revival of
“Old Beijing.” Perhaps hardest to understand here, although sadly by no
means an isolated example absent from other global contexts, is how these
latter forces simultaneously operate on the perverse irony that their quest to
recreate Dashalar within a heritage industry’s2 vision of “Old Beijing,” was
undertaken at the expense of its preexisting local heritage. This was quite
visibly being cast asunder, making local efficacies the key casualty of the
heritage industry’s banalizations and cleansings. Indeed, this period of tran-
sition was the very reason for our visit and for Harriet’s ongoing long-term
ethnographic fieldwork with locals experiencing this context (Evans 2020).
THE VOYAGE OUT—A ROOM AS “QUEST-TEXT”
Like any group of travelers at this liminal moment, I want to pause in order
to better equip ourselves for our intellectual “voyage out.” As such, I want
to adopt A Room as “quest-text” in order to explore its efficacies and their
limits for our own critical heritage quest (Woolf [1929] 2014). Woolf begins
A Room by anticipating that her audience requires an “explanation” as to how
and why her invitation to speak about “women and fiction” opens with her
assertion of the need to possess “a room of one’s own” and “£500 a year.”
This allows Woolf to argue the need to keep definitions (“women,” “fiction”)
in play as “unsolved problems” and to open up her text to embrace fluid
“positionalities-personae” (Woolf 2014, 1–2). Ultimately, Woolf takes her
audience on a very different quest than expected. Similarly, I use “Woolf in
40 Beverley Butler
Dashalar” as “explanation,” to keep a critical fluidity of definitions—notably

“local heritage and China” as “unsolved problems”—for mobilization on our
quest. This offers a means to dissolve further fixities and figurative categories
in order to simultaneously address concerns that are articulated in Woolf’s
work as grounded material “matters of circumstance”3 (a room, money and
the effects/affects of exclusion) and as “things that matter”4 (see Spalding
2014, 150). Here, a “room” is a synonym for refuge, freedom, creativity,
promise and access to the Good Life.
HERITAGE EFFICACIES, EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITIES
Woolf’s A Room as “quest text,” alongside other actors and interventions

that emerge in our journey, converges with my own work on the efficacies of
heritage and theorizations of “heritage pharmacology,” and related concep-
tualizations of “magics, fevers and syndromes” (Butler 2016). We share an
interest in grasping experiential states and intensifications of being as the sa-
lient point of departure for understanding the effects/affects of diverse forms
and forces and their associated lifeworlds. These “heritage efficacies,” as a
triad of possession, ritual and sacred dramas, operate as different experiential
intensifications, that, in turn, map across and collapse “lesser heritages” as
“everyday magics” (synonymous with Woolf’s “patterns of daily life”) with
the extreme intensities of “heritage fevers and syndromes”—as profound
episodes of breakdown/depersonalization and derealization.
What interests me, in particular, is that the latter extremes of heritage effi-
cacies converge with the heightened states of being that Woolf, and others on
our journey, seek to articulate. Indeed, my encounter with “Woolf in Dasha-
lar” could be grasped within Woolf’s own literary-lexicon as a “moment of
being”—an intensified, profound and salient experience—and a promise of
“incandescence,” provoking flashes of illumination, and underpinned by a
movement from personal to mutual and collective insights. Such experiences
are also marked by “unexpected” and “spontaneous” intensifications (Woolf
2002; 2014, 97). As I have argued elsewhere, medicalizations of such “heri-
tage syndromes and fevers” posit a tipping point of breakdown, dysfunction,
pathology and even madness (Butler 2016, 2019). Woolf, who herself suf-
fered episodes of “breakdown,” was all too aware of negative experiences
of ill-being. In fact, along with “a room,” and “money,” the possession of
“health” is the third, oft-overlooked, component of Woolf’s own triad of con-
ditions needed for creativity to flourish (Woolf 2014, 40). Crucially, Woolf
articulates broad cultural expressions of episodes of ill-being that are born of
exclusion. In A Room she argues:
[If] one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of conscious-
ness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of
that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.
Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into dif-
ferent perspectives. But some of these states of mind seem, even if adopted
spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others. In order to keep oneself
continuing in them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually
the repression becomes an effort. But there may be some state of mind in which
one could continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back.
(Woolf 2014, 96)
This in turn reiterates the “pharmakonic” or “poison-cure” signature of

heritage efficacies. I join Woolf and others in recasting elements of these
pharmakonic efficacies as potentially transformative modes of “questing” and
questioning. As crystallizations and enactments of certain visions and lived
realities of exclusion, such questing turns Woolf, like “us,” into a “critic,” or
even a symptomatologist-diagnostician on a critical journey that opens up to
unexpected, spontaneous “moments” or “flashes” of redemption and cure.
Such “heritage syndromes and fevers” can be read alternatively as experi-
ences of breakdown and breakthrough. In turn, these can be understood as
moments of “acting back” on power, and thus as attempts—whether suc-
cessful or failed—to remake self/others/worlds in novel ways following their
collapse. Interestingly too, the extremes of “heritage efficacies” iterate mod-
ernism’s own turns to, and concern with, adopting, adapting, subverting—
if not fusing with—epic forms and forces, such as archetypes, iconic per-
sonas, sacred dramas, ancestors-ancestry and/as alternative moral-ethical
scripts. Collectively, such efficacious intensities are best grasped in moments
in which such forms and forces encompass and collapse the “real” (“matters
of circumstance”) with “imaginative worlds” (“things that matter”) in diverse
quests for the promise of fulfillment and the fulfillment of promise. These, in
turn, offer a means to possess and/or be possessed by what I call “cosmolo-
gies and constellations of care and protection” as encounters and communion
with the “otherwise” and “elsewhere.”
THREE JOURNEYS
We now embark upon three journeys. First, we follow Woolf as the “figure of
everywoman” to map the fixed pathways of power, privilege and patriarchy
synonymous with “Greater Heritage” and its “top-down efficacies.” Intense
experiences of repeated ritual exclusions transform our everywoman (us)—
into an angry “critic[s].” Recast as symptomatologists-diagnosticians we are
42 Beverley Butler
able to identify the “insider-outsider” heritages at play and their accompany-

ing intensified “syndromes and fevers.” We then follow Woolf in opening
up our quest to modernist “streams-of-consciousness” and to the efficacies
of “fiction” and creativity. Woolf’s figure of “Shakespeare’s sister” guides
us to alternative “truth-values,” moving heritages and ancestries. This then
returns us to China, as we are joined by the writer-artist-intellectual Ling
Shuhua, who personifies an earlier link in local/translocal constellations and
cosmologies operating between China, Woolf and Bloomsbury. As Woolf’s
contemporary, Ling Shuhua belonged to the Crescent Moon Group, dubbed
the “Chinese Bloomsbury Group,” and shared the same modernist quest for
creativity. Via these “ivory pagodas” we subsequently reengage with Chen
Ke’s “Woolf in Dashalar.” Our third journey then plunges us into the depths
of collective memory to critically explore the ongoing quest of engaging
with extreme experiences of “lesser heritage.” Here the ethnographic “real”
and accompanying personae of “Dashalar’s sisters” emerge as moral-ethical
rejoinder to the intensifications of the “heritage industry” and the point of
departure for new responses and responsibilities vis-à-vis promises of fulfill-
ment and the fulfillment of promise in the present.
PATHWAYS OF POWER AND PRIVILEGE:

INSIDER/OUTSIDER HERITAGES
The first phase of our quest proper sees us join Woolf in her critical mappings
of pathways of power, privilege and patriarchy. While Woolf imaginatively
grounds her text in the twin monumental and iconic loci of “Oxbridge” and
the British Museum (with the sacred space of the Reading Room of the Brit-
ish Library at its core)5 as sites sacralized by power, my own critical lens is
directed toward the wider encompassing foundational and formative “sacred
dramas,” which substantiate the power and privilege of “Greater Heritage” by
engaging in top-down possessional ritual practices to lay claim to certain loci
as sacralized, thus efficacious “self-objects.” Recast as symptomatologist-
diagnostician, Woolf draws out the elitisms and exclusions at play that con-
stitute the fixed polarities of the emergent “insider/outsider” heritage fevers
and syndromes. As subject to elite institutional-intellectual sacralizations of
knowledge and learning that fix lines of tradition, transmission, authentic-
ity and ancestry, the converging pathways of the academy and the museum/
library occupy a potent place within the “Greater Heritage” canon. Else-
where, I have explored the “Westernization” of the origins/ ancestry of heri-
tage discourse vis-à-vis myth-histories of the ancient Alexandrina Mouseion
(a composite of academy-museum-library). By fixating on the Alexandrina as
privileged loci—the idealized “ancestor-archive”—“Western” forces intensify

their power by adapting the Alexandrina’s “myth of return and redemption”
as a paradigmatic model of heritage revivalism and as a “blueprint” of the
archetypal museum, including that of the British Museum itself (Butler 2007).
Moreover, this gifts iconic status to the academy-museum-library as it is
reified further as synonym for possessing “origins,” “home,” and “refuge,”
and as literal-metaphysical center-points of wisdom, truth and creativity
and ultimately of the quest for “things that matter.” Linking Woolf’s and
my own critical focus is the desire to uncover ongoing colonizing tropes in
which certain powerful actors-institutions ultimately position themselves as a
“singularity” that lays claim to efficacious “cosmologies of the center,” thus
transforming and projecting what might be seen as “otherwise/elsewhere” or
“provincial/local” onto “universal” pathways. Woolf’s critical lens and her
comedic, sardonic provocations are chiefly aimed at unveiling the central
place of patriarchy and genealogies of “patriarchal memory” within this cos-
mology through her alternative mappings of the monumentalisms, elitisms
and exclusions at play.
In my own critical visions (Butler 2007) I adopt, adapt and subvert un-
critical, routinized notions of the journey-quest, specifically the “Heritage
Crusades” and “secular-pilgrimages” enacted by “Greater Heritage,” as the
means by which nation states, and other power-blocks have elevated their role
to “semi-divine,” sacred status. Since 1945, UNESCO has become a singu-
lar amalgam of these. However, as a Kantian institution, it can be unveiled
as Western modernity’s own quest for power, privileging its own idealized
ancient origins within “Greek-Memory” and repositioning these as superior
roots/routes of “Civilization.” As Derrida noted, this is achieved by exclud-
ing, in particular, “Egyptian, Jewish, Arabic memory” and “Chinese and
Japanese philosophical traditions” (Derrida 2002, 40).
OXBRIDGE—PROMISED LANDS
Returning to A Room and the potent loci of Oxbridge we realize that walking
in Woolf’s footsteps is a difficult quest as “she” is constantly positioned by
power as the “figure of an outsider.” We first meet her, however, in a calm
state “sitting on the banks of river . . . lost in thought.” Summoning the imag-
ery of fishing, she is hoping for “the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the
end of one’s line.” As the “tumult of ideas” surface it becomes “impossible”
for “her” to “sit still” and in this intensified state she finds herself “walking
with extreme rapidity across a grass plot” (Woolf 2014, 3–4). It is here where
the exclusions of place—1920s Oxbridge—come equally rapidly into view
44 Beverley Butler
as our narrator is stopped short when a college beadle disciplines her for tres-
passing on the manicured grass of the college quadrangle reserved for (male)
“fellows only,” and thus for desecrating what she caustically calls “forbidden
masculine ground.”
This is just the beginning of her experience of being exiled outside the
“constellations and cosmologies of care and protection” sacralized and pos-
sessed by powerful elites that, in turn, repress and banalize her own creative
efficacies. She unwittingly triggers the mechanisms by which power acts to
protect its “own” in the cleansing rites of riddance put in place to conserve
the assumed purity of place. What then emerges is a series of literal/figurative
pathways blocked by power that prevent our protagonist’s entrance into
“Oxbridge” as Promised Land of learning and fulfillment. Moreover, we see
that the emergent creativity that led her “astray” is repeatedly repressed by
power and so never gets to flourish. Constantly displaced by power, she is
thus demonized by default as an “outsider.”
Our everywoman thus experiences Oxbridge as the Promised Land from
which she is forbidden entry. The “heavenly environs,” as she ironically calls
them, acquire archetypal status as constituted not only of “quadrangles,” but
of “massive buildings,” “high domes,” “pinnacles,” and “courts” tranquilized
in an oasis of “smooth lawns.” As “heritage questers” we can thus apprehend
how “Oxbridge”—and by extension the academy, education, the forms and
forces of inheritance, ancestry and promises of fulfillment they contain—is
itself subject to a certain “heritagification” or “museumification.” What
might be dubbed an “Oxbridge Syndrome” kicks in as our narrator argues
a certain atemporality pervades episodes akin to those of derealization and
depersonalization:
Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the
present seemed smoothed away the body seemed contained in a miraculous
glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from
any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty
to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment.
(Woolf 2014, 4)
As “heritage syndrome,” Oxbridge becomes loci for insiders to ritually

possess and commune with a perfect state of harmonious wholeness, but it
is prohibited for “outsiders.” Indeed, certain museal qualities emerge that are
synonymous with the ossified and deathly underside of archetypal museo-
logical enshrinement. For example, on witnessing a passing procession of
all-male academics, “many . . . in cap and gown; some [with] tufts of fur on
their shoulders; others . . . wheeled in bath-chairs,” our everywoman recasts
Oxbridge as “a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon
be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand.”6 Her
constant “outsider” status and literal displacement is reiterated as: “Gate after
gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles
were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was
being made secure for another night” (Woolf 2014, 11). Our protagonist is
again excluded from the cosmologies of care and protection reserved exclu-
sively for those “insiders” centered within the traditions of the academy. She
sees Oxbridge as a collection or museum of white and venerable “old stone,”
of “pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the paneled rooms,” . . .
of “tablets and memorials and inscriptions,” of “the fountains and the grass”
and of academics’ quiet rooms “looking across the quiet quadrangles;” and
highlights how the “urbanity,” “geniality” and “dignity” of such settings reit-
erates the circumstances within which creativity can flourish, but from which
the majority of people are excluded (Woolf 2014, 21).
Here, ritual behaviors such as the adoption of different clothing, proces-
sions, scripts, redemptive formulas emerge as ways for those within the ar-
chetypal “ivory tower” to cut themselves off from the “real” outside. This is
when a tipping-point comes into view between rationality/sanity, and fevers/
dysfunction, when defining the value of human beings becomes synonymous
with rituals of fixing manifest in being “adept at putting people into classes
and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names” (Woolf 2014,
104). Such ritualistic fixations of academy are shared with the heritage fra-
ternity, notably within top-down authorized heritage acts and discourses, and
are synonymous with UNESCO’s “magical Heritage List” (Askew 2010) and
its underlying promise of the gift of “Universal Outstanding Value.”
THE BRITISH MUSEUM, OIL OF TRUTH
The scene then moves to a more dynamic, contemporary vision of London

as “workshop” and “machine” when the narrator argues that the impasse ex-
perienced at Oxbridge requires an “inevitable sequel” (Woolf 2014, 23). Not
without irony, she embarks on a quest for “the essential oil of truth” within
the inner sanctum of the Reading Room in the British Museum. Among the
numerous questions she brings with her from Oxbridge are: “What effect has
poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of
art?” Answers to these were only to be had by consulting the “learned and the
unprejudiced.” After all, she sardonically argues, “If truth is not to be found
on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a
notebook and a pencil, is truth?” (Woolf 2014, 23–25).
46 Beverley Butler
Once inside the monumental “vast dome encircled by famous names”

we encounter new ritual behaviors that mark the search for knowledge and
truth. Woolf alights on the indexes that categorize, fix and by these means,
promise to reveal such truth. However, what is again projected as universal
knowledge, emerges as partial and prejudicial. Attempting to commune with
the mass of paper confronting her, our protagonist reiterates her quest and
the promise of fulfillment of place: she had “come with a notebook and a
pencil” to transfer “truth” into its pages. However, the ritual process of se-
lecting books, involving “depositing slips of paper” in “the wire tray” “was
distressing, . . . bewildering, . . . humiliating. Truth had run through my fin-
gers. Every drop had escaped” (Woolf 2014, 28). Thus she resorts to “mak-
ing a perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so” and waits in her
stall. These initial experiences pave the way for further ritual behaviors that
threaten to collapse into dysfunctional fevers and ill-being.
The intensification of distress, bewilderment and humiliation continues as
in working through the catalogues, indexes and books, our narrator uncovers
viewpoints that are crystallized, in the words of one [male] professor, as “the
Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex” (Woolf 2014, 29).
Woolf recasts such work as being “written in the red light of emotion and not
in the white light of truth.” This triggers in our narrator an anger that follows
her as she breaks for lunch, in which time, she sketches out a doodle—a
caricature of an “angry professor.” Browsing through her newspaper she
confronts a constant iteration of the same stereotype. The newspaper—or
more widely—the “media” thus emerges as the third force circumscribing
and circumventing female creativity in ritual practices based upon claims of
superiority and imputations of inferiority.
The urge to “act back” sees Woolf compare “imaginative work” to a spi-
der’s web that is “still attached to life at all four corners,” as she reiterates
that creativity is the “work of suffering human beings” who are necessarily
“attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we
live in” (Woolf 2014, 39–40). Some glimpses of hope emerge as, for exam-
ple, we discover our narrator’s financial circumstances transform when she
inherits an unexpected “yearly allowance of £500 from her aunt” that renders
her independent from male support. With heightened symbolism this legacy
arrives on the same day as women get the vote. While this may well feel like
some kind of “wish fulfillment” on Woolf’s part, she uses this convergence of
the “imaginary-real” to project a better future for women as she imagines that
“in a hundred years women’s full access to the professions”—and to creativ-
ity—will be a promise fulfilled. This is reiterated as our narrator emphasizes
the more recent “presence of women novelists” on bookshelves and women
icons like the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison within the “academy.”7
Woolf’s mind ultimately turns to those women and other “outsider” figures
who lack the material means to take part in such quests. She suggests that
new modes of transmission, value and inclusion are needed, arguing that for
women, the “desire to be veiled still possesses them,” adding that “speaking
generally, [they] will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irre-
sistible desire to cut their names on it, as [men] must do in obedience to their
instinct.” She brings alternative forms and forces of cultural transmission and
heritage-efficacies into play as she argues: “For women have sat indoors all
these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by
their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks
and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business
and politics” (Woolf 2014, 86).
Thus Woolf acknowledges such “rooms” as efficacious forms and forces,
particularly in terms of women’s heritage and creativity. Perhaps here we
can similarly acknowledge the growing transformational forces both “inside”
and “outside” currently acting on “Greater Heritage” and the academy that
urgently demand that such contexts “make room” to acknowledge “others”
while also taking moral-ethical responsibility for the histories of violent
possession and the intensities of exclusion underpinning them. Indeed, the
British Museum has in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement de-
pedestalled its founder Hans Sloane in response to condemnation of his own
culpabilities in the slave trade.8
STREAMS-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS: “SHAKESPEARE’S SISTER”

AND “MOVING HERITAGES”
At this mid-point in our critical journey, we change direction as we encounter

a key moment in Woolf’s A Room as “quest text.” A radical shift occurs, as
Woolf intensifies her own efficacies as author by opening up her work fur-
ther to free flowing “streams-of-consciousness”—creative forms and forces
that crystallize as waves of “otherness” and “othering.” Woolf uses these to
imaginatively conjure up the figurative “Shakespeare’s sister” who acts as
an alternative “portal” or “conduit” to encounter the “elsewhere” and “other-
wise” of “self/others/world(s)” and, more particularly, is capable of grasping
further insights into intensifications of “lesser heritage(s).” In order to make
our way to Dashalar, I similarly want to open up my text to these emergent
forms and forces and put Woolf’s figure of Shakespeare’s sister in dialogue
with the interventions of Chen Ke—the artist whose “Woolf in Dashalar”
initiated our quest—and Ling Shuhua, who as previously stated, personifies
an earlier, contemporaneous link with Woolf and Bloomsbury.
48 Beverley Butler
What unites Ling and Chen’s interventions is that they both position
Woolf’s A Room as a “shared object” of communion and as “sacred text,”
and thus as a critical point of inspiration and departure for new creative
encounters that in turn bring China and Chinese heritage and memory back
into view. I now want to mobilize the above intensifications and interven-
tionisms to develop a convergent motif of “moving heritage” as that which
variously “moves with us” (geographically and/or figuratively), “moves us”
(emotionally) and moves us “to act” (in the world). Our critical quest thus si-
multaneously brings together the efficacies of fiction and creativity with both
“matters of circumstance” and “things that matter” in underpinning promises
of fulfillment and fulfillment of promise. This as part of an urgent wider
argument for heritage discourse to engage with creative forms and forces of-
fering salient and resonant “heritage paradigms” that are better able to grasp
existing experiential intensities, practices and processes and are better placed
to generate and further shape efficacious entities and states.
FICTION AS EFFICACY
Our quest requires us to rejoin Woolf’s A Room in order to recast the figure of
Shakespeare’s sister as alternative “heritage,” or perhaps better, as “anti” or
“counter-heritage” paradigm. Through the turn to fiction, Woolf postulates:
“Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have hap-
pened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us
say” (Woolf 2014, 44–45). This semi-playful, yet deadly serious, imaginative
intervention challenges the banalization of top-down pathways by breaking
with unilinear narratives that privilege fixed categories of past, present and
future and grasping alternative “moving heritages” capable of collapsing
“insider/outsider” fixities to offer a more fluid and vital vision of heritage
lifeways as multi-directional, cross-temporal, and spontaneous, and as visions
of alternative collectivities and solidarities. A core promise of fulfillment un-
derpinning this quest is that despite or perhaps because of the turn to fiction,
imagination and creativity, such efficacious modes of encounter variously
fuse and collapse with the “real,” to, paradoxically, prove “more truthful.”
As such, they stage themselves as loci synonymous with alternative/greater
“truth value.”
Woolf’s fictive biography introduces us to Shakespeare’s sister—Judith—
the fictional sibling of the iconic bard William Shakespeare. It sketches out
the pharmakonic efficacies at play and at first sight, unfolds as a unilineal
tragic narrative. Yet, as we shall see, Woolf deploys her critical “second
sight” to simultaneously recast Judith as a potent figure capable of position-

ing “women” and other “outsiders” as “inheritors and originators.”
We are told how the promise of William Shakespeare’s quest for creativity
is successfully fulfilled as he journeys to “seek his fortune in London,” to live
“at the hub of the universe” and commune with the cosmologies and efficacies
of the center, allowing his genius to flourish. By contrast, “his extraordinarily
gifted sister . . . as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as
he was . . . remained at home.” Yet, similarly propelled by the fevered desire
to explore her own creativity, she “refuses marriage” and “runs away to Lon-
don.” There, however, the negative pharmakonic underside of “quest texts”
takes greater hold as she is taken advantage of by the “actor-manager” she
hopes will support and nurture her. Finding “herself with child” she tragically
“killed herself one winter’s night.” With distinct touches of dramatic irony
and satire, Woolf depicts “Shakespeare’s sister” as symbolically consigned
to the outskirts where she lies unceremoniously “buried at some cross-roads
where the omnibuses now stop” (Woolf 2014, 46). Excluded from the effica-
cies of the center, and consigned in death to the periphery, this is a tragedy
synonymous with the death of fulfillment, of promise and creativity—a fate
our narrator extends to include other excluded underprivileged “outsiders.”
At this point of the tragedy, Woolf powerfully steps back to grasp alterna-
tive readings of “history”/“heritage” that make “room” for that which has
been excluded and marginalized, its efficacies banalized in various rituals
of riddance. “Shakespeare’s sister” is thus repossessed and sacralized as a
means to redeem fragments of women’s genealogies and by extension “out-
sider heritages.” Woolf uses her to evoke alternative ancestry and ancestor
figures to commune with, thus repossessing a vision of “women’s/outsid-
ers’” presence in historical memory. Woolf calls on us to make “room” to
reappraise and reclaim oft-demonized or overlooked female figures within
“outsider” histories, including the “witch,” the “possessed,” “wise women,”
“herbalists,” unrecognized and unacknowledged maternal influences, and
those whose creativities were “lost,” “suppressed” and rendered “mute” and
“inglorious” (Woolf 2014, 47).
Our narrator highlights how historical exclusions of such figures, many
of whom were associated with curative practices, must have prompted self-
sacrificial ritual responses in those whose repressed creativity intensified
into “crazed torture” and “dashed brains.” A moment of positive reclamation
emerges, however, as Woolf argues, “Anon, who wrote so many poems with-
out signing them, was often a woman.” Seen as fragmentary and fragmented
forms and forces of “lesser heritage” these submerged “women’s/outsider”
heritages are thus grasped at in redemptive acts. Woolf’s references to
women “spinning . . . ballads and folk-songs” iterates the need for “heritage
50 Beverley Butler
discourse” to reevaluate the efficacies of non-monumental loci as vibrant

forms and forces of popular, sub and counter cultures—as resilient folklore
practices and curative wisdoms (Woolf 2014, 47). Evans touches on some
aspects of this in her chapter “Threads of Time” in this volume. However,
attempts by top-down heritage agencies, notably UNESCO, to grasp and
possess such forms and forces consign them to the category of “intangible
heritage” which, as an iteration of failed binary descriptors, only serves to
banalize such entities by dispossessing them of preexisting efficacies as they
are musealized/sanitized and deadened.
The project of reclaiming “outsider”/“moving heritage,” through the adop-
tion and adaption of alternative ancestors and alternate flows of ancestry, is
aligned in turn to the need to possess a heritage of “one’s own” and reclaim,
(re)create, and repossess potent “cosmologies and constellations of care and
protection.” Woolf warns that any “persons-things” rendered outside such
frameworks—both metaphorical and material—face the humiliating and
painful experiences of being “feared,” “mocked at,” and “thwarted” (Woolf
2014, 47). Ultimately, Woolf argues, the loss of one’s “health and sanity”
becomes “a certainty.” “Shakespeare’s sister,” however, puts in place a basis
for “acting back” or for what Spivak has called “strategic essentialism” as a
starting point for reclaiming a shared presence as marginalized gender in deep
time/pasts (Spivak in Butler 2007, 80).
LING SHUHUA, CHINESE BLOOMSBURIAN
Woolf’s advice in looking to alternative directionalities and affiliations now

guides us back to China, to the figure of Ling Shuhua, who provides a pow-
erful bridge between Bloomsbury and China and more specifically to the
Crescent Moon Group (CMG) as a contemporaneous “Chinese Bloomsbury”
(Laurence 2003, 4). Indeed, Ling has been credited as adding “another figure
to the Bloomsbury constellation,” who in turn “reconfigures” “Bloomsbury’s
relation to China” (Laurence 2003, 8) thus making “room” for “contrapuntal
perspectives” as “sometimes parallel or discrepant, sympathetic or oppo-
sitional” (Laurence 2003, 19). In modernism, Bloomsbury and CMG thus
shared a paradigm in “a constellation of beliefs, values and techniques”
(Kuhn in Laurence 2003, 19). Perhaps a mutual creative fusion of “Blooms-
bury Syndromes” with “China Syndromes” was at play?
It was through her relationship with Julian Bell, Woolf’s nephew who
taught briefly at Wuhan University, that Ling becomes an “extended part
of the Bloomsbury constellation” and begins correspondence with Woolf
herself. Ling positions Woolf as her “laoshi” (teacher/mentor) (Lin 2005,
707) in her own quest to build on her literary work by adopting the “stream-
of-consciousness” style to write her autobiography. Exchanges of letters
attest to Woolf giving her encouragement and advice. However, rather than
the unidirectional influence critics reiterate, “it is no exaggeration to say that
British modernism would not have been the same without the contrapuntal
contribution of Asia” (Lin 2005, 705). This in turn embroils us in wider
questions such as, “how did Bloomsbury respond to the Orient, and the Ori-
ent to Bloomsbury?” (Nadel 2018, 14) and to wider repertoires of creativity
that have significant implications for radically rethinking heritage and local/
translocal dynamics.
CRESCENT MOON GROUP
In taking its name from a collection of poems of the Indian poet Rabindra-
nath Tagore (1861–1941), the “Crescent Moon Group, sought to collapse the
struggle between East (China) and the West (England, America) by adopting
the imagery of a third nation (India) in the image of the ‘Crescent Moon’
(Xin yue pai).” As such, it is credited as “an early and brave act of decon-
struction of the behemoth polarities of East and West by a Chinese literary
group” (Laurence 2003, 103). As part of the May Fourth 1919 and wider New
Cultural literary movements, CMG took forward the quest of repositioning
modernism more broadly “as a criss-crossing of experiments from the various
sequential experiences of many nations and languages,” rather than “a linear
progression [this] converged as an . . . ‘interpenetration,’ a ‘reconciliation,’
‘coalescence’ and ‘fusion’” (Kinkley in Laurence 2003, xvii). Many critics
argue that Chinese aesthetics and creativity are better placed to engage in the
modernist quest and, I would add, to build upon ideas of “moving heritage.”
Thus, “unlike the Western fixation on geometry, machines and perspective,
Oriental art expressed a principle of ‘moving focus’ with the viewer in con-
stant movement, never stationery” (Nadel 2018, 22). These were quests to
grasp new kinds of consciousness and fresh techniques for conveying them,
notably by “delving inward to the soul itself” (Laurence 2003, 17).
Ling, like Woolf, however, saw such interventions as marked by “voyages
outwards” also grounding their work in the “real,” notably in quests for wom-
en’s rights and critiques of patriarchy. Ling and others, including Bell, are
therefore conduits into greater and more complex constellations that, contra
to the earlier rehearsed “museal” forms and forces, position “objects-things”
as vital connectivities providing material markers that provoke and under-
pin “evanescent dialogue” (Laurence 2003, 111). Alongside the previously
documented exchanges between Bloomsbury and CMG are also unexpected
52 Beverley Butler
archival discoveries. For Woolf scholar, Laurence, a cache of letters, includ-

ing correspondence between Woolf and Ling, that surfaced in an auction
house, took her on a “rather wild journey” (Laurence 2003, 4), communing
with an “odd packet of materials” that she described as provoking ritual
behaviors in order to “let [her]self into [their] mysteries” (Laurence 2003,
1–2). Alongside letters and notes she discovered photographs and “small
bookmarks and calendars painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant” that
assisted her to better grasp the relationships and sensibilities that permeate
these unexpected material “facts of the ground” (Laurence 2003, 1–2).
FRIENDSHIP SCROLL
A further efficacious object—a “friendship scroll”—connects us with the

figure of Chinese writer-intellectual-poet Xu Zhimo who is credited as being
“the great link with Bloomsbury” (Laurence 2003, 129). The friendship scroll
“compiled” by Ling and “her friends” is active in “[m]aterially marking the
China-Bloomsbury link” while also bringing into view a very different vision
of “Oxbridge.” Xu takes the scroll with him “when he visited Cambridge in
1921 and 1922” (Nadel 2018, 26). According to the critic Nadel, “The scroll
archives the relationship between British and Chinese artists and intellectu-
als, many in the Bloomsbury group, and their Chinese equivalents. Inscribed
. . . with drawings, poems and calligraphy, it symbolizes an implicit cultural
union” (Nadel 2018, 26).
Alongside Ling and her friends’ contribution the scroll grew to encompass
twenty-two items, including “a quotation written by Bertrand Russell’s wife,
Xu Beihong’s sketch of a horse and a poem by Tagore,” “a watercolor by
[Roger] Fry and passages from a variety of poets and scholars materially
uniting Bloomsbury to China” (Nadel 2018, 26). A crucial point to be made
here is that within Chinese aesthetics the scroll is a form that one can enter
“at any point,” making an objectification of core modernist tenets in “plot
development” “of little importance” (Nadel 2018, 27). To these “filaments
of a cultural web” (Laurence 2003, 5) we can add Arthur Waley’s first tran-
scriptions (1918–1919) into English of Chinese poetry, and Duncan Grant’s
illustrated edition of Waley’s translation of Monkey (Xi you ji)—a powerful
Chinese quest-text also known as Journey to the West. In 1933–1934 Roger
Fry also gives his Slade Lectures on Chinese Art at Cambridge (Laurence
2003, 14).
WHAT WOULD VIRGINIA DO?
In Ling’s turn to Woolf’s text, she recalls, “One day I happened to come
across and read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and I was quite car-
ried away by her writing, so suddenly I decided to write and see if she were in
my situation what she would do” (Laurence 2003, 253). Ling’s own creative
quest was, however, a long, protracted journey in which a series of personal
and cultural-political events, including the war with Japan and civil war in
China, defined her particular context when engaging thus with A Room. In
the same period Woolf communes with Ling, seeing her as a “despairing
woman who was caught in turmoil” and encouraging her to “think how you
could fix your mind upon something worth doing in itself,” adding, “[Julian]
said . . . you have lived a most interesting life” (Laurence 2003, 253). Indeed,
the themes of war, intensifications of conflict and the violences of patriarchy
continued to be joint personal/literary and moral-ethical concerns for both
Ling and Woolf. In the same year, 1938, Woolf penned Three Guineas, the
“sequel” to A Room. Written in the context of the Spanish Civil War that saw
Julian Bell killed, age twenty-nine, and of the intensities that led to World
War II, Woolf’s fierce polemic has been described as “a damning indict-
ment of a male-dominated society, suggesting that the structure of patriarchy
causes fascist ideas to take hold” (Anon in Woolf 2014, vii).
The two writers maintained their correspondence between 1938 and 1941
during which time Woolf read drafts of Ling’s autobiography. One critic
writes, “The process of writing this book clearly reflects the influence of
British modernism/feminism on the Chinese writing of the female self” (Lin
2005, 707). While Vita Sackville-West, part of the extended “Bloomsbury
constellation,” praises its “Arabian Nights quality,” it was Woolf who en-
couraged Ling to develop “her own free writing style” in order to retain a
modernist Chinese signature. While Ling and Woolf never met in person
(the latter committed suicide in 1941), Ling maintained connections with
Bloomsbury through Woolf’s husband Leonard and Vita Sackville-West. Her
autobiography, Ancient Melodies, that fuses modernism with the rhythms of
ancient Chinese tradition, was finally published in 1953 by Bloomsbury’s
own Hogarth Press. Ling dedicated her book to Woolf and Sackville-West,
with the latter providing an enthusiastic preface.
IVORY PAGODAS, WAKING THE SLEEPING BOOKS
Critics have drawn out certain similarities between Woolf and Ling. To
use Woolf’s own words from Three Guineas, both were “the daughters of
54 Beverley Butler
educated men” (Laurence 2003, 254). Ling, as the daughter of the former
mayor of Beijing and his fourth wife, held greater elite status than Woolf,
despite the latter’s father Sir Leslie Stephens’s well-known status as author
and critic and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography, and her
famous literary ancestry through her father connected with William Make-
peace Thackeray. The elite-privileged status of both women and wider still
of Bloomsbury-CMG have respectively earned them the characterization as
“ivory tower” and “ivory pagoda” intellectuals and associated with a de-
tached “arts-for-arts-sake” approach (Laurence 2003, 254). These elitisms
continue to be levelled against both groups and in the Mao era led to the work
of both groups being banned in China. From the 1950s on, the “Crescent
Moon scholars [were] dismissed as decadents for their bourgeois taste, [no-
tably individualism] which . . . caused their contributions to modern Chinese
literature to be greatly under-evaluated until the late 1970s” (Lee 2010, 21).
For decades, subject to ritual cleansing by power in China, the Bloomsbury
Group-CMG are now regaining a certain efficacy. The antithesis of the “ban-
ning of books” has been couched as the “waking of sleeping books.”9 While
some modernist books were “forgotten or destroyed after 1949” many were
subsequently “revived and celebrated after 1976” (Lee 2010, 98–99). Thus,
as pharmakonic entities, such books were seen at different times as healthy
or poisonous influences. Some critics have highlighted an intense “modernist
literature fever” in post-1978 China. With specific regard to Woolf “before
the re-entry of western modernist works to China in the late 1970s,” her
works were “basically silenced in China.” However, a “Woolf fever” took
hold during the 1980s, “initially focusing solely on the literary forms . . .
and her literary theories” (Lee 2010, 104–105). However, the 1990s sees a
switch in some critics’ attention to Woolf’s feminist concerns and a substan-
tial growth in her popularity, as observed in the rapid rise in the numbers of
critical essays about her between the 1980s and the 1990s. Moreover, it is this
continuing force of Woolf fever that propels us to Chen Ke’s interventions
and to reencounter “Woolf in Dashalar.”
CHEN KE, HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
Our next engagement with A Room is no simple celebratory homage. Like

Ling, Chen Ke adopts and adapts A Room to particularize it vis-à-vis her
own context. As an updated contemporary version of “Shakespeare’s sis-
ter’s” quest, the material conditionalities and experiential intensities are very
different. Publicity material describes Chen’s own quest as that of a young
contemporary female artist, a “product of China’s one-child policy,” whose
“work deals with the isolation and loneliness of growing up without an ex-
tended family in Tongjiang county.” More specifically Chen uses “Woolf’s
argument [in A Room]] as a point of departure” to invite her audience “inside
the psyche of a young woman who has relocated to Beijing in an ambitious
attempt to succeed economically and socially” and to fulfill her promise as
part of “a generation of young Chinese dreamers to make it in the big city.”10
Chen, however, identifies the limits of Woolf’s text as promise of fulfill-
ment. The publicity material continues:
While Woolf might argue that this imaginary young woman has the tools for
success [money and a room], we are faced with an internal conflict as we try
to resolve the overwhelming sense of boredom, loneliness and frustration that
permeates throughout the tiny room leaving us vulnerable and longing for more.
On one hand we are voyeurs observing the private world of a woman who has
technically achieved freedom by securing her own space. On the other hand we
cannot avoid the underlying sense of fragility and uncertainty.11
“SHAKESPEARE’S SISTER” IN CONTEMPORARY BEIJING
Chen does, however, acknowledge Woolf’s efficacies by engaging with A

Room as diagnostic tool to apprehend and crystallize her dispersed and ex-
tended identity/heritage as a cause, in particular, of inner dis-ease. By these
means she explores new conditionalities that collect around the paradox that
despite achieving the quest of Woolf’s A Room this contemporary “Shake-
speare’s sister” still does not feel “in place.” Recasting Chen’s experience
of Beijing as an “unknown” place in “heritage syndrome” terms, grasps the
pharmakonic forms and forces of derealization and depersonalization at play.
Describing her work in interview as “melancholic,”12 Chen sees creativity as
her outlet for exploration of “things that matter” and also as a wider quest to
maintain her well-being, even sanity by intensifying positive feelings.
Chen as symptomatologist (of self/other[s]/world[s]) thus iterates creativ-
ity as potential diagnostic, even perhaps, a quest for cure, and certainly as a
form of coping mechanism. As one critic has it:
[Chen] is also addicted to the analyses of the constellations, which also make
a contribution to the sense of mystery in her works. Chen Ke uses painting to
fill her life and express herself in her paintings. It is stated that she would be
buried in a sense of constellation nothingness if she stops painting for a whole
day. Chen likes challenges and is always seeking the power for achievements
to satisfy her needs to be superior to herself and to seek a sense of herself. For
Chen Ke, this achievement becomes more real and exciting than just remaining
still and waiting for death.13
56 Beverley Butler
Chen, like Ling and Woolf before her, has been criticized for operating
within the domain of “confessional art” depicting “inner worlds” and “indi-
vidual psyches” and as such socially and politically unaware.14 However, like
Woolf and Ling, Chen collapses the binaries in such statements as, “My art is
as real as my spirit” and while her artwork is “ultimately an external depiction
of her own inner world” she too makes “voyages out” in that she “uses a uni-
versal language that connects with a wide audience.”15 This audience, in turn,
is bound up in various intensifications synonymous with the “Art Fevers” and
“Auction Booms” that have seen Chinese art and artists take the international
art world by storm.16 There are, however, other forms and forces that relate to
more localized forms of intervention.
CHEN IN DASHALAR, HOME IS WHERE?
Here, we are “in place” to reengage with the point of inspiration and depar-
ture that first provoked our heritage quest: Chen’s “A Room of One’s Own”
installation and related exhibition “Home Is Where the Heart Is”—a tempo-
rary “pop-up” event in Dashalar. One could argue that the particular “site
specific” and “participatory” nature of Chen’s work and its grounding in the
local holds efficacies that potentially fulfill the promise of reaching out to the
local. A certain collaboration between Chen and ChART and Beijing Design
Week in 2011 led with the promise of “voyaging out” in order to create such
connectivities. The installation, located on the top-floor of a “duplex in the
hutong area” of Dashalar, was “in place” to adopt and adapt A Room and the
figure of “Shakespeare’s sister” to make “room” for empathetic identifica-
tions and affiliations with the public.
Accompanying publicity further articulates this promise of offering a
“more personal way to connect this city of migrants and immigrants with
their loved ones far away,” arguing that this is what “makes Chen’s work
particularly apropos to the installation space. Home to traditional hutongs
and Beijing’s oldest business street, the Dashalar area is rapidly modern-
izing, with new shopping centers and snack streets resembling Southern
California–style outdoor malls.”17 Entering the exhibition, I remember the
feelings of isolation and emptiness conveyed by Chen’s “A Room” installa-
tion. The exhibition title “Home Is Where the Heart Is” was obviously used
ambivalently as a prompt to raise questions about belonging and being “in
place.” Chen represented “her room” as all white, with the centerpiece of
the artwork consisting of a near life-size white calico doll and scattered pos-
sessions made of the same colorless material. Small clusters of minimal yet
lovingly hand embroidered motifs provided traces and gestures of practices

and rituals synonymous with homemaking and connectivities with women’s
traditional crafts. However, the prevailing starkness communicated that this
was ultimately a failed quest.
Some form or moment of shared ritual redemption was, however, available
to visitors in the participatory activity in which:
Visitors could pick from any postcard hung on the wall, with clotheslines simi-
lar to those used to hang laundry (a ubiquitous sight in China, where people
prefer to hang dry their clothing). They could then write a message to anyone
anywhere in the world and hang it up. At the end of the exhibition, the postcards
will be mailed and sent off to their destinations.18
Chatter and activity took hold as I, like many other visitors, took a card
which had Chen’s “A Room” depicted on it, seen in figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1. Postcard from Chen Ke Exhibition, 2011, author’s photo
I wrote a note to family (including my cat) back home in London, which

was then placed onto the clothesline for the duration of the exhibition. Stamps
were bought and affixed in anticipation of the cards making their own “voy-
age out” to various national, regional and international destinations. Reviews
attest to visitors not only maintaining contact with loved ones in acts of care
but sending the cards to themselves in expectation of the pleasure and effica-
cies synonymous with “snail mail.”
58 Beverley Butler
WHAT AND WHO IS LOCAL?
The stated aims, efficacies and “lasting impact” of Design Week in Dashalar
were to “act as a catalyst for re-envisioning an area that had seen better days
and was threatened with the kind of ‘renovation’ that had destroyed other
historic precincts around it.” More specifically, to help “strengthen the case
for a revitalization strategy that sees a future for the neighborhood that more
sensitively respects its history, urban fabric and existing residents.” The
wider promise of fulfillment was thus to see a “diversity of stakeholders”
take possession of the projects.19 However, looking through reviews, visi-
tor make-up and participation and Harriet’s research, it seems that while the
figure of Beijing as a “city of migrants and immigrants” was pitched as the
empathetic point or “shared object” in terms of the intensities of experience
it provokes, those attracted to and who felt able to participate in such Design
Week “pop-ups,” were certainly not those at the extreme end of such experi-
ences, as Evans’s chapter in this volume reveals.
However, an earlier exhibition of Chen’s “A Room,” as part of the “Bei-
jing Underground” Open House program, offered a deeper engagement with
“bottom-up” forms and forces of immigration and migration. In this previous
collaboration a series of “emerging artists from second, third and fourth tier
Chinese cities” engaged in interventions “with spaces that are slated for rent,
sale or demolition.” Chen, again in collaboration with ChART, situated her
“Room of One’s Own” within a “10 square meter underground residence,”
the purpose being to highlight how such “underground residences” are “sur-
prisingly common in Beijing and are popular amongst recent migrants who
need to save money.” Chen’s design, rather than alienating, was argued to
help “transform the room into something more comfortable and familiar.”20
This promise of making “room” for social-political engagements and pro-
voking collective ritual participation was thus bound up in the efficacies of
“grasping”/materializing experiences of dispossession, while simultaneously
also bringing into view the limits of this quest.
“DEPTHS OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY”—“DASHALAR’S

SISTERS” AND HERITAGE AT THE CROSSROADS
In this final section our “quest” draws toward its conclusions, and sees
heritage precariously positioned “at the crossroads.” It is here where we can
pursue our return to Dashalar in more depth while putting “in place” the criti-
cal perspectives that we have accumulated along our journey. It also makes
us aware of the threats “we” heritage-questers face in terms of moral-ethical
impasse, and of the significant limitations, notably of the capacity of con-

temporary critical “heritage discourse” to act in solidarity with certain con-
stituencies and communities in extremis. In the case of Dashalar, and those
who occupy the underground of the “local” in the sense of being preexisting
presences, here is where obligations in terms of the efficacies of “bridging
acts,” the adoption and adaption of “shared objects,” and “quest-texts” and
crucially the projection of promises of fulfillment and fulfillment of promise,
are brought into sharp relief.
Our final return to Woolf’s A Room is a reencounter with the figure of
“Shakespeare’s sister” who gifts us loci of potential recovery and redemption:
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not
look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she
never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the
Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word
and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. (Woolf 2014, 112)
Woolf’s belief in the efficacy of “Shakespeare’s sister” as vital

“lifeworld(s)” (“life force,” “lifeline,” “afterlife” and “aura”), pervades her
own conclusions in order to open up to new ritual engagements vis-à-vis the
novel rebuilding of self-others-world(s). The “cross-roads” are oft-regarded
as potent loci, summoning the “pharmakonic” potencies of the supernatural.
Woolf thus plots out alternative heritage constellations and cosmologies as
empowering visions vis-à-vis new modes of possessional acts, ritual attach-
ments, affinities and affirmations. Crucially here, Woolf collapses individual
and collective positionalities-personae to access a greater accumulation of
“lesser-outsider-moving-heritages” as a zone of greater collective efficacious
substance. This is a zone Woolf associates with the experiential intensities of
“incandescence” and which I want to redeem further as a “zone of heritage
efficacies” as constituted by those forms and forces which resist the banaliza-
tions of power and privilege, and as such cannot be pressed into the service
of its elitisms and exclusions. This then is a transformative zone within which
certain heritages can be amplified and others nullified.
Of this vision of counter-heritages of accumulation and connectivities,
Woolf argues, “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are
the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body
of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice”
(Woolf 2014, 112). She then imagines a line of succession between iconic
women writers who broke cultural barriers, such as Jane Austen, Fanny Bur-
ney and George Eliot. Finally, she calls on “All women together . . . to let
flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but
60 Beverley Butler
rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them
the right to speak their minds.”21
WALKER’S SEARCH FOR “OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS”
Woolf’s words and the reemergent figure of “Shakespeare’s sister” continue

to emit potent efficacies in terms of their capacity to “move us” and reig-
nite our quest/ions vis-à-vis the promise of fulfillment and the fulfillment
of promise. Similarly, they continue to empower “us/others” in attempts to
transform and move beyond oppressive “matters of circumstance” and allow
“us/others” to align with vital life forces synonymous with “things that mat-
ter.” However, the ongoing, urgent need to further embrace the “elsewhere”
and “otherwise” of extremis is long overdue. Alice Walker’s own literary-
creative “search for our mothers’ garden,” described as a quest to capture “the
voices of unsung heroines” in contexts of intensified exclusion is our final
reengagement with Woolf’s A Room (Walker 2005).
Walker’s alternative “quest-text” starts by celebrating the efficacies of
literature and creativity by acknowledging the names of certain writers-
intellectuals. Woolf is singled out as a particularly vital ancestor figure, a
potent literary saint and redemptive figure within this constellation, “who”
Walker ventures “has saved so many of us” (Walker 2005, 14). Walker
collapses figurative and “real” worldings by positioning literature and
creativity—and by extension, reconfigured heritage forms and forces—as pro-
foundly transformative and efficacious life-saving medicines/“pharmakons.”
However, Walker returns to Woolf’s A Room later in her “search,” and to
the “figure of Phillis Wheatley”—an enslaved woman and poet living in the
1700s—who personifies the reality of greater inequalities at stake, and who
is excluded and exiled “outside” heritage efficacies. Walker states: “Virginia
Woolf, in her book, A Room of One’s Own, wrote that in order for a woman to
write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key
and lock) and enough money to support herself. What then are we to make of
Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?” (Walker 2005, 235).
Walker responds by reconfiguring Woolf’s text to make “room” not sim-
ply for Shakespeare’s figurative female sibling but for alternative figures
such as Wheatley whose suffering cost her her health. As symptomatologist-
diagnostician, Walker also isolates the effects/affects of “contrary instincts”
at play in terms of recalcitrant forces of chronic dispossession which reside
in Wheatley not having a heritage and ancestry of “her own” to draw from,
leaving her to mimic “top-down,” banalized modes of cultural transmission.
In turn, Evans’s ethnographies in Dashalar offer insights into such “contrary
instincts” within the “local” which reside particularly in the ambiguity and
pharmakonic qualities synonymous with the “Old Beijinger” heritage and
identity. This term has been put in play in the context of both violent clashes
and moments of entente vis-à-vis the respective interventions and intensifi-
cations of both “top-down” power (politics/economics) and of solidarities
with the “translocal.” As “quest text,” Evans’s Beijing from Below and her
chapters in this volume demonstrate our own “heritage quest” is obligated
to make “room” for those local persons simultaneously dispossessed by the
intensifications wrought by the “heritage industry,” yet coerced into adopting
and adapting the largely inauthentic, as many see it, “Old Beijinger” moniker
in increasingly alien and alienating “matters of circumstance.” Evans’s dis-
cussion of the contradictory feelings of locals vis-à-vis the “Old Beijinger”
identities and heritage is not a reductionist argument that situates Dashalar’s
long-term residents as having a claim to greater “authenticity,” but is based
on the responsibility to highlight blatant injustice.
“DASHALAR’S SISTERS”
One can place such solidarity alongside recognition of other injustices

wrought by “Greater Heritage” (in its persona as “Heritage Industry”) work-
ing hand-in-hand with the market and development. This refers notably to the
collectivities of those globally who have been displaced by top-down “Greater
Heritages” in their routinized ritual behaviors of riddance and cleansing of the
local. Our quest must then grasp the question of the new modalities by which
to acknowledge—activate and commune with—those forms and forces that
are already present as ancestry, efficacious lifeworlds and vitalities that have
been variously lost, obscured, and fragmented but can be unearthed in new/
alternative individual/collective ritual acts of solidarity. This is also the
means by which new forms of heritage emerge to be “named” in ways in
which the “local” becomes apprehended as a set of injustices, moral obliga-
tions, debts and imperatives, and acknowledged as part of what Woolf calls
the “real” of “common life” (2014, 112).
Ultimately, by recasting heritage “from below,” and/or as “outside,” “mov-
ing,” “counter” or “anti-heritages,” we can access diverse “truth values” and
align such efficacies to ongoing quests for social justice. I want to draw out
the efficacies of two particular interlocutors in Evans’s book, Old Mrs. Gao
and Hua Meiling, whose lives—including pre-“heritage industry” intensifica-
tions—are symptomatic of the ongoing, everyday challenges and suffering
synonymous with profoundly oppressive “matters of circumstance” operating
in the “local,” including those imposed by patriarchy (Evans 2020). These
62 Beverley Butler
women, simultaneously, acted as symptomatologists-diagnosticians of their

own lives, and that of the locality and of the wider worlds impacting on them.
In response, both women were creatively active in sacralizing their “homes”
amid the hutongs, as their “own” powerful “cosmologies of the center” and
thus serving as refuges, and, potentially, as promises of freedom synonymous
with quests for betterment and “things that matter.” These homes, that as
Woolf argues, are imbued with spirit and efficacy, thus acted as center-points
for the reception and recovery of diverse ancestry and ancestors and for in-
novations vis-à-vis the grounding in the local of “constellations and cosmolo-
gies of care and protection.” Evans’s heart-breaking “epilogue” is witness to
the further, extreme intensifications of suffering wrought by the “heritage
industry” that leave our “Dashalar’s sisters” with their health and lives broken
by the violences that crucially deprived them of lifelines in and of the local,
including their respective “rooms of one’s own.”
DASHALAR’S HERITAGE, “UNSOLVED REDEMPTIONS”
Writ large, I would argue that what “Woolf in Dashalar”—and more particu-
larly, the “real” tragedies of “Dashalar’s sisters”—brings “home” to heritage
discourse are the unnecessary pain, suffering and humiliations wrought by
power. While the “heritage industry” as led by economic intensification can
be singled out for its violences, these are also present in authorized heritage
agencies and discourses, and are part of their own efficacies. Indeed, in what
could be seen as an act of complicity, the Beijing Capital Museum installed
a replica of “Old Beijing” and “Hutong” heritage just as Dashalar was being
rent asunder. “Dashalar’s sisters” thus emerge as powerful personifications
of what happens to persons/bodies/lifeworlds when communities are forcibly
dispossessed and thereby stripped of familiar markers, loci and rituals of
everyday life, and the wider encompassing constellations and cosmologies of
care and protection. Part of being human and being “in place” is the need to
have at one’s disposal—as individuals and collectives—“one’s own” phar-
makonic efficacies (a room, money, health and the need to understand other
“matters of circumstance”/“contrary instincts” and diversities of visions/
quests vis-à-vis promises of fulfillment) as means to continuously revitalize,
remake and rebuild self/other(s)/world(s) vis-à-vis “elsewhere/otherwise.”
This leads us to investigate how Chinese vocabularies and local, regional
and/or creative intonations can be centered within reconfigured “heritage
quests.” A key issue here is how “efficacy” as “ling”/“ling-li” which, for
example, is used by Puett (2019) in the context of the efficacies of ritual in

early China, might be adopted and adapted to grasp contemporary “heritage
efficacies” and associated “pharmakonic” signatures.22 These being a means
to better crystallized motivations in terms of efficacies of heritage questing
(both figurative and literal) and to strengthen accompanying “cosmologies of
care and protection” of “lesser heritages.”
Our quest has taken us from Dashalar, first via the pathways of privilege,
elitism and patriarchy that sacralized—and still haunt—“Oxbridge” and the
“British Museum” and were possessed as “shared objects” by top-down
power-blocks in the academy and in UNESCO, and positioned as their ex-
clusivist ancestors/ancestry. We witnessed the ritual behaviors defining and
excluding “outsiders.” Via Bloomsbury as creative-intellectual “portal,” we
then moved back to China in order to introduce wisdoms emanating from
the ever efficacious constellations and modernist cosmologies synonymous
with the “laoshi” that occupied the “ivory towers” and “ivory pagodas” and
the entanglements that created vitalities between Bloomsbury and the Cres-
cent Moon Group. By means of “Shakespeare’s sister,” who is possessed of
and by many forms and forces, we aligned ourselves by fictive-imaginative
means to alternative ancestry, as we reclaimed “wise-women,” “wizards,” the
“possessed,” the “self-sacrificial” and those driven “mad” and “crazed.” We
subsequently recognized them as part of a collective accumulation of efficacy
as “incandescence” that “lives through us” and is “waiting to be reborn.”
At the “crossroads” too, we saw glimpses of redemption. In the figures of
Alice Walker and Phillis Wheatley we acknowledged the ongoing need to
make “room” for and transform “our” own place and the place of heritages
of the other(s) within the wider dramas of the “real.” Finally we embraced
“Dashalar’s sisters” as part of the “society of outsiders” and saw them as
a moral-ethical rejoinder to “heritage” notably in its violent industrial-
marketized-commodified personas. Here we acknowledged that debts and
obligations were not only owed but overdue in terms of “past-present-future”
imperatives toward the local. We reiterated the need for new and alternative
forces and forms of local/translocal solidarities to give birth to and open up
to the particularized promises of fulfillment and fulfillment of promise that
are also capable of bringing into focus “that which matters” with the “real”
to create more empowering “facts on the ground.” Here, finally, one might
add the agenda in heritage practice of reconfiguring “Greater Heritage” as
synonymous with collective access to “things that matter” rather than with
“top-down” power.
64 Beverley Butler
POSTSCRIPT
Our quest was provoked by my empirical encounter with “Bloomsbury in

China” and “Virginia Woolf in Dashalar,” so I end with a creative projection
of “China in London” and “Dashalar’s sisters in Bloomsbury.” At a time when
Covid rituals of distancing and cleansing were in play, a small gesture of “act-
ing back” was undertaken collectively with Chinese students on the MA in Cul-
tural Heritage (2020–2021)23 that, as seen in figure 2.2, momentarily reconfig-
ured as “our” “own” “backyard of Bloomsbury,” was to capture in image form
some of the transformations and emotional intensities emerging from the above
quest. This alternative “postcard” [from/to] “home” collectively transposes
onto Bloomsbury local-translocal heritage efficacies vis-à-vis the “elsewhere/
otherwise.” In Woolf’s lexicon these images take the form of intensely evoca-
tive flashes of illumination that unite our actors, “ourselves” and “others”
within the “zone of incandescence.”
By adapting and adopting Woolf as “shared object” we thus “imagina-
tively materialize” core connectivities and protagonists-personae by mak-
ing “room” within the “local,” thereby extending heritage efficacies, thus
bringing new efficacies and/as “constellations and cosmologies of care and
protection” into play.
Figure 2.2. Busts of Virginia Woolf and Rabindranath Tagore in Bloomsbury, London,
courtesy of David Francis
Studies of transcultural entanglements are usually directed against essen-

tialisms, and toward avoiding any propensity to idealize the local as a homog-
enous or purely redemptive space. But this tends to deny the contextualizing
of analogues as, in our case, Bloomsbury recognizes itself in China and China
in Bloomsbury. However transcultural we may recognize this to be, the “flash
of spirit” that “we”/our actors discover in Woolf is more than an inspiration.
Rather, drawing on a sense of common destiny, our characters share in the
emergence of something like a shared autonomy. If tragic consciousness is
about accepting ambiguity, then achieving some kind of escape from what is
contextualized as local, in particular in the form of a still powerful ideal of
how one might live, finds itself in new forms of identification. Far from some
kind of essentialized pole of difference, the flash of recognizing a shared in-
candescence in the aspiration of a “Room of One’s Own,” describes the way
the past tumbles into the present to disturb and correct whatever might be
seen as possibilities of new beginnings.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sincere thanks to Harriet Evans and fellow heritage-quester Mike Rowlands

for their invaluable help and advice with this chapter and for starting this par-
ticular quest for “Woolf in Dashalar.” To Zhang Lisheng and David Francis
for their creative discussions of “heritage quest texts,” “efficacy/ling” and
“pharmakon.” Thanks also to them and the Chinese students on the MA in
Cultural Heritage Studies (2020–2021) for their help and enthusiasm trans-
posing “China in London” and “Dashalar in Bloomsbury.”
NOTES
1. https://hyperallergic.com/37502/postcards-home-chen-ke-chart-contemporary
-beijing-design-week. Last visited, February 3, 2021.
2. See Hewison, 1987, coining the term “Heritage Industry” and intellectual tropes
to Adorno and Horkheimer’s coining of the “Culture Industry” [1941] (2012).
3. See https://www.lawrence.edu/mfhe/www_web_student/Everyone/A%20Mat
ter%20of%20Circumstance.pdf. Last visited February 8, 2021.
4. See Spalding, 2014, 150, on “A Room” as a “deep reflection on women, society,
literature” and on “what matters in life.”
5. The British Museum’s Reading Room became well-known in China because of
its associations with Karl Marx.
66 Beverley Butler
6. The Strand was and remains a major thoroughfare in central London. It fea-
tured prominently in Woolf’s work as a place where “bright men and women . . . for
all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality.”
7. Jane Harrison’s controversial, feminist interpretations of Greek mythology
were extremely influential on Woolf’s thinking.
8. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/aug/25/british-museum-removes
-founder-hans-sloane-statue-over-slavery-links. Last visited February 8, 2021.
9. https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/waking-sleeping-books-bloomsbury
-crescent-moon-group-china/. Last visited February 9, 2021.
10. https://www.chartcontemporary.com/open-house-chen-ke. Last visited Febru-
ary 8, 2021.
11. https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2014/12/12/life-in-beijings-underground-1/. Last vis-
ited February 8, 2021.
12. For more discussion see https://www.saffronart.com/artists/chen-ke. Last vis-
13. https://www.primomarellagallery.com/en/artists/21/chen-ke/. Last visited Feb-
ruary 8, 2021.
14. https://peoplepill.com/people/chen-ke-1. Last visited February 8, 2021.
15. For more discussion see. https://www.saffronart.com/artists/chen-ke. Last
visited February 9, 2021.
16. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/the-chinese-art-explosion-206/. Last
visited February 9, 2021.
17. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/beijing-design-week/index.html. Last vis-
18. https://hyperallergic.com/37502/postcards-home-chen-ke-chart-contempo
rary-beijing-design-week. Last visited February 3, 2021.
19. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/beijing-design-week/index.html. Last vis-
20. https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2014/12/12/life-in-beijings-underground-1/. Last vis-
21. Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was one of the first English women to earn her liv-
ing by writing. As such, she became a model for later generations of women authors.
22. Such signatures exist, for instance, in the popular saying that goes “one third
of any drug is poison” (shi yao sanfen du). In ancient Chinese alchemy—part of the
broader Daoist tradition of self-development and spiritual practice—dan (sometimes
translated as elixir) refers to certain chemical substance, or drugs that can facilitate
one’s pursuit of immortality. There were many stories of dan-making gone wrong,
the most famous of which is that Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BC)—the first emperor
of dynastic China—was killed by the dan he had produced to make him live forever
(personal communication from Zhang Lisheng).
23. The pandemic transferred my classroom teaching in UCL online, and I started
introducing new students on the MA in Cultural Heritage by virtual means to UCL
and Bloomsbury, the Chinese women students both recognized and responded posi-
tively to images of and discussion about Woolf.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass

Deception. London: Routledge, 2012 [1941].
Askew, Marc. “The Magic List of Global Status: UNESCO, World Heritage and the
Agendas of States. In Heritage and Globalisation, edited by Sophia Labadi and
Colin Long, 1–17. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
Butler, Beverley. Return To Alexandria—An Ethnography of Cultural Heritage
Revivalism and Museum Memory. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.
———. “The Efficacies of Heritage: Syndromes, Magics, and Possessional Acts.”
Public Archaeology 15, 2–3 (2016): 113–135.
———. “Rome Syndrome—Tourism, Heritage and Guidebooks at the ‘Crossroads
of the Real and the Idea.’” In Proceedings of the Topoi, Topographies and Travel-
lers Conference, edited by Stefano Fogelberg Rota and Anna Blennow, 9–27. The
Swedish Institute in Rome: Rome, Italy, 2019.
Denton, Kirk. “Life in Beijing’s Underground.” Modern Chinese Literature and
Culture (MCLC). 2014. blog. https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2014/12/12/life-in-beijings
-underground-1/ Last visited February 8, 2021.
Derrida, Jacques. Ethics, Institutions and the Right to Philosophy. Translated by Peter
Pericles Trifonas. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002.
Evans, Harriet. Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center.
Hewison, Robert. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London:
Methuen Publishing, 1987.
Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
Lee, Kwee-len. “Virginia Woolf in China and Taiwan: Reception and Influence.”
Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Maryland, 2010.
Lin, Lidan. “The Hybrid Matrix of Modernism: Bloomsbury and the (Chinese) Cres-
cent Moon Group.” Review Essay. Modernism/Modernity 12, 4 (2005): 705–711.
Nadel, Ira. “Oriental Bloomsbury,” Modernist Cultures 13, 1 (2018): 14–32.
Puett, Michael. “Life, Domesticated and Undomesticated: Ghosts, Sacrifice, and the
Efficacy of Ritual Practice in Early China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
9, 2 (2019): 439–460.
Spalding, Frances. Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision. London: National Portrait
Gallery Publications, 2014.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. London: Orion Books, 2005.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin Books, [1929] 2014.
———. Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. London: Random House,
2002.
Chapter Three
Rediscovering “Huangshan”
in a Heritage Context
Spatial Strategy and Invisible Locality
Luo Pan
Since the UNESCO World Heritage Convention was ratified by China in

1985, a large number of tangible and intangible heritage sites in China have
been included in the World Heritage List.* To be inscribed in the list, all
properties and sites, whether cultural or natural, have to be redesigned in
order to fit into particular UNESCO criteria.1 In this process, some values are
emphasized while others are abandoned. The selection of “values” for a par-
ticular cultural heritage site usually involves the strategic planning of space
under the urban planning authorities.
Mount Huangshan, located in the southern part of Anhui Province in east-
ern China, was designated both as a UNESCO World Natural and Cultural
Heritage site in 1990 for its magnificent natural scenery, as seen in the cover
image. I conducted the fieldwork on which this project is based in Tunxi
District, the center of Huangshan City, fifty-seven kilometers away from
Mount Huangshan, over a period of five months between November 2011
and April 2012. At that time, an ancient town named Liyang in Tunxi District
was undergoing reconstruction and transformation into a new scenic spot. I
therefore conducted a survey on the transformation process of Liyang Town.
During this, I visited all the nearby counties, where local people kept telling
me stories about how Huangshan City had been renamed from “Huizhou”
since 1986, and how this so-called “Huizhou renaming event” had had a
great impact on traditional Huizhou culture. Between 2012 to 2017, I made
numerous trips to Huangshan City, and learned a lot about the intricate links
between the Huizhou region, Huizhou culture and Huangshan, including both
the mountain and the new Huangshan City.
Huizhou is known as a region that over many centuries had a distinctive re-
gional culture. Generally speaking, the term “Huizhou culture” refers among
69
70 Luo Pan
other things to the styles of architecture and village planning seen in figure
3.1, to its art, folk customs, and a local school of Neo-Confucianism.
Most of the area around Mount Huangshan falls within the traditional
Huizhou region. However, due to the development of tourism, the region’s
traditional culture and the daily life of its local people have been marginal-
ized into invisibility, leaving the scenic beauty of Mount Huangshan and
its significance in Chinese arts and literature to the interests of tourists and
heritage experts.
This chapter draws on my research in Huangshan to describe how the
“value” of a heritage site is determined, how space is redesigned and manipu-
lated in the interests of local economic development, and how local lives that
are not directly related to the value of a cultural heritage site are dislocated
through urban planning and space management.
“HUANGSHAN”: FROM A SACRED PLACE TO A SCENIC SPOT
Mount Huangshan’s mystical status has historically been associated with its
divinity. Benefiting from its special physiognomy and geographical posi-
tion, it was first identified as a sacred place by people seeking immortality
Figure 3.1. Hui style village, author’s photo

Rediscovering “Huangshan” in a Heritage Context 71
between the Tang dynasty (618–907) and the Ming dynasty (1368–1644),
when repeated attempts were made to build temples on the mountain. With
the development of the regional economy during the Ming dynasty, Mount
Huangshan reached its peak of divinity and became an important tourist
destination for scholars. Then, in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties
(1644–1911), it became a site of refuge and freedom for rebels, unsuccess-
ful scholars, artists, poets and loyalist adherents of the overthrown dynasty.
In painting and calligraphy, Mount Huangshan was repeatedly described as
a different type of sacred place that distinguished it from secular sites. Jump
to 1979, Deng Xiaoping, the vice-premier of the People’s Republic of China
(PRC), announced that Mount Huangshan should become an important center
of tourist development.2 This event rapidly transformed Mount Huangshan
into an appealing destination for mass tourism. As such, it has been consid-
ered as the starting point of tourist development in China.3
When I arrived there in November 2011, I had the following conversation
with a local cadre:
LP: Do local people, for example, people from Tunxi, make the pilgrimage to
Mount Huangshan? To those temples on the mountain?
Cadre: No, we don’t go there.
LP: Why? Aren’t there still some temples? Why don’t you go? Is it too far?
Cadre: Local people make the pilgrimage to Mount Qiyun and Mount Jiuhua4
every autumn if they need to pray for peace or for a baby. People from nearby
provinces will also go to these two mountains. And every spring we people who
live in Tunxi go to nearby hills to our ancestors’ graves. But Mount Huangshan?
It is for tourists. We might sometimes go there with friends for fun. Those
temples [on the Mountain] are for tourists as well.
At first I thought that as a cadre he might never participate in the daily

ritual activities of local society. But later, his point was confirmed by al-
most all the locals I interviewed. The cadre’s explanation indicated that in
the local context, the surrounding mountains were divided into three differ-
ent categories. The first were the sacred mountains, like Mount Jiuhua and
Mount Qiyun; the second were the ritual sites, like the small hills where the
ancestors were buried, and where the geomancy ( fengshui) might affect the
welfare and achievements of the living; and third, the tourism sites with their
beautiful landscapes, like Mount Huangshan, but cut off from local society.
Local people might enjoy its view, but would never consider it as a major
pilgrimage destination, or a sacred place.
Why did the local society make such a classification of the surrounding
mountains? What does this situation have to do with Mount Huangshan’s
72 Luo Pan
status as a world cultural heritage site under tourist and cultural heritage man-
agement? Most importantly, what was the significance of Mount Huangshan
to local society before it became a heritage site? And how did its situation
as a heritage site affect local residents’ sense of locality and belonging? To
answer these questions, I start by explaining how Huangshan became a heri-
tage site.
Mount Huangshan covers a total area of one thousand two hundred square
kilometers around a core zone of 154 square kilometers. As a site inscribed
as both cultural and natural heritage, its cultural value has been as eulogized
as its magnificent natural scenery. The documents prepared for the applica-
tion for its recognition as a world cultural heritage site divided its cultural
value into two aspects. The first described its myths and legends, including its
connection with Buddhism and Daoism; the second introduced the literature,
calligraphy and painting devoted to the theme of Mount Huangshan. The
former regarded it as a site of religious divinity, and the latter’s emphasis on
its political marginality served to strengthen its divine appeal.
The relationship between religion and Mount Huangshan continues to oc-
cupy an important place in its cultural value. Buddhism and Daoism have
always preferred to choose famous mountains and rivers as religious retreats,
but Mount Huangshan’s lack of transportation due to the height and extent of
its mountain range was not conducive to its development as a religious site.5
Daoism developed relatively early in Mount Huangshan, and many of the
mountain’s legends and place names bear the traces of Daoism. It was said
that the legendary ruler, the Yellow Emperor, made his pills of immortal-
ity here. This legend is officially dated back to the Tang dynasty, when the
mountain was described in a Daoist text as the place of discovery for the
long-sought elixir of immortality.6 In the year of 747, the Tang emperor Xu-
anzong (685–762) gave Mount Huangshan its name and assured its place in
Chinese history, and the sixth month of lunar calendar was set as its birthday.7
But even so, Daoism never really flourished on Mount Huangshan, and even
before the Ming dynasty, there were very few Daoist activities there.
The development of Buddhism in Huangshan is more complicated. Bud-
dhism never really flourished on Mount Huangshan nor in the Huizhou
region, but in the mid-Ming dynasty, there was an obvious blossoming of
Buddhism that reached a peak in the early Qing dynasty. This prosperity of
Buddhism in Huizhou was closely related to the Huizhou merchants, who
flourished with the development of the commodity economy in the mid-Ming
dynasty, when business became an important channel for people to deal with
the pressures on the land of a growing local population. The Huizhou mer-
chants gave great impetus to the conditions encouraging the development of
Buddhism in their hometown by helping improve local transportation. They
brought Buddhism back from their business destinations, such as Hangzhou,

Yangzhou, and Beijing. And they also supported monks to build temples on
the mountains near their hometown. In 1606, a monk named Pumen went to
Mount Huangshan and built the Fahai Meditation Temple with the support
of the Huizhou merchants. Within four years, Pumen and more than thirty
followers made Mount Huangshan a fully developed Buddhist site, by en-
couraging the Wanli emperor (1573–1620) to name a new temple “Ciguang”
(Glory of Mercy). This symbolic event was the peak of Buddhism in Mount
Huangshan. With the Ciguang Temple being given recognition by the em-
peror, the Huizhou merchants increased their support for Buddhism. New
temples continued to be built on Mount Huangshan and in the surrounding
areas. Buddhism flourished for hundreds of years, effectively until the mid-
nineteenth century when more than ten years of civil war between the Qing
government and Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping tianguo, 1851–1864)
brought havoc to the Huizhou region, including the irreversible decline of
Buddhism (S. Xu 2002).
But even at its peak, Mount Huangshan never really achieved as high a
status as the two other nearby mountains. Mount Jiuhua, one of the four most
famous Buddhist mountains in China, is located two hundred kilometers
away. When Buddhism started to spread in Mount Huangshan, Mount Jiuhua
already had more than one hundred temples, and to this day, it remains an
active Buddhist destination, mainly for pilgrims from Zhejiang and Anhui. In
the seventh lunar month, visitors from all over China gather there to celebrate
the birthday of Ksitigarbha. Mount Qiyun, another of the four famous Dao-
ist mountains, is located in Tunxi, the center of Huangshan City. Daoism in
Mount Qiyun started during the Tang dynasty, reaching its peak in the Ming,
and it retains an evident influence on the nearby community today.
Mounts Jiuhua and Qiyun have been significant and popular sites of pil-
grimage for a very long time. Pilgrimage is a popular custom that is widely
practiced in nearby areas, for important festivals, praying for good health or
children, or guiding the spirits of the dead. The choice of pilgrimage site is
mainly determined by its distance from home and people’s financial situa-
tion. The pilgrimage journey is commonly known as “Towards Jiuhua and
Qiyun.” Even people from the three counties closest to Mount Huangshan
tend to join the “Hua and Yun Pilgrimage Group” in a journey that links these
two mountains together in a series of activities starting with Mount Jiuhua,
and looping back to Mount Qiyun. The pilgrimage is still popular in Anhui
and nearby provinces. In Tunxi, a small group named “Yongjing” (Forever
Respectful) is responsible for organizing local people for this pilgrimage, but
Mount Huangshan is not included.
74 Luo Pan
Mount Huangshan thus never enjoyed a high religious status and its re-
ligious activities declined in the early Qing dynasty for the reasons I have
noted above. In addition to the size of its total land area and its poor transpor-
tation, natural disasters in Mount Huangshan were also frequent, destroying
some of its temples in flash floods and landslides.
However, due to the development of the regional economy and the political
turbulence of the seventeenth century, Mount Huangshan unexpectedly ac-
quired another sense of divinity. As a place on the periphery of transportation,
religion, politics and even daily life, it became a center of spiritual sustenance
appealing to hermits, poets and landscape artists, a place that stood in contrast
to secular life and politics. Ming dynasty restorationists went there to flee the
repressive rule of the early Manchu Qing rulers. Artists were fascinated by
the dramatic mountainous landscape, its many grotesquely shaped rocks, its
gnarled trees, and its perpetual sea of clouds, launching a school of landscape
painting, called the Huangshan School of Painting. This school of painting
was a group of landscape painters from different places whose courageous
spirit of innovative creativity inspired them to express their feelings or be-
liefs through depicting the “Huangshan” landscape as their main object. This
school of painting was formed in the early Qing dynasty and has maintained
its influence to the present. Landscape painting of the time provided a way for
literati and artists to record their ideals, personality and self-esteem in ways
that could be implicitly political.
The most classic case was Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), a famous calligra-
pher between the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties. The
Yuan and Qing dynasties were both ruled by non-Han ethnic “invaders.” Un-
der the huge political constraints of the Qing dynasty, painters could only ex-
press their political thought by criticizing painters of the previous dynasty. As
an individual who surrendered to the Mongolian ruler of the Yuan dynasty,
Zhao Mengfu and his work were fiercely condemned by Ming restorationists
in the early Qing. The Huangshan School artists articulated their political
ideas in the form of their painting, creating a new orthodoxy (daotong) that
advocated a life free of dreary commitment to wealth, power and fame in a
context of protest against the change of dynasty. In the first half of the sev-
enteenth century, the paintings that took Mount Huangshan as their theme
were full of the emotions of exiles from previous dynasties (Qiu 2013). The
formation of the “Huangshan School of Painting” thus gave the mountain a
fresh and different sacred quality associated with a new orthodoxy espoused
by poets and artists.
But after the mid-Qing, Mount Huangshan was transformed from a place
of peace to one of strife and conflict. The natural condition which brought
Mount Huangshan its artistic and textual fame—its thick forests and numer-
ous granite peaks—also made Mount Huangshan a great place for anti-Qing
rebels. One record noted a ritual held there in memory of Emperor Chong-
zhen, the last emperor of the Ming dynasty, in the late seventeenth century
when the Qing empire had been established for more than thirty years. In
the nineteenth century, the rebellious Taiping Heavenly Kingdom positioned
their army in Mount Huangshan. Since it was occupied by the rebels for many
years, the Huizhou merchants and local residents of Huizhou used to avoid
its nearby roads. Years of turmoil led directly to the decline of the temples
on Mount Huangshan.
Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, war and invasion
disrupted the lives of local communities throughout the country. Then after
1949, with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, religious
activities were basically curtailed as “feudal superstition” by the socialist
revolution. On July 15, 1979, Deng Xiaoping, the state and party leader and
architect of China’s market reform, climbed the mountain and said, “Huang-
shan is a good place where tourism can prosper. You must boast about it and
make it known to the world” (Sang 2009). He also suggested that the “moun-
tain should be incredibly important cultural capital.” His talk was inspired
by his visit to Singapore and Malaysia in the winter of 1978. Noticing that a
small place like Singapore attracted more than two million visitors per year
and made a great fortune from tourism, Deng decided to develop tourism in
China. His Huangshan speech, considered as the opening declaration of the
“open-door” reform (gaige kaifang) and the inspiration to commercial tour-
ism, kicked off the development of the mountain, and launched the tourism
industry in China. Full and immediate implementation of his idea was carried
out by the provincial government of Anhui. With this background, the devel-
opment of tourism in Mount Huangshan was far earlier than in other scenic
spots in China. It also paved the way for the revitalization of the pure sacred
site of Mount Huangshan without the commercial contamination associated
with the city.
However, even before Mount Huangshan’s development into a scenic spot
under these new policies, the question of whether to rebuild its temples was
already a topic of debate. Considering how the complicated environment
and bumpy roads made it inconvenient for monks to live there, and concerns
about how monks’ religious activities, such as incense burning, garbage and
sewage, could cause pollution, the local government decided to focus more
on its natural landscape than its cultural qualities. The temples and the origi-
nal ruins on the mountain were all turned into hotels and restaurants in the
1980s.
Despite its various empty sacred sites, all religious activities associated
with Mount Huangshan thus disappeared. However, its divinity was rewritten
76 Luo Pan
into its UNESCO application profile to become a world cultural heritage site
to correspond with the UNESCO criteria. Nevertheless, it was obvious that
Mount Huangshan was unlike the famous Mount Wutai in Shanxi Province,
a heritage site which continued to attract religious practitioners, as described
by the anthropologist Robert Shepherd (2013, 13).8 Mount Huangshan re-
mains a sacred space only in its heritage application. However, to increase its
“divinity,” all nearby scenic spots visited by important political figures, most
notably Deng Xiaoping, are highlighted in the text of the tourist introduction
to Mount Huangshan. Soon after it was declared a world heritage site, a pine
tree named “Friendship” by the UN secretary general Kofi Annan during a
visit to Mount Huangshan in 2006 was made a prominent scenic site. In 2015,
the Mount Huangshan management office designed a new climbing trail fol-
lowing the route of Deng Xiaoping’s visit.
We can identify three different stages of the transformation of Mount
Huangshan’s divinity. Its religious divinity was first recognized by the em-
pire before the late Ming dynasty, when, as I noted above, Buddhist monks
tried to expand its religious status. After the establishment of the Qing dy-
nasty in the mid-seventeenth century, Ming restorationists and anti-Qing
rebels made the mountain a sacred place to sustain their political ideals, in
what could be thought of as their “dao” (way). Since 1979, Mount Huangshan
has reconstructed its divinity by stressing the connection between its heritage
identity and national and international leaders. This third stage has brought
about a really profound change, emphasizing the mountain landscape as
cultural capital, and using landscape painting and the Huangshan School to
endorse the mountain’s scenic spots. Although there are many depictions of
religious activity proving the “divinity” of Huangshan in the original applica-
tion narrative for cultural heritage, no temples have been rebuilt for tourism
development, and only a few temple ruins have been rebuilt into hotels.
THE HUIZHOU RENAMING EVENT:

URBAN PLANNING AND SPATIAL STRATEGY
Shepherd used Mount Wutai as a case study to examine the underlying para-
dox of the recent cultural preservation movement. “In an attempt to protect
and maintain global cultural diversity in the face of a relentless globalization,
this ideology presumes that diversity can be promoted by mandating a uni-
versal system of spatial organization, one which requires cultural and natural
sites defined as preservation worthy to be separated from ongoing social ac-
tion” (Shepherd 2013, 16).
China’s cultural heritage management commonly separates the cultural

value of cultural heritage from its locality. However, the case of “Huangshan”
is even more particular. Three events were influential in producing the partic-
ular management style adopted to transform Huangshan. The first, of course,
is Deng Xiaoping’s visit in 1979 and his suggestion on tourism development.
The second was in 1990, when the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature (IUCN) reviewed the recommendation document by the Chinese
government, and declared that Mount Huangshan’s natural values “predomi-
nated over its cultural heritage.” Then, in the same year, the International
Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) also deferred Mount Huang-
shan’s recommendation for cultural heritage listing, citing a lack of support-
ing evidence. Some researchers have noted that the idea of cultural heritage
in the West conflicts with the traditional Chinese idea of the inseparability of
nature and humanity (Liu 2013). However, heritage management in Mount
Huangshan implements the Western/UNESCO concept of cultural heritage,
distinguishing “culture” from “nature.” “Given the binary natural/cultural
heritage approach that is integral to world heritage site listing, the Chinese
authorities had no alternative but to seek inscription for Huangshan based on
separate assessments of its qualities even if their own world view does not
draw the same clear-cut distinctions between the two” (Li and Sofield 2006,
254). This is not specific to the management of Mount Huangshan, but is a
commonly used approach applied everywhere in China.
The consequences of this contradiction were first reflected in the manage-
ment of scenic spots within the mountain area. Researchers noticed that the
natural value of the scenic spots was constantly emphasized, while its human-
istic or cultural attributes and history remained invisible (S. Xu 2002). How-
ever, very few studies have examined the spatial planning of the city under the
mountain, and very few researchers have noticed how the spatial planning has
emphasized the tourism services with no understanding of the locality. The
“Huizhou Renaming Event” is a typical example of how spatial planning was
used to emphasize the natural value of a region for the purpose of tourism.
As I’ve already noted, Huangshan City is named after Mount Huangshan.
The current jurisdiction of Huangshan City covers much of the historical
and cultural region of Huizhou. Mount Huangshan marks the boundary
of Huizhou and historically was administratively under the jurisdiction of
Huizhou. In 1979, almost as soon as Deng Xiaoping climbed Mount Huang-
shan and advised the local government to use it to promote the development
of the area, the Anhui provincial government and Huizhou prefectural gov-
ernment started to draft tourism development strategies. The adjustment of
the administrative region to fulfill the needs of tourist development was one
of the resulting major decisions.
78 Luo Pan
Before 1979, Huizhou was a prefecture level city. Three years after Deng
Xiaoping’s visit, in December 1983, Taiping County and two other com-
munes of a nearby county of Mount Huangshan together established the pro-
vincial county level Huangshan City, commonly known as “Little Huangshan
City,” which was temporarily separated from the Huizhou region. “Little
Huangshan City” was positioned as a tourist city and a recuperation city.
People in charge of the Huangshan administration and Little Huangshan City
were cross-appointments, hence the deputy secretary and mayor of Huang-
shan City Municipal Committee at that time was concurrently the director of
the Mount Huangshan administration. In fact, according to the regulations of
the State Council of China at that time, county-level cities generally have to
meet two main conditions: the amount of non-agricultural population and in-
dustrial output value. Even though Little Huangshan City did not meet these
two conditions, the additional approval was granted it because of the special
status of Mount Huangshan’s tourism resources among national scenic spots.
This change lasted for no more than three years. During 1983–1986, Little
Huangshan City was “independent” from the Huizhou region, but it faced
critical problems, like a small population and difficulties with profit distribu-
tion, transportation, inadequate medical facilities, as well as materials and
supplies shortages. At that time, the management bureau of Mount Huang-
shan was gradually transformed from a public institution to an enterprise.
Institutionally, an enterprise cannot act as the government of the city, or carry
out the duties of government, so is not considered appropriate to undertake
the protection, development and construction of scenic spots.
Soon the unprecedented development of tourism triggered a series of policy
changes. As a scenic spot for tourism, Mount Huangshan has huge develop-
ment potential and economic benefits. However, one key question in deciding
on strategy to develop it concerned which administrative level—district, city
and/or province—should be the biggest beneficiary of Huangshan’s tour-
ism development. Furthermore, who should have the authority to decide on
Huangshan’s tourism management and related urban planning? Eventually,
due to the various practical difficulties mentioned above, Little Huangshan
City had to be reintegrated back into the Huizhou region in 1986 (S. Xu 2003;
Xu, Xu and Tun 2012). On November 27, 1987, China’s governing body, the
State Council, issued a new policy “On the adjustment of the administrative
division of Huizhou, Anhui Province” to redefine the local districts (qu).
This “adjustment” rescinded the former administrative system of Huizhou,
the original territory of Mount Huangshan, and established a new provincial
level city with a jurisdiction that covered much of the historical and cultural
region of Huizhou. In 1987, the provincial government decided to change the
city’s name “Huizhou” into “Huangshan.” This decision was made not only
because Deng Xiaoping suggested using the mountain as cultural capital, but
also, sadly, because at that time, they thought that Mount Huangshan was
much more famous than Huizhou, and Huizhou culture would have to rely
on Huangshan’s tourism for its development (Xu, Xu and Tun 2012, 78–79).
Furthermore, before resolving the problem of poverty, there were no experts
qualified to talk about culture.9 But as a compromise, the name Huizhou was
retained in one of the three districts.
In 1987, the jurisdiction of Huangshan City was finalized, with a reduc-
tion from the initially planned seven counties and two cities to the present
three districts and four counties. The establishment of new Huangshan City
destroyed the cultural ecology of Huizhou completely. Three counties were
separated from Huizhou, leaving the regional culture of architecture, customs,
economy and artistic style, which had undergone nearly a millennium of de-
velopment, separated and submerged behind the natural values of Huangshan.
In 1990, inscribed by UNESCO into the World Heritage list, the glorious
new status of Mount Huangshan created a series of new tasks confronting
the new municipal government of Huangshan City. On the one hand, the
municipal government had to follow the UNESCO World Heritage Center’s
regulations on protection, tourism management, the authentic maintenance of
heritage properties and maintenance of the site’s charisma; on the other, it had
to find ways to maximize the benefits from the tourism economy and balance
their distribution among the different levels of government. Urban planning
and space management were deemed to be the most useful methods to con-
front these challenges. The urban planners then managed the space of Mount
Huangshan and Huizhou in a way that separated the sacred mountain from
the tourist center, reorganizing “Huangshan” into two interrelated spaces
with different responsibilities: a city named “Huangshan” and a heritage site
named Mount Huangshan. Huangshan City is thus a totally new space, pro-
duced to sustain commercial development and practices unrelated to Mount
Huangshan’s sacred values, while Mount Huangshan, as a heritage site, com-
plies exactly with the outstanding universal value of the UNESCO document.
From Huizhou to Huangshan, the core of this model of city management
shared by the planning of Huangshan City and the heritage management of
Mount Huangshan, centered on tourism as the fundamental value leaving
the mountain as the main capital. However, when tourism becomes a city’s
most important economic activity, management has to focus on its business
operations. The management of Mount Huangshan is one of China’s earliest
examples of introducing market mechanisms into the local tourist economy.
In the 1990s, cultural heritage management was a brand-new topic in China,
when “environmental protection” and “economic development” were its
core objectives. Moreover, the two core indicators of heritage management
80 Luo Pan
referred first to the quality of the heritage item or practice and second to the
quality of the environment associated with the heritage (S. Xu 2003, 44).
The guiding policy suggests that tourists should live in the hotel under the
mountain after climbing the mountain (shanshang you, shanxia ju).10 This
policy had a profound impact on the urban planning and spatial arrangement
in the surrounding areas. As the capital of the new Huangshan City, Tunxi
District became the most important space for “living under the mountain.”
Tunxi and Huangshan City together were instrumental in the planning of
the supporting facilities for tourism, including hotels and the entertainment
industry. Other administrative areas incorporated into the new “Huangshan
City” have all merged their flagship products into the area’s tourist develop-
ment. These areas may have famous cultural heritage and scenic spots that are
integrated into the planning of Huangshan’s tourist itineraries, including the
world cultural heritage sites of Yi and She Counties, the ancient towns and
leisure tourism products of Huizhou District, or Mount Qiyun in Xiuning, to
name but a few examples. In planning its tourist itineraries, Huangshan also
gives priority to neighboring areas, such as Zhejiang and Shanghai, in order
to maximize the numbers of tourists.
In 2002, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences conducted an investiga-
tion on the heritage management of Mount Huangshan. Scholars found that
under the administrative and planning authority of Huangshan City, Mount
Huangshan had become a space that was completely severed from its loca-
tion, with serious effects on local society in terms of social and economic
resources and the environment (S. Xu 2002). Tunxi, as the most important
transit hub providing tourism services, absorbed most of the tourists’ con-
sumption and made significant economic strides, while local residents living
in villages around Mount Huangshan were not in a position to realize any
benefit from tourism (S. Xu 2002, 17).
The destructive distortion of the relationship between Mount Huangshan
and local space caused by this approach to urban planning was not limited to
the economy. It also had profound effects on the relationship between cultural
heritage and local society in the surrounding communities. The regulation
issued by local government according to UNESCO for the preservation of
cultural heritage should attach equal importance to its historical culture and
its community culture. Cultural heritage as a site should not therefore be
separated from its location and become an independent space (S. Xu 2002).
At the time, Tunxi, as well as several communities near Mount Huangshan,
all paid their price for neglecting locality.
The “Huizhou Renaming Event” and the corresponding management
became well-known in China as the “Huangshan Cultural Heritage Manage-
ment Model.” As the first in China to be inscribed as a world heritage site,
the experience of Huangshan was appreciated by central government as a

good example of heritage management that integrated the market and urban
planning in adapting to a changed social and economic environment. While
over time it was considered to have made a great contribution to the devel-
opment of the local economy, also it triggered a great deal of discussion in
local society and among heritage scholars. In the process, Huangshan’s name
acquired new meanings in the context of heritage construction in China, and
the formulation of the “Huangshan Model” revealed important aspects of
China’s emerging cultural heritage management policy.
THE HUANGSHAN MODEL AS

A MODEL OF HERITAGE MANAGEMENT
When I first arrived in Tunxi to start my field research in 2011, I lived in a

hotel on Ancient Street in the city center. The hotel was owned by a Hong
Kong real estate company. On the very first day when I checked in, the man-
ager, also from Hong Kong, gave me his advice about the locality, warning
me as follows: “Mind yourself, do not go outside the tourist area, [because]
they are all local people, and robbers. One of our guests was robbed of his
mobile and some money.”
On the other hand, locals I talked with were explicit in their views about
Ancient Street: “We don’t usually go there, to Ancient Street. The restaurants
there are expensive and tasteless. It’s just for tourists.”
The reorganization of Huangshan City divided space in Tunxi District into
an “area for tourists” and an “area for locals.” Due to the income, investment
and development opportunities that tourism could bring, the reorganization
of Huangshan City became a contest between competing interests. As the
center of new Huangshan City, Tunxi District is the most urbanized district.
It occupies nearly 20 percent of the new Huangshan City total administrative
area. Tunxi used to be a famous Anhui tea market in the Qing and Republican
periods, and was once the capital of Anhui Province. Although its political
position declined after the 1950s, Tunxi became the undisputed center of new
Huangshan City due to its convenient transportation and well-developed lo-
gistics. Tunxi airport was built in the 1950s, its railway was opened in 1981,
and a bullet train station was completed and put into operation in 2012. Tunxi
District was considered the biggest beneficiary of Huangshan’s reorganiza-
tion and a high proportion of its local residents are engaged in the tourism
industry. Few tourists know that Tunxi is also an important part of Huizhou
culture. There was no evidence in heritage displays that anyone cared about
the relationship between Tunxi, Huizhou and Mount Huangshan or what
82 Luo Pan
people’s everyday lives in Tunxi were like. Rather, local people’s identity as
Huizhou cultural practitioners who live a real life here is absorbed into the
label of “tourism employee.”
Urban planning and spatial arrangement have thus made Tunxi the front-
stage for both Huangshan City and Mount Huangshan. Two further planning
guidelines have been formulated for Huangshan City since the millennium:
the Municipal Urban Planning Guideline (2002–2020), and the Municipal
Urban Planning Guideline (2008–2030). These rely heavily on tourism, and
on how the length of tourists’ average stay and the number of consumable
objects will impact the development of the district. The spatial planning of
Tunxi is based on two goals: to extend its status as a transportation hub,
and to extend the stay of tourists. The only famous tourist sight in Tunxi
is Ancient Street.11 Along a stretch of 1,273 meters long, Ancient Street is
a well-preserved mercantile street with the architectural styles of the Song,
Ming and Qing dynasties, and full of all kinds of tourist products, restaurants
and Huizhou style hotels. The shops in Ancient Street show the specialties
of each district and county of the new Huangshan City. The items sold on
the street were carefully planned to include different destinations, with their
products and major selling points organized to emphasize their tourist appeal.
For example, tea from Qimen County, stationery from Yi County, ink stone
from She County, local snacks that became popular due to a documentary on
national television, and so on. Various fragments of Huizhou culture were
also displayed on the street, introduced as traditional life or the essence of
Huizhou culture. But for locals, these products were deliberately abstracted
from Huizhou’s history and redesigned for tourism, more like an invented
and imagined “Huizhou,” that has nothing to do with real life. Xidi and
Hongcun are two famous ancient villages, both listed as world heritage sites,
just south of Mount Huangshan. In addition to their beautiful landscapes, the
most important selling points of these two villages are the marriage, mate
choice and family customs of local Huizhou merchants. These centered on
the chastity of the wives of the Huizhou merchants. After long years of wait-
ing for their husbands to return from business trips, these wives took vows
of chastity not to remarry if their husbands died in other places. Such stories
were told to curious tourists as stories of classic local “tradition” embedded
in Confucian principles, since Neo-Confucianism is considered an important
part of Huizhou culture.
The commercial life of Tunxi thus centers on Ancient Street. It is around
here where the hotels are situated, with their prices usually based on proxim-
ity to Ancient Street. Tourist activities are therefore almost entirely limited
to this area. In contrast, the areas outside Ancient Street, where local Tunxi
people live, are considered dangerous and chaotic, as the Hong Kong man-
ager of my hotel noted.
When the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) boom began to take off after
2004, the display of ICH was incorporated into the Guideline (2008–2030).
This focused on retaining visitors, and in order to improve tourist facilities,
it developed a new area, called Liyang Town, as another display platform
for ICH. One bridge away from Tunxi’s Ancient Street, this redevelopment
project was called “Liyang in the Lane” (Liyang in xiang). The name of this
project was a hybrid of English and Chinese, with two related meanings:
“preserving Liyang in a lane,” and “Liyang, a fashionable lane.” This area
was to be connected with Ancient Street. After its completion, “Liyang in the
Lane” was to become a special space to attract tourists by displaying all the
intangible cultural heritage of Huizhou, as seen in figure 3.2.
The “Liyang in the Lane” project led to a dramatic change. A total area
of twenty thousand square kilometers of farmers’ housing was destroyed,
involving the relocation of one and a half thousand households, and the resi-
dents of four villages had to move out of their original houses.12 The project
started in 2009, was completed in June 2013, and was followed by an inau-
guration ceremony in August 2013. A culture and arts festival was to be held
Figure 3.2. Liyang in the Lane: a complex with old Huizhou and modern styles,
author’s photo
84 Luo Pan
every year to boost local traditional culture and tourism by heeding Deng
Xiaoping’s call to “make Mount Huangshan known to the world.”
The Liyang in the Lane project reconstructed most of the area’s old build-
ings into hotels and restaurants. An intangible heritage street was planned and
some buildings on the street were rented at very privileged prices to “intan-
gible cultural heritage transmitters” as their studios and exhibition halls. Only
transmitters with provincial level certifications were invited.13 Their products
were advertised as high-end items that promised tourists valuable future in-
vestment. Because of the strict limit on level of recognition as cultural heri-
tage transmitters, none of the transmitters are from Liyang or Tunxi. They are
invited by the local Culture and Tourism Bureau to demonstrate the epitome
of Intangible Cultural Heritage protection of Huangshan, even though most
of them are from other counties or cities.
When I revisited Tunxi in 2016, no intangible cultural heritage projects
from Liyang or Tunxi were in evidence in the cultural heritage exhibition
area in Liyang in the Lane. I found five studios there including transmitters
of ink stone carving, wood carving, stone carving, Huangshan School engrav-
ing and Chinese lacquer. Two of these were run by people from Huangshan
City while the other three were from different provinces. An old house in
Liyang town had been decorated as an intangible cultural heritage exhibition
hall of “Huangshan engraving.” “Huangshan engraving” was a new intan-
gible cultural heritage project based on the Huangshan School of Painting,
and combining modern engraving technology. The transmitter for this was a
young artist from Hunan Province in central China. When I asked her why
she became the transmitter able to represent “Huangshan engraving,” she
replied, “Because I am a printmaker with good skills, and the local people
do not have the knowledge about printing. They don’t even understand it.”
Though, as mentioned above, the Huangshan School of printing was formed
by printers from different places, her words still recalled the comment of the
local person who claimed that Liyang in the Lane was just for tourists.
An open stage was set up as a base for a heritage performance in Liyang in
the Lane, where folk arts performances from other areas, including Yunnan
ethnic music, were invited to perform to tourists. Sometimes, other so-called
cultural performances, such as the cheongsam show and Han traditional
clothing runway show also took place.14 These performances were normally
organized by a culture and tourism company affiliated with the developer of
the Liyang project, but under the charge of the Culture and Tourism Bureau
of Huangshan City. The only intangible cultural heritage performance from
the new Huangshan City was the Liyang ceremonial drum. This was redis-
covered by the Huangshan Municipal government in 2012. Between 2012
and 2018, the Liyang ceremonial drum rose from Tunxi District level to
Huangshan City level intangible cultural heritage, and it soon became a pro-
vincial ICH. In order to meet the standards required for these different levels
of intangible cultural heritage, the Liyang ceremonial drum had to undergo a
dramatic transformation, oriented not to the sustainable development of a folk
culture, but to increase the tourist attraction of the newly constructed heritage
stage. Local Liyang residents had virtually no part in this process. They lost
their land, received considerable compensation and moved collectively to a
newly constructed residential housing seven kilometers away from their old
houses. While I was doing my field work in 2011, these farmers who had lost
their land were either gambling or working in nearby cities.
The Liyang ceremonial drum has a history of one thousand five hundred
years in Huizhou, especially in Liyang village. The story goes that in the Sui
dynasty (581–619), Wang Hua, a general from Liyang, designed a particular
drum dance to celebrate his military success and demonstrate the strength
of his army. After he died, a temple fair called “peaceful August” (bayue
jingyang) was held every year to commemorate him. Thus over time, the
drum dance was gradually combined with ancestor worship. During the Ming
and Qing dynasties, the Liyang ceremonial drum was used by government
officials as a ceremonial performance during major festivals to welcome
important officials. Local people regarded the “Liyang ceremonial drum”
as a sacred ceremony which should not be performed for ordinary mundane
purposes.
The Liyang ceremonial drum ceremony used to be performed by male
soldiers. After its reinvention as intangible cultural heritage, however, its
traditional gender association was transformed since its contemporary recon-
struction was based on the memory of a woman who was soon identified as
a cultural heritage transmitter of the ceremonial drum. Some women from a
local university for senior citizens were then invited to form a team for the
ceremony, following which some male public servants from the Liyang town-
ship government were included. They thus formed a team combining both
genders, as seen in figure 3.3.
Since no local records of the ancestor worship had been preserved, the
ceremonial aspect of the Liyang drum had also been erased even before the
twentieth century. Reshaped as a “folk dance,” and reconstructed as intan-
gible cultural heritage, it thus was divorced from the embodied and spatial
practices of its local tradition. Its reconstruction as a heritage performance
obliterated its ritual status as a form of embodied knowledge dealing with the
relationship between humans and the divine world.
86 Luo Pan
Figure 3.3. Drum dancers of both genders, author’s photo
FINAL REFLECTIONS
“It is all for tourists.” The Huangshan Management Model now has a history
of almost thirty years. As a model of urban planning and spatial strategy it
extends beyond the management of Mount Huangshan’s cultural and natural
heritage since the new Huangshan City covers the relationship between the
famous mountain, the local community and their culture. As a result, al-
most all the places and facilities associated with Mount Huangshan tourism,
including the sanctity of the mountain, are, in the eyes of local residents,
reserved for tourists.
The Huangshan Model was developed soon after China joined the world
heritage convention and adopted the concept of world heritage, apparently
without hesitation. Although this concept completely separates nature and
culture and has given rise to considerable controversy among local executors
all over China, the whole country at that time was eager to achieve economic
development, and few people had much awareness about the needs and
meaning of cultural protection. The restoration and protection of the cultural
landscape of Mount Huangshan was not considered an important issue at the
time, any more than was the relationship between cultural heritage sites and
the local community.
However, these cognitive problems gradually created a chain reaction.

Tourism planning initially focused too much on the natural landscape of the
mountain, while ignoring its religious sanctity and its connection with tradi-
tional Chinese culture, as well as with the local culture in surrounding areas.
The administrative and cultural links between Mount Huangshan and the
surrounding counties were subsequently cut off. Then, in the new Huangshan
City, urban planning created an artificial separation between tourist space and
local space. After its reorganization, Huangshan City was split away from the
“Huizhou cultural circle,” leaving only a very limited number of Huizhou cul-
tural elements as tourist heritage selling points. Traditional “Huizhou” culture
and the religious divinity of Mount Huangshan were therefore ignored over
several decades. Huizhou disappeared in China while a new kind of city was
created, oriented mainly to the provision of tourist services but without any
sense of cultural history.
Since China ratified the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of
Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004, the government has embraced “tradi-
tional culture” as an important source of social and economic development.
Huangshan City soon joined up with those that were eagerly submitting their
intangible cultural heritage credentials to be included in the international or
national lists. At almost the same time, however, the Huangshan Model was
widely questioned in China by not only local residents but also heritage ex-
perts (Xu, Xu and Tun 2012) because it was considered to have caused the
widespread destruction of the integrity of cultural heritage. This study of the
experience of Huangshan, including the disappearance of its local commu-
nity, reveals that preservation carried out in the name of intangible cultural
heritage still continues at the cost of local understandings of the historical
sanctity associated with Mount Huangshan. However, in my research, I found
that although “Huangshan” seems to be a new city without history or locality,
it is still haunted by the ghost of “Huizhou” that lurks in the division of space
by local people into their own and tourist areas. In this process the cultural
and ritual meaning of Huizhou has been restored for commercial purpose, and
divorced from its cultural embeddedness in local knowledge.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am extremely grateful to Zhang Lisheng for his help with the editing of this
paper. I’m also grateful to Harriet Evans and Mike Rowlands for their critical
suggestions about earlier drafts of this chapter.
88 Luo Pan
NOTES
1. To be included on the World Heritage List, sites must have at least one out-
standing universal value of ten selection criteria (six cultural and four natural) listed
in the Operational Guidelines for the implementation of the world heritage conven-
tion. The criteria are regularly revised by the committee on the basis of theoretical
and practical research.
2. “Notice on Relearning the Transcript of Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 Visit
to Huangshan.” (Guanyu chongxin xuexi Deng Xiaoping tongzhi 1979 nian shicha
Huangshan shi tanhua jilu de tongzhi), “Important Documents of the Prefectural
Party Committee in Huizhou Region, Issued by Huizhou” (Zhonggong Huizhou diyao
wenjian hui fa) 1987 (No. 57).
3. http://www.china.com.cn/travel/txt/2016-07/15/content_38890965.html. Last
accessed on 23 November 2020.
4. Mount Qiyun in Anhui Province is a famous sacred place for Daoism. Mount
Jiuhua, a most important Buddhist mountain in China, located in Zhejiang Province.
5. It “is surrounded by mountains and the terrain is steep, the soil is harsh and
often flooded. Its city is almost walled by mountains, so the desolation of its sub-
urbs can be imagined.” (Luo yuan [Song Dynasty], Xin’an zhi 2, 18. Wenyuange
sikuquanshu, vol. 0485, pp. 0369b, Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.)
6. “Mount Huangshan was originally called Yi Mountain . . . It is said that the
Yellow Emperor once conducted experiments in alchemy here. On Lunar June 17,
the sixth year of Tianbao of the Tang Dynasty, it was renamed Huangshan by the
Emperor.” (Fang Wangzi, Huangshan Tujing [Maps and Illustrations of Huangshan]),
Beijing: National Library Press, 280–281.
7. Xin’an zhi (Xin’an Gazetteer) 3, 7. Wenyuange Sikuquanshu, vol. 0485, pp.
0381b, Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe.
8. Mount Wutai is one of the four sacred mountains in China and was inscribed
in UNESCO’s World Heritage list in June 2009.
9. “Guanyu jinyibu wanshan Huangshan guanli tizhi sheli Huizhou shi de
baogao” (Report on Further Improving the Management System of Huangshan
Mountain and Establishing Huizhou City), issued by Huizhou Region, 9 June 1987,
no. 61 (Hui fa wen [1987] 61).
10. “Huangshan fengjing mingshengqu guanli tiaoli” (Regulations on the Ad-
ministration of Huangshan Scenic and Historic Sites), 2014, issued by Huangshan
fengjingqu guanweihui (Huangshan Management Bureau).
11. The development model of Ancient Street is actually quite similar to other
places in China, like in Chengdu, or in Lijiang’s old town as described in Evans’s
chapter in this volume.
12. When I visited Huangshan City in 2012, I interviewed some Liyang residents
in their new community. Most villagers from Liyang town were relocated to a large
residential area seven kilometres away from Liyang town and received quite good
compensation according to the area of their original residences.
13. The “ICH transmitter” is divided into four different levels including: national,
provincial, municipal and county levels. The “ICH transmitter” receives different
amounts of allowance according to their level, and their level directly affects the price
they are paid for their work.
14. Cheongsam (or qipao) now refers to a tight-fitting woman’s dress with high
neck and skirt with a side slit, versions of which are widely available in global
fashion. A looser version of it was initially created in the early twentieth century as
uniform of a girls’ school. It quickly became popular as the outfit of modern educated
urban women of the new era. In the first half of the 20th century its style was greatly
improved by incorporating Western tailoring. Now it is considered as a typical Chi-
nese dress, and often thought of as Chinese women’s “traditional” attire.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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of Huangshan Scenic and Historic Sites), 2014.
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(2002–2020), 2008.
Huangshan shi ziran ziyuan he guihua ju Huizhou fenju (Natural Resource and
Planning Bureau of Huizhou district, Huangshan). “Huangshanshi chengshi
zongti guihua 2008–2030” (Municipal Urban Planning Guideline of Huangshan
(2008–2030), 2018.
Huizhou Region. “Guanyu jin yibu wanshan Huangshan guanli tizhi sheli Huizhou
shi de baogao” (Report on Further Improving the Management System of Huang-
shan Mountain and Establishing Huizhou City), 9 June, no. 61, 1987.
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Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), China.” In Managing World Heritage Sites, edited
by Anna Leask and Alan Fyall, 250–262. New York: Routledge, 2006.
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undoing zhong de renzhi kunjing yu lixing huigui” (Whose Culture, Whose
Identity?—Cognitive Dilemma and Rational Return in the Intangible Cultural Her-
itage Protection Movement). Minsu yanjiu (Folklore Studies) 107, 1 (2013): 10–18.
Qiu, Caizhen. Huangshan tu, 17 shiji xiabanye shanshuihua zhong de Huangshan
xingxiang yu guannian (Huangshan: The Image and Concept of Huangshan in
Landscape Paintings in the Second Half of the 17th Century). Beijing: Culture and
Art Publishing House, 2013.
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quarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=018_1979huangshan.inc&issue=018. Last
visited 15 June 2021.
90 Luo Pan
Shepherd, Robert J. Faith in Heritage Displacement, Development, and Religious

Tourism in Contemporary China. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Xin’an zhi (Xin’an Gazetteer). n.d. In Wenyuange siku quanshu (Complete Library in
Four Sections), vol. 0485, Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 0381b, vol. 3, 7.
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10–18.
———. “Zhongguo de shijie yichan guanli zhi lu, Huangshan moshi pingjia jiqi
gengxin” (On the Management of World Heritage in China—the Evaluation and
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44–50.
———. “On the Management of World Heritage in China—the Evaluation and
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shan moshi pingjia jiqi gengxin). Lüyou xuekan (Tourism Tribune) 18, 2 (2003):
52–58.
Chapter Four
“Slave(s)” to the Great Museum

Heritage, Labor and Ethics
in the Jianchuan Museum Complex
Zhang Lisheng
Since its initial development in 2003, the Jianchuan Museum Complex (JMC)
has become one of China’s most visited and best-known non-state museums.*
Labelling itself as China’s largest “private” museum project, the museum
claims to house a still-expanding collection of eight million items, making it
the biggest repository of historical artifacts and documents of twentieth-cen-
tury China. Heavily influenced yet not completely controlled by the govern-
ment, it is one of the very few museums that has been able to address China’s
politically contentious history of the twentieth century, and the only one that
has done so while achieving economic success and nationwide popularity.
Located in Anren, a historic town near the southwestern city of Chengdu,
the JMC is a vast complex of more than thirty museums and memorials,
spreading across an area of five hundred mu (roughly thirty-three hectares).
Built up on the personal collection of Fan Jianchuan, a self-made multi-
millionaire and collector-curator, the museums are clustered under four
main themes: the Resistance War against Japan (1931–1945), the Red Age
(1966–1976), the Wenchuan earthquake (2008) and Chinese folk culture.
Welcoming over a million visitors from across the country every year since
2009, the JMC has become a major tourist attraction and a key driver of the
local heritage economy. In 2009, Anren was officially branded as the “Mu-
seum Town of China.”
The development of the JMC and Anren is a small but significant segment
of China’s “explosive” museum boom and cultural heritage “fever” since
around 2005. By the end of 2018 China boasted 5,354 museums (Xinhua
2017), and the world’s highest number of listed items of both UNESCO
World Heritage Sites and Intangible Cultural Heritage. The ramifications
of China’s “museum and heritage boom” is a key issue behind the central
themes of this volume, and as other chapters note, it is a highly politicized
91
92 Zhang Lisheng
phenomenon. On the one hand, it is an instrument for the state’s promotion

of its “ideological mainstream” (zhu xuanlü), as shown by a number of recent
researchers (Denton 2014; Varutti 2014; Fiskesjö 2015; Evans and Rowlands
2015; Wang and Rowlands 2017), and on the other hand, it has become a
space where nonofficial narratives of the nation’s history have been made
possible. By early 2016, over a quarter of all the museums in China were non-
state, or minban, “organized by the people” (China Private Museum United
Platform 2016, 7). Non-state heritage initiatives have made considerable ef-
forts to bring public awareness to some of the “persistent” memories that are
less encouraged or accepted by the state, articulating a unique sense of moral
responsibility to heritage and history (Thaxton 2016, 14).
In this chapter, I examine the development of the JMC and critically ad-
dress the ethical domain of museum and heritage work through the lens of
the working lives of the museum staff. Based on fifteen months’ ethnographic
fieldwork conducted as a voluntary worker at the JMC between 2015 and
2017, I probe into the contrasts between Fan’s self-proclaimed moral values
and the grounded reality of the museum’s everyday social life.
THE MUSEUM AS A MORAL PROJECT
“To collect wars for peace, collect lessons for the future, collect disasters for
safety and collect folklore for cultural transmission.” Such is the project’s
motto as inscribed in bold Chinese characters on the cast-iron arch at the
JMC’s entrance that can be seen in figure 4.1.
This marks Fan’s redemptive aspiration to confront and deal with the
nation’s controversial recent past. Today, histories related to the Chinese
Nationalist Party, or the Guomindang (GMD), and the Cultural Revolution
concern politically sensitive issues and until very recently, have been largely
neglected in public commemoration.1 Though allies in resistance against
Japan, the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a
civil war after 1945, resulting in the GMD’s defeat and retreat to Taiwan in
1949. Since then, the Guomindang has been excoriated in dominant histori-
cal and political discourses under the communist government, and its major
contribution to the war against Japan has long been downplayed. The Jian-
chuan Museum Cluster was the first museum in mainland China to dedicate
attention to the Guomindang troops during the Resistance War. Before the
JMC opened in 2005, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Publicity
Department banned regional media coverage of the project and initiated an
“investigation” of its museums, which led to changes in both their names and
contents. Furthermore, due to the representation of Guomindang leaders, Fan
“Slave(s)” to the Great Museum 93
Figure 4.1. Cast-iron arch at the entrance of the Jianchuan Museum Complex, author’s
photo
was forbidden from inscribing any names on the “Chinese Heroes” memorial
square, a group of 201 larger-than-life cast-iron sculptures of prominent CCP
and GMD war heroes standing side by side. Public opening of the memorial
was not allowed until 2007 when Fan invited a group of descendants of senior
communist party leaders to visit the site to put pressure on the authorities.
Fan also announced plans to build museums on war traitors (hanjian), corrup-
tion, the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957–1959) and the Great Leap Forward
(1959–1961), though none of these have been permitted.
The political restrictions on the museum project indeed gave it additional
moral weight. In 2007, the Hong Kong–based Chinese magazine Phoenix
Weekly published a feature article on Fan Jianchuan, famously entitled “The
Vernacular Preacher of the True History of China’s Last Hundred Years”
(Huang 2006). By celebrating the role of the vernacular, this designation sets
Fan’s museums against the state’s historical narratives. Western media have
also depicted the project as telling an alternative version of history. In 2016,
the Wall Street Journal even called Fan a “challenger . . . taking on Beijing,”
who keeps pushing boundaries to test the censors’ tolerance (Wall Street
Journal 2016).
In Fan Jianchuan’s own words, what he does is “sound the alarm bell”
(qiaozhong) for the nation to evoke an ethical awareness about the “missing”
94 Zhang Lisheng
parts of China’s modern history that have been overlooked and suppressed
in official historical narratives. This is best demonstrated in the museums
developed in the early years of the JMC, that are dedicated to diverse experi-
ences and memories, including those of the GMD and war prisoners in the
Resistance War, different aspects of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution,
and controversial issues in the 2008 earthquake.
All this was made possible by Fan Jianchuan’s industrious practice of
collecting in a nongovernmental capacity during the post-Mao period. Fan
views his enterprise as motivated by a sense of “historical responsibility”
(lishi zeren) to restore collective memory against the corrosive forces of
rapid social transformation. Such moral impetus originates from his personal
memories of growing up as the son of a denounced party official, a Red
Guard,2 a sent-down youth3 and a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier
under Mao. Impelled to preserve the imprints that period left on himself and
his family, Fan started collecting everyday objects from the Mao era soon
after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when these were being abandoned
and destroyed in the “de-Maoification” campaign in the late 1970s and early
1980s (Barmé 1996). Among the early beneficiaries of the economic reform,
Fan then found success in the real estate business, before eventually devoting
himself to building museums.
“China can easily spare a businessman, which might well be a good thing;
but if no one does this (collecting), we would have a serious problem,” Fan
said in a 2008 interview (CCTV 2008). He attributes his move from the lucra-
tive real estate business to the world of museums and heritage to a quixotic
sense of moral obligation. Titling his 2013 autobiography The Slave to the
Great Museum, Fan characterizes himself as “enslaved” to his memories and
museum dream, regardless of the financial difficulty and political risks. Fan’s
notion of self-enslavement encapsulates the discourse of “self-sacrifice” and
“historical responsibility” that upholds the JMC as a moral heritage project
as well as Fan’s public image and personal branding.
THE MUSEUM AS SOCIAL WORLD
While existing accounts have told the story of the JMC emphatically from
the perspective of Fan Jianchuan as the mastermind of the project (Makinen
2012; Ho and Li 2016; Denton 2019), I examine the development of the proj-
ect from the perspective of the museum employees, particularly of the curato-
rial staff members who I spent most of my time working with throughout my
fieldwork. Their experiences of the JMC as a “social world” shed light on
how the changes I have outlined affected the dynamics, both of their work in
the JMC and of the overall operation of the JMC over time. In this, I under-
stand museum work as embodied practice, involving not only the production
of knowledge but also the material everyday concerns and emotions of the
working individuals as well as the relations among them.
Labor is not a new category in the study of heritage and museums. With
the global expansion of the museum labor force, museum work has become
increasingly diversified, incorporating not only conservation, research, exhi-
bition making, but also aspects such as marketing, management and public
relations (Fyfe 2006). Sociologically influenced works have investigated the
changes of and conflict between different visions of the organizational iden-
tity of museums (Zolberg 1981, Alexander 1996). Macdonald’s ethnography
of the creation of an exhibition in the Science Museum in London explores
what happens “behind the scenes” to make sense of the changing ideology in
the museum’s production of knowledge (Macdonald 2002). Engaging with
the “social world” of Colonial Williamsburg, Handler and Gable show how
the museum’s egalitarian discourse “mystifies” the reality of its corporate
hierarchy, and how its employees simultaneously accept and criticize the
“company line” in their working lives (Handler and Gable 1997).
I place particular emphasis on the ethical domain of museum work be-
cause, on the one hand, the JMC, as already noted, is to a great extent a mor-
ally charged project. Fan Jianchuan’s moral discourse permeates the ways in
which it was conceived, developed and managed. The same discourse con-
tinues to permeate the museum’s public face. In the meantime, the museum
staff’s working lives speak of contrasting moral values and concerns to those
that Fan articulates. Museum work, in its constant negotiation with Fan’s
dominant moral discourse, therefore itself becomes an ethical process.
My theoretical impetus for conceptualizing a notion of museum ethics as
exemplified by the JMC draws on the concept of “ordinary ethics” elaborated
by anthropologist Michael Lambek. By locating ethics in the mundane prac-
tices and circumstances of the everyday, Lambek argues that an investiga-
tion into the dimension of ethics “in selfhood, social encounter and action”
may provide a profound understanding of human social lives and activities
(Lambek 2010, 7). This critical vantage point has been adopted by Charles
Stafford who also holds that much can be learned about ordinary ethics from
the “micro processes of everyday life” (Stafford 2013, 5). I therefore pay
critical attention to both explicit expressions and the more implicit, tactical,
circumstantial acts, reflections and remarks of the employees of the museum,
to capture the ethical that is practiced every day, as distinct from Fan’s claims
about the moral values of the museum.
A couple of weeks after I started my fieldwork at the museum, one
afternoon I walked into the office area to the sound of an extremely loud
96 Zhang Lisheng
argument. The chief of security, Guo Changlin, was roaring and cursing at the
administrator Zeng Yong, shouting “how dare you deduct a half-day’s pay
from my salary?!” An ex-commander in the People’s Liberation Army, six
foot tall and phenomenally strong, Guo was intimidating when enraged. He
was there raging for the loss of a half-day’s pay, which was approximately
one hundred yuan (roughly £11), because he had missed a clocking-in. Guo
said he had never missed a clock-in and it must be a problem with the clock-in
machine. Zeng Yong defended himself for simply doing the job of calculating
the salaries based on the machine’s record. The only thing Guo could do was
to take it further to the senior managers. It was this drastic incident in the very
early stage of my fieldwork that brought me face-to-face with the “real-life”
mundanities of museum work, including the most down-to-earth matters such
as a half-day’s pay. This suggests a strong contrast to Fan’s articulated vi-
sions and commitment and indicates a completely different ethics of heritage
work. If Fan is a “slave” to the JMC, the employees are also “enslaved” in
their own ways, and their ethical dispositions, desires and concerns need to
be taken into consideration. I thus approach the JMC as a plural and dynamic
social world that complicates our understanding of the labor relations within
it. However, before turning to the employees’ stories, I set the scene by de-
scribing the early emergence of the JMC project.
CORPORATE IDENTITY OF A MORAL PROJECT (2003–2005)
To start with, I address the JMC’s organizational status. In 1999 Fan regis-
tered the “Jianchuan Museum” as a “private non-enterprise unit” (minban
feiqiye), primarily in order to avoid legal risks in acquiring objects for his
collection, since business companies were then not allowed to trade objects
confiscated during the Cultural Revolution. According to the “Guidance
Notes for Private Museums” issued by the State Administration for Cultural
Heritage (SACH) in 2014, all non-state museums in China belong to the cat-
egory of “private non-enterprise units,” abiding by the “Interim Regulations
on Registration Administration of Private Non-enterprise Units” (1998). Due
to its “private non-enterprise” status, the JMC does not have to pay corporate
income tax on its revenue from admission.
The JMC had a commercial side from the beginning. In 2003, Fan set up
the “Anren Jianchuan Cultural Industry Company” (Anren Jianchuan wen-
hua chanye youxian gongsi) within the Jianchuan Industrial Group (Jianch-
uan shiye jituan) to manage the museum complex. The organizational status
of the museum thus became simultaneously a “private non-enterprise unit”
and a “private enterprise” (minying qiye), the former non-profit, and the lat-
ter for-profit. Different from most state museums in China, which outsource
certain parts of their operations, the Jianchuan Museum is registered as a
“private museum” and operates primarily as a private company. As I shall
demonstrate, this dual nature of its organizational identity has had signifi-
cant influence on its management and staffing. One story that I was told on
several occasions about the establishment of the project is that in 2004 Fan
sold the main official building of his real estate company to raise funds for
the museum complex. But then I learned that the reason for sale was not sim-
ply Fan’s enthusiasm. As Vice-Director Han Mei told me, the museum was
initially a joint investment with two local state-owned corporates, the China
Railway No.8 Group Company and the Sichuan Daily. These two companies
then contributed up to 49 percent of the total investment and the museum
held the controlling interest. Yet, shortly before the project was launched, the
China Railway No.8 Company decided to withdraw its investment, claiming
the “loss of state assets.” Fan was forced to sell an office building in Chengdu
that was worth forty million yuan.
Therefore, from the very early stages of the project, state capital interests
were heavily involved, which raises questions regarding the museum’s claims
to its “private” position and moral motivation. Several informants saw Fan’s
museum building as a strategic move from real estate into cultural tourism,
stating two main reasons.
The first was the changing circumstances in the local real estate market
around the millennium. In 2002, Hutchison Whampoa, the Hong Kong–based
company owned by Li Ka-Shing (Li Jiacheng) started its investment in Sich-
uan. Together with several other local real estate companies, Fan raised over
two billion yuan to bid against Hutchison Whampoa in an auction for a block
of land in south Chengdu, but did not succeed. According to senior employ-
ees, that incident marked a turning point in the company’s change of strategy.
Second, since the early 1990s, the state had undertaken a series of legal and
fiscal measures to develop and propagate cultural industries and cultural con-
sumption, including the introduction of income tax and other fiscal measures
in 1994 (Wang 2001), and a subsequent lowering of interest rates in 1996 and
1998. Fan started becoming involved in the cultural scene with a first exhibi-
tion in 1999 at the Sichuan Museum.
The JMC project thus had a Janus-face character from the start, as a private
museum on the one hand, and a cultural enterprise on the other. To the public,
Fan ascribes his decision to move from the lucrative real estate business to the
allegedly unprofitable world of the museum to a sense of moral duty toward
the nation and his paternal family. He regarded commercialization as “the
way for a grassroots museum to survive,” by generating an income to sustain
98 Zhang Lisheng
itself. He hence designed a “museum complex” (bowuguan juluo), mixing

museums with teahouses, restaurants, shops, hotels and a boating service.
Fan has consistently striven to infuse his moral virtues into the manage-
ment of the company. In 2004 he wrote to the museum’s initial team of eight
people: “the Anren project is unique. It is unprecedented in China and the
whole world. For its accomplishment, we have to be creative and face chal-
lenges. Of course, we all have different roles, so doing your own job well is
the best way to take part in this great enterprise” (Fan 2013, 140).
This passage encapsulates some of the recurring themes in the museum’s
managerial discourse, particularly the notion of “challenge” and the stress on
the importance of abiding by one’s duty. Throughout my fieldwork, I found
that Fan Jianchuan made a constant effort to reiterate these values through
the interplay of the two notions of challenge and duty. The idea that the mu-
seum was faced with economic and political challenges, which required the
diligence and sacrifice of its staff members, was a discourse that was repeat-
edly reproduced, and mediated through the structuring and management of
the company.
IDEALISM AND SACRIFICE: THE EARLY STAGE (2005–2007)
Among the initial team of eight were the Han cousins, Han Mei and Han
Zhiqiang; Han Mei was a senior manager in Fan’s real estate company and
Han Zhiqiang was Fan’s assistant and driver. Within the museum project,
Han Mei specialized in administrative procedures and liaison with local
governments, and Han Zhiqiang worked intensively with Fan on collecting
and construction. The cousins were soon promoted as vice-directors of the
museum in charge of their respective lines of work.
For those involved in the early phase of the project, the creation of the
museum complex was a challenging journey. Despite the openly expressed
endorsement from the municipal and county-level governments, the museum
team had a series of business banquets with government and military officials
to settle the deal on the land and the mansions. Because of the heavy drink-
ing during these banquets, Han Mei recalled that Fan gave each museum
employee involved a ten-thousand-yuan cash bonus as “compensation for the
damage to their health.”
In 2005, the museum also recruited a few younger college graduates
to work on the construction of the first five museums in the complex. Lu
Zhishan, an interior designer, was one of these. When we met in 2016, he
described how the startup of the museum was “crisis-ridden” right from the
beginning.
There were about twenty of us in the company, and we worked on the site for
about six months, with huge anxiety and pressure, political pressure, financial
pressure, time pressure . . . All the buildings were designed by renowned archi-
tects, but we had little experience (in construction). . . . We were short of money
as well. Every penny had to come from Mr. Fan’s pocket. He used to say that
he would sell his office building if necessary. . . . At that time, it was uncertain
if it would be approved. Before Mr. Fan left for Beijing to solve some political
problems, he joked that he might not be able to come back to pay us.
The team of twenty employees, as Lu remembered, formed three depart-

ments: administration, construction, and the “decoration and display” section
that he was in. Three vice-directors were appointed, each overseeing one
department.
Despite the structure, the actual operation was fluid and collaborative. The
construction site was in constant disarray. “We were really ‘crossing the river
by feeling the stones’ (mozhe shitou gouge),”4 Lu told me. “There was a lot
of overlapping and cross-working. Lots of things were done together, for in-
stance, administrators had to help with construction work from time to time.
It caused some problems. But we had no choice.”
On his first day at work, Fan gave Lu an automatic camera to take photo-
graphs of the workers every day. These photographs were not for publicity
but rather for the museum’s self-documentation. From these photos, such as
figure 4.2, most of which were taken between January and May 2005, we see
construction workers drilling holes and plastering cement without effective
eye or hand protection, some with bare torsos in the summer heat.
The living conditions were poor. The employees lived adjacent to the
construction site, in a four-story house Fan rented from local peasants. The
site was previously rice fields. Lu and his colleagues paved the muddy path
to their dormitory with large wooden boards to walk across. Their bedroom
walls were full of moths, and hot water was not available in the building.
To have a shower, they had to be taken in a lorry to a public bath. “But we
weren’t bothered,” Lu recalled, “we would sing revolutionary songs on our
way to the shower, just like the sent-down-youth. For the two hundred or
so construction workers living on the site, the conditions were even worse.
When their families came to visit, they spent the night on the site sleeping
under a mosquito net. It was really difficult.”
In retrospect, Lu described the work experience as “interesting and fulfill-
ing . . . probably more interesting than working in the museum today . . .
It was interesting in the sense that people gathered from different places to
cooperate on the same project; and fulfilling because one witnessed the whole
thing being built from scratch.” Lu fondly remembered that he attended the
100 Zhang Lisheng
Figure 4.2. Builders working on the early JMC museums in 2005, courtesy of the Jian-
chuan Museum Complex
museum’s opening ceremony in August 2005, in a “clean white shirt,” feeling

“enormously proud.” Lu also highlighted the role of Fan Jianchuan:
the museum was not built by one person, but by a group of people at the call of
Mr. Fan. It took someone of his level of wealth and intelligence to lead us with
his dream, so that however difficult the process was, nobody lost faith, or got
too concerned about personal gains and losses.
These remarks reflect a consensus view among the museum’s early-stage

employees, which resonates strongly with Fan’s idea about the unique moral
significance of the museum project, namely that taking part in building the
museum complex was doing something that had never been done before.
Fan sought to engage his employees in his sense of commitment and duty
by setting himself up as a model for others. A colleague of Mr. Lu’s, who was
one of the museum’s first frontline interpreters, described Fan as an endearing
leader. “He trained us himself. The way he told the stories of the objects was
so moving, because he had collected them, and nobody knew them better than
he did.” During the investigation into the first five museums from August to
December 2005, Fan grew a beard to show his determination.5 He named a
pavilion in front of the Chinese Heroes Square the “Pavilion of Disturbance”

( fengbo ting) to mark the difficult period. While the company was making
financial sacrifices for the museum project, Fan never failed to pay his em-
ployees on time. Meng Xin, the museum’s publicist, told me that when the
museum was not making enough money Fan used to have his assistants bring
large bags of cash from his real estate company on payday to pay the museum
staff. Through such embodied performance of his moral commitment during
the early years of the museum’s establishment, the impression Fan Jianchuan
left for most of the staff members was of a charismatic and inspiring leader.
After the official recognition of the museum’s opening in December 2005,
restraints were placed on the museum’s publicity. A former employee, Mr.
Xia Jifang, who was working for a local newspaper in 2006, told me that
reporting on the newly founded museum was a delicate issue, particularly for
official media outlets:
Publicizing the Jianchuan (Museum) was difficult, as any information concern-

ing the Cultural Revolution or the Nationalist Party was strictly prohibited. But I
found ways to do it. On the same page, I would put my article on “a museum in
Dayi County” on the top half, without mentioning its name, and the museum’s
advertisement below it. The newspaper editors would examine the news, but not
the advertisements. There was an advertisement for a summer camp, and I used
a photo of a group of children standing inside the entrance hall of the Nationalist
Army Museum. On the wall behind them was a large mosaic figure of Robert
Capa’s portrait of the Nationalist soldier, made out of porcelain Nationalist
army cap badges. Readers would be able to figure it out and find [relevant]
information. Things like this I did a few times.
By the end of 2006, Xia Jifang had visited the museum sixteen times as
a journalist to conduct interviews with Fan Jianchuan. When Fan made him
the offer to be the museum’s publicity chief, he took it. “Working for the
Jianchuan was a lot more meaningful than my job as a reporter,” Xia told me
in 2016. He felt that taking part in Fan’s enterprise would create more space
for his own abilities:
There was a team of idealistic and enthusiastic young people, who really wanted
to do something. Though the living and working conditions were a lot more
difficult than nowadays, and there was nothing in the town, no shops, no enter-
tainment, no streetlamps, and when we finished work at six o’clock, it was pitch
dark outside. We always lived right next to the office. But we were full of drive
and vigor. We treated it seriously and took the work as a career. There was this
feeling that we weren’t there for the money.
102 Zhang Lisheng
Mr. Ren He was another member of this young team. In 2004 he was in
the final year of his undergraduate studies in Chengdu. After hearing Fan’s
public talk on the museum project at his university, he immediately applied
for a job at the museum and worked there as an administrator for three years.
By 2005, the museum was struggling financially with a total income of just
over seventy-eight thousand yuan. Some were concerned that the admission
fee of one hundred yuan (for three days) was set too high (Xiong 2008). Vice
Director Han Mei told me that there were days when the museum had not a
single visitor, when she would buy a ticket with her own money before the
day ended.
Despite the revenue deficit in the opening months, further investment
was continuously made into building the second museum series of the Red
Age, including the Museum of Red Age Porcelain Artworks in 2006 and the
Museum of Red Age Everyday Objects, the Museum of Red Age Stamps,
Clocks and Badges in 2007. In 2006, Fan invited his old friend Zhao Jun to
join the museum team to be the fourth vice-director in charge of the mainte-
nance and security of the complex. Fan and Zhao used to be comrades in the
army in Inner Mongolia in their early twenties. After Fan left for university,
Zhao stayed in the army and became a professor in one of the country’s most
prestigious military academies. The two kept in touch and Fan made Zhao
several offers to join him in business. It was Fan’s plan to build museums on
the Cultural Revolution that made Zhao decide to take early retirement from
the military and join the museum team. “I was living the comfortable life of
a professor at one of the country’s top military universities. Even now my
pension from the military is much more than my museum salary,” he told me
in an interview in 2017, “but I had to give that up because he [Fan] was do-
ing this [building the Cultural Revolution museums], which was something
extraordinary.” Zhao told me that he planned to do research on the Cultural
Revolution history with the materials in the museum’s collection, but was
reticent, understandably, about his personal experience of the period.
The above accounts of the museum’s early years fit well with the themes of
challenge and duty. There was a sense of common purpose in the employees’
narratives of their work which they linked with Fan Jianchuan’s articulation
of his personal dream and commitment. Working for a not-yet-profitable en-
terprise was rendered as an “idealistic” endeavor, a collaborative and creative
process of solving problems that entailed a sense of trust and hope, and, at the
time, almost a “voluntary abandonment of self,” to borrow the phrase from
the late David Graeber, which was close enough to Fan’s favored notion of
sacrifice (2013).
COMMERCIALIZATION AND BUREAUCRATIZATION

(2008–2015)
The year 2008 marked a turning point for the museum. In the immediate after-
math of the Wenchuan earthquake on 12 May 2008, Mr. Xia and a colleague
proposed the idea of an exhibition on the earthquake. Fan took it further and
decided to build an earthquake museum. After thirty days they opened the
country’s very first memorial museum of the earthquake on June 12, showing
images and objects from the stricken area. This made international news, and
largely due to the increased media exposure, the museum’s income jumped
from the more than three and a half million yuan in the previous year to more
than five million, breaking even for the first time that year.
The growth of the museum complex brought changes to its organizational
structure. From the three departments in 2005, the museum’s division of la-
bor gradually became more specialized. In 2008, the museum employed 319
people in total, almost half of whom were hired that year. There were twenty-
eight regular employees in management posts (zhengshi yuangong) and
the rest of them temporary employees (linshi yuangong) covering security,
sanitation, maintenance and other services. The regular employees, usually
referred to as “members of staff” (gongzuo renyuan), or “members of man-
agement” (guanli renyuan), worked across ten departments: administration,
marketing, retailing, finances, security, publicity, display and decoration,
cultural development, storage and acquisition, and hotel and restaurant. The
four vice-directors oversaw different sections of work, and each head of de-
partment reported to one of them. As such, the museum operated a five-tier
management hierarchy as illustrated below.
• Fan Jianchuan
• Vice-directors [senior management]
• Department heads [middle management]
• Department members [lower management]
• Interpreters and temporary workers
This was the overall managerial structure I encountered when I started

my fieldwork in 2015. The company provided three meals a day and accom-
modation for management staff during working days (five days per week).
The monthly salary for a department member varied from three thousand to
six thousand yuan depending on the post. In the cultural development depart-
ment, for example, a senior designer earned more than a researcher-curator,
although the respective posts were at the same level of management. The
temporary workers, including catering, security, cleaning and other services,
104 Zhang Lisheng
were hired locally and earned around one thousand to one thousand five hun-
dred yuan per month.
At seven o’clock every Monday evening, all management staff would get
together for a weekly meeting, provided that Fan was in the museum. Vice
directors and department heads would sit with Fan Jianchuan around a long
table, and the department members in rows of chairs around them. The meet-
ing proceeded through a set agenda. The department heads would start by
giving a summary of their department’s work in the previous week, followed
by usually very brief comments from the vice directors. Then Fan would open
up the floor to the department members sitting in the back rows and ask if
they had issues to raise, which was usually answered by silence. Sometimes
he would select someone at random, and on most occasions that I was pres-
ent, the selected person would respond with an embarrassed smile and a quick
shake of the head. Then Fan would take the floor, starting with his response to
the issues just raised and almost invariably ending up by reiterating the chal-
lenges faced by the museum and the importance of teamwork and sacrifice.
At the end of every month, staff members were required to submit a work
report (shuzhi baogao) in a standard format, though some were handwrit-
ten, and others printed. These forms would be collected by Zeng Yong, the
aforementioned administrator, bound into a volume and submitted to Fan for
feedback. Fan would leave his general comment on the front page, and give
each report individual remarks, and then pass them down to vice directors and
department heads to review and leave their comments. The volume would
then be circulated among the employees. The work report was a means to
keep Fan informed about the employees’ work as well as a platform for the
employees to present their ideas, queries and concerns.
These two mechanisms have functioned to facilitate communication within
management since the museum’s early days. They serve as a prism reflect-
ing the changing work ethos within the museum, becoming gradually more
formal and standardized over the years. Fan’s handwritten comments, in the
meantime, preserve some playfulness and freedom. The contrast is illustrated
in the image below in figure 4.3 of Yuan Hongwei’s April 2014 report; under
Yuan’s neatly printed bullet points summary of his work of the month, Fan
drew a stick figure portrait of himself pointing at the words: “for the Qingdao
Project [a consulting project the team was working on], please show your best
work as it relates to the company’s future expansion of consulting business,
in other words, it is a battle of life and death!”
By 2009, however, the anticipated increase in income had not occurred.
The Monday evening staff meetings started to last longer, according to Xia
Jifang. To boost morale, Fan would talk for a few hours about the notions of
sacrifice and duty. The reference Fan most often used was the battle of Teng
Figure 4.3. Fan’s comments on Vice-Director Yuan’s April 2014 work report, author’s
photo
106 Zhang Lisheng
County, Shandong, in March 1938, a crucial defense that paved the way for
the Taierzhuang Battle, the first major Chinese victory in the Resistance
War. The Sichuan-born general Wang Mingzhang who led the Teng County
defense was killed together with his whole division of three thousand soldiers
(Co 2015). Xia remembered Fan saying to the staff, “if I am to take Taier-
zhuang, what you need to do is defend Teng County!”
The extreme sacrifices in the brutal battle of Teng County more than
symbolized the type of self-sacrificial quality Fan urged in his employees.
However, the middle and lower tier staff were not keen to contribute their
ideas to the staff meetings, in contrast with the meetings in 2005, which, ac-
cording to Lu Zhishan were much shorter and “less formal,” and in which no
one hesitated to speak.
This reflects a subtle change in the workplace ethos around 2008 and 2009,
from one that was seen as collaborative and problem-oriented to an increas-
ingly authoritarian mode. The two mechanisms—the work reports and staff
meetings—were designed to encourage cross-level communication, but in
fact they functioned to reinforce the managerial hierarchy.
On the one hand, this change reflected the shifting relationship between the
museum’s corporate nature and its structuring framework. Between 2005 to
2009, the expansion of the museum led to an increase in management person-
nel covering much more diversified operational jobs, for instance in market-
ing, retailing, hotel and restaurant management. When I started fieldwork,
the museum complex had two restaurants, two hotels, a boating service and
several shops selling refreshments, souvenirs, vintage newspapers and Fan’s
calligraphy works. The addition of the new divisions of business, together
with an increasing desire for profit, entailed a much stronger sense of the need
for “proper” and “scientific” management, as the executive vice-director put
it, including more formal staff meetings, more frequent work reports, a rigid
attendance checking system and so on. The commercialization of the museum
thus went hand in hand with its bureaucratization, which by reinforcing the
managerial hierarchy, hindered the willingness to communicate among its
employees.
On the other hand, the change in work ethos may also have suggested an
ideological shift relating to the collective understanding of work. Xia Jifang
commented that it was the loss of a common purpose that brought the change
in attitudes toward work: “once the project started to make money, people
began to get concerned with their own benefit. If you look at the work reports,
there were fewer suggestions, and more self-criticism. Nepotism emerged,
and corruption as well.”
Xia’s remark concurs with the general awareness and tolerance of the prac-
tices of nepotism and favoritism in the museum that I observed and was in-
formed about during my fieldwork. Not only did Fan give jobs to his relatives
and friends. Xia Jifang also recalled that at one point there were around thirty
employees connected to the Han cousins, to the extent that when Han Mei’s
father passed away, all her relatives went on leave to attend the funeral, caus-
ing a conspicuous absence at work. From the gossip and informal exchanges
among the employees, I got the sense that due to their long-term loyalty to
Fan Jianchuan, the Han cousins were the ones with “real power” (shiquan)
among the vice-directors, so some of the employees made a conscious ef-
fort to develop a good relationship with them. For instance, Han Zhiqiang’s
sister ran a small restaurant outside the museum complex serving cuisine
from their hometown in Anhui Province. I had breakfast there regularly on
weekday mornings as I lived outside the complex. Nearly every time I went
there, I found other museum employees buying breakfast there even though
there were several other local eateries around. The museum’s designer, Guan
Sheng, told me that Han Zhiqiang asked him to design the menu for his sis-
ter’s restaurant.
Such nepotistic practices created a barely hidden hierarchy outside the
administrative structure of the museum, which was based on the members’
relational connections (guanxi) with Fan Jianchuan. In actual operation, this
hierarchy could even take priority over the managerial structure. There were
cases where employees prioritized tasks or errands from Han Mei or Han
Zhiqiang over those from other vice directors. These vicissitudes of internal
politics and guanxi relations, speak strongly about power, and the forms in
which it is exercised and channeled (Yang 2002). The rampant nepotism and
increasingly autocratic behavior of certain managers changed the ethos of the
company. In his 2008 annual report, Vice-Director Zhao Jun expressed his
concern about the increasing skepticism and mistrust in the workplace. But
his dismay was conveyed in a restrained form of self-criticism of his own lack
of drive and responsibility.
CURATORIAL STAFF AND CURATORIAL WORK
The politics and power relations noted above may not be unique to the JMC
as a corporate institution, but as a museum project, it is worthwhile consid-
ering how the change of general work ethos affected the curatorial work,
including the actual making of exhibitions and museums. Under the 2008 di-
visional structure, the curatorial work was undertaken mainly by the two de-
partments of “cultural development” and “decoration and display.” The cul-
tural development department was then a team of three researcher-curators,
whose job was to prepare the exhibition outlines and assemble texts, images
108 Zhang Lisheng
and exhibits. The decoration and display department consisted of four graphic
designers who were responsible for the museums’ interior design and other
visual aspects of the exhibitions. A totally separate department dealt with
the acquisition and cataloguing of the collections, and their work was more
technical than scholarly. Due to a separation between the curatorial team and
the “acquisition and storage” personnel, there was little research done on the
collections. Curatorial research focused on the themes of the museums, hence
were predominantly historical. Information about the exhibits generally came
from the captions that accompanied the items upon their acquisition.
The first museums which opened in 2005 were curated by outsourced pro-
fessionals, so when Wang Zhu joined the museum in 2006, he was technically
the museum’s first exhibition designer. His initial response to the then inex-
pert design team, drawing by hand, was that it was “completely shocking.”
The first project Wang was assigned to undertake was the Red Age Porce-
lain Artwork Museum. Not without difficulty, he managed to liaise with the
curatorial and storage departments and designed the showcases according to
the measurement of exhibits, in order to highlight certain valuable artworks.
And yet, Fan was dissatisfied with the result, since he preferred a much
“denser display,” which in his terms meant having the space ready first and
filling it up with a large quantity of items, including cups and teapots such as
those seen on the front cover. “That was the first and only time I was granted
any freedom [to make decisions],” Wang told me in 2017, “after that, I did
every museum following his direction, which, to be honest, made my job
easier.”
It is hence not surprising that Fan invariably referred to himself as the
curator of all his museums in interviews and speeches. He indeed personally
authored some of the texts and captions, though not all of them, as he occa-
sionally claimed. During my fieldwork, Fan’s involvement in the curatorial
work took the form of making decisions over matters ranging from archi-
tecture, layout and design to the selection of images and exhibits. Curatorial
issues were discussed in work meetings in Fan’s office. Very different from
the formalized staff meetings on Monday evenings, these meetings with cura-
torial staff were much more practical. I attended many of these work meetings
in which Fan would discuss in detail each team member’s presentation of
their work which then fed into specific instructions he eventually gave them
to execute. Such meetings could last from a couple of hours to all morning
and afternoon.
Wang regarded Fan’s control over curatorial matters as “inevitable.” “The
point is that Mr. Fan and his employees are not at the same level,” he said,
“he hires people not to communicate ideas. He hires them to follow his orders
and get things done. He gets his ideas from communicating with his friends,
intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs.” On a different occasion, Wang re-

marked, “there is, and can be, only one true talent (rencai) in the museum,
and that is Mr. Fan himself.” In 2010, after working for the museum for four
years, Mr. Wang chose to leave to start his own business. The “decoration and
display” department was merged into the “cultural development” department
soon afterwards.
While Wang was concerned with his personal career, other curatorial
members were frustrated by the workload. In her 2008 annual work report,
Ms. Qin, head of the cultural development department, expressed her concern
over the time pressures for curatorial work. She wrote, “everything [for an
exhibition], the content, the design, the installation, had to be done in a hasty
manner. While it is necessary to improve it in the future, the outcome is far
from satisfactory right now.” I also observed that the selection of material
was sometimes hasty, leaving little time to proofread the texts. Some staff
members told me privately that they felt that they were being “irresponsible”
to the visitors, and the museum was sacrificing quality for profit, in a work
style that resembled the Mao era “faster, better and more economical” (duo
kuai hao sheng) slogan of the Great Leap Forward. 6
Nevertheless, the company kept on building new museums at high speed, at
least two or three every year. Furthermore, in 2010, the museum embarked on
its own heritage consultancy business. For the price of two million yuan, the
company would provide a package including the overall planning design of a
heritage site, visual renderings of museums, detailed exhibition outlines and
a loan of collections. Each project would last around two to three months. By
2018, the museum had completed over twenty such planning projects across
a range of provinces and cities, contracting with different local governments
and authorities. These projects were usually undertaken simultaneously with
the preparation for new museums. At times, the curatorial team would work
on two or three projects at the same time.
Yet despite the increased amount of work, the museum’s curatorial team
shrunk. In 2008, there were altogether seven employees in the cultural de-
velopment department and the decoration and display department. When I
started fieldwork in 2015, there were five people in the cultural development
department that was already merged with decoration and display, and after
one employee left in 2017 there were only four. Head of the cultural develop-
ment department Qin Hua once made remarks about the increasing workload
in a staff meeting. Fan responded that every member’s duty was equally
important, and it was selfish to claim that some worked more than others.
Despite the lucrative museum planning business, Fan pleaded poverty and
said explicitly that the museum could not afford to hire any more people, and
staff therefore had to be keen to learn and do more.
110 Zhang Lisheng
These managerial changes happened against the backdrop of a tightening

political environment. On January 8, 2017, Fan called for a staff meeting
immediately after returning from the Sichuan provincial “two sessions”
(lianghui) in Chengdu.7 “This is the first time that it’s been so difficult to
communicate [with the government],” was the first thing Fan said as he sat
down, with an unusual look of distress and frustration. “It is only going to get
worse, and more difficult to ask [the government] for money,” Fan said, and
“we all have to work harder” in order to “do as much as possible before the
door is completely closed.”
Yet it was one thing to encourage self-development among employees, and
quite another to have nonprofessional staff doing curatorial work. Toward the
end of my fieldwork in early 2017, a few members from the administration
and publicity departments, and two vice directors were involved in exhibition
preparation and planning projects. Some might well have argued that this
reflected a different attitude toward “expertise,” as Fan began to characterize
himself as a “grassroots” (caogen) figure in the museum world, and his ex-
pertise as “vernacular” (minjian) in contrast with the “professional” (zhuanye)
museums of officialdom. However, in my analysis, this had just as much to
do with the nature of the work. Because while the alternative “vernacular”
position seemed to suggest a fresh creativity, in fact, the work’s increasingly
unprofessional character made it repetitive and mechanical. This could also
be evidenced by comparing the first five museums, which were highly profes-
sional and undertaken by specialist architects and designers, with the later ones
done by the museum team on the basis of the same formula.
This is not to deny that creativity has played a significant role in the mu-
seum’s curatorial practice. Creativity remains key to the museum’s appeal,
and yet Fan Jianchuan seems to be the only source of it. As demonstrated
above, the way Fan works with his team gives little space for his creative
initiatives to be taken any further by his employees. Over the recent ten years
or so, the team’s role in the museum’s curatorial work has been effectively
instrumentalized and the quality of the museum has become dependent on the
extent to which Fan is involved.
This has produced a very different understanding of work to the ethos
of the JMC’s “creation phase.” The idealist and experimental ethos of the
early years was replaced by frustration over the museum’s autocratic and
exploitative style of management, voiced not only by the curatorial team,
but also by other staff members. This marks a shift in the employees’ self-
identification from “museum makers” (bowuguan jianshezhe) to “museum
workers” (dagong de)––the former with an evident sense of pride and owner-
ship, while the latter is a term often associated with migrant and short-term
physical labor.
CONCLUSION
In charting a brief organizational history of the Jianchuan Museum, attending

to its managerial structure, staffing strategy, and curatorial line of work, it
becomes clear that for many if not most of the JMC’s employees, the general
work ethos underwent a shift from of an idealistic mission of museum build-
ing in the early phase of the museum’s creation, to a sense of basic wage
employment in recent years.
It is striking that over the course of the museum’s development, the pro-
fessionalization of its overall management has been accompanied by a de-
professionalization of its curatorial work force, even though it is crucial to
the museum’s production of knowledge. Between Fan’s self-identification as
“vernacular” and the increasingly repetitive and top-down character of the
museum’s curatorial operations, there emerges a disjuncture between Fan’s
moralized discourse of his “self-enslavement” to the museum and the reality
of how it works. The purveyor of true history to some is an exploitative capi-
talist to others. The ways in which this disjuncture is experienced and dealt
with by different museum employees open up a significant new dimension in
considering the ethics of heritage.
In broader terms, while China’s continued heritage boom is giving rise
to increasingly diversified articulations about the past, the JMC offers a
sobering example of how political and financial pressures can suffocate the
creativity out of inspiring projects and replace them with increasingly bu-
reaucratic and managerial constraints responding to a shifting political and
economic environment, which has been particularly apparent since 2012.
The vicissitudes of labor management at the JMC speak of the moral as
well as financial complexity of museum work and the contrasting ways in
which heritage value can be formulated under the impact of the increasing
tendency in recent years toward the top-down imposition of central policies
of museum-building, curatorship and heritage meaning. As my account of the
JMC indicates, to understand how this tendency is perceived and negotiated
by local heritage initiatives requires critical attention to the often marginal-
ized voices and undertakings from behind the scenes.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am extremely grateful to Professor Harriet Evans and Professor Mike Row-

lands for involving me in this project and supporting me generously through
the research and the writing of this chapter. I also would like to thank Suvi
Rautio, Loretta Lou and Sonia Lam-Knott for reading and commenting on
112 Zhang Lisheng
earlier drafts of this chapter. With the exception of Fan Jianchuan, all names
are pseudonyms.
NOTES
1. In 1981, the party-state adopted the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the

History of our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” which
deemed the ten years of the Cultural Revolution responsible for “the most severe set-
back and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the
founding of the People’s Republic.” This has played the role of a “pact of forgetting”
for the event, in the sense that only state-sanctioned historical accounts that conform
to the official discourse are allowed. Since 2012, the state has tightened its control
over public remembrance of the Cultural Revolution. China’s first public memorial
of the event, the Taiyuan Cultural Revolution Museum built in 2005 in Shantou by a
retired local official, was forced to close in June 2016.
2. Red Guards (hong weibing), were the millions of young students who were mo-
bilized by Mao Zedong to combat “revisionist” Party authorities and carry out wide-
spread destruction of “traditional” cultural objects and practices during the height of
the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. At the time, this was described as an attack
on feudal practices and superstition in order to build a new socialist culture. This
destruction was only later described as a destruction of China’s “cultural heritage.”
3. The “sent-down youth” (zhiqing), refer to urban young people of high school
and university age who participated in the “down to the countryside movement (xiax-
iang), between 1968 and the late 1970s. At the time, this was described as part of a
revolutionary project to enable young urban people to “learn from the peasants.” For
a recent analysis of the movement in Shanghai, see Honig and Zhao 2019.
4. This saying is known to be favored by Deng Xiaoping to describe China’s eco-
nomic approach toward the Reform and Opening-up (gaige kaifang) policy that began
in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
5. To grow a beard as the evidence of one’s will (xuxu mingzhi) is a Chinese tra-
dition. Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the PRC, famously grew a beard during the
Resistance War.
6. This phrase comes from the General Line for Socialist Construction—“Go all
out, aim high, and build socialism with greater, faster, better and more economical
results”—which was suggested by Mao Zedong and officially adopted by the CCP in
the Second Session of the Eighth National Party Congress in May 1958.
7. The “two sessions” here refer to the annual Sichuan Provincial People’s Con-
gress session and the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference (CPPCC) session.
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Chapter Five
Between State and Local Residents

Heritage Perspectives and Their
Combination in Quanzhou, Southern Fujian
Stephan Feuchtwang
Heritage making is consolidated through mediation between perspectives

from very different conceptions of history and morality.* The very same ob-
ject of heritage can and usually does evoke quite different ideas of the past,
even in the same person. Key mediators, in their identification and preserva-
tion or reformation of heritage as a continuation from the past, succeed in
their efforts of heritage making by gaining trust because they have shown that
they can entertain several interpretations, combining perspectives of what the
heritage is and what it is for.
I see roughly three major perspectives on heritage transmission and pres-
ervation in all their forms, tangible and intangible. I think they have their
equivalents everywhere but I delineate them here for application in the
People’s Republic of China. The first is mainly identified with and by the
state and its allied intellectuals, historians and cultural advisers, at every level
from the center down to rural and city regions; the second is held mainly by
private entrepreneurs with wealth to invest in local culture and museums,
and the third is grounded in local residents reviving ancestral worship and
genealogies, and festivals celebrating local protector gods. All three engage
in the designation and establishment of heritage in the same place. The first
does this in a pedagogic mode of commemoration and of making history as
the common good, celebrating an inherited civilization that is China’s glory
in a world of modernization. The second has or is in the process of making a
distinct sense of locality and of loyalty to memories starting from their own
biographies. The third receives and transmits to and from household to larger
scales, through ancestry and neighborhood, to the shared place that is a com-
mon good. However, in this case the larger scale includes the household in
a cosmology that was formed long ago as well as in the current narrative of
China’s history, and that may or may not correspond with that of the current
115
116 Stephan Feuchtwang
state. All three perspectives convey in their heritage activities and achieve-
ments a moral purpose, a fulfillment of an obligation or an aspiration, either
a model for others or of something special to be made known to others. Any
one person in any of these categories can ally with any others and each can
entertain, often simultaneously, different senses and scales of the common
good. In other words, these are categories of different perspective, not of
solidary groups. Those most successful at mediating more than one such per-
spective have been the most effective in establishing a heritage.
My examples are taken from the region of Quanzhou, in southern Fujian
Province, on the southeastern coast of China.
QUANZHOU REGION AND CITY
To the many anthropologists and historians who have researched and written
about this region and its main city, Quanzhou is outstanding for many things.
It is a source of migration to Southeast Asia. The greatest flows of emigration
and settlement took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they
started much earlier, in the ninth century. From the fourteenth century they
included the settlement of most of the large island of Taiwan (called Formosa
by Portuguese colonizers).
Long before that, Quanzhou was the southern half of a kingdom called
Minyue, one of the many kingdoms of peoples that Chinese historians called
Yue, stretching along the southeast coast from present Zhejiang to Vietnam,
that was defeated by the northern Chinese of the first long dynasty, the Han
(206 BCE–220 CE). Then again, most of the province of Fujian, including
Quanzhou, was an independent kingdom of Min after the fall of the Tang dy-
nasty in 907. This kingdom of Minyue lasted until 978. Min was short-lived
but lasted much longer as a point of reference as we shall see.
Quanzhou’s population speaks a number of related languages that are
quite distinct from and unintelligible to the other languages spoken in China.
Quanzhou’s main spoken language is named the southern Min language
(Minnan yu).
All of these things form the bonds of place of origin associations (huiguan)
among the traders and merchants whose ships sailed from Quanzhou up the
coasts and along the rivers of China and overseas. These associations, like
their places of origin, trace their fortunes and their history to their particular
versions of protector gods, such as their own figure of the savior goddess
Guanyin and her more recent associate goddess, Mazu, both of them guard-
ians of seafarers. Everywhere in China has such local temples, but Fujian and
Between State and Local Residents 117
southern Fujian, in particular, is peculiar for the large number of temples in

its cities, towns and villages.
Quanzhou City was the center of the Maritime Silk Route, to which mer-
chants, Arab, Persian and others, came and from which Minnan and other
Chinese merchants travelled the world from the seventh to the fifteenth cen-
tury (Wang 2009). The culture claimed by Quanzhou and southern Fujian is
also named Minnan (southern Min). This claim, through its links with Taiwan
and further, forms a diaspora of migrants who contributed much wealth to the
Chinese Republican Revolution of 1911 and to the building of what were then
modern streets in Quanzhou City. These and the main products of its rural
hinterland in the mountains, particularly its teas, have also been, as I shall
show, the subject of discussion by heritage entrepreneurs and other agents.
I shall start my argument with the example of a tea merchant, who is also
a heritage entrepreneur.
MR. HUANG, HERITAGE AND TEA ENTREPRENEUR
Mr. Huang’s heritage mission is to advance his native village and to promote
his local tea to world fame, as a business, not with state funds, but with of-
ficial support. His tea and village are in the mountains of Anxi County, part
of the inland region of Quanzhou.
In October 2016 a group of us were taken to visit him by Wang Mingming
and his friend Mr. Xie, the Chinese Communist Party head of publicity for
Anxi County. Mr Huang, a man in his forties, burly, genial and informally
dressed in a white sweatshirt and black trousers, introduced himself to us
as an IT businessman who also operated tealeaf treatment and trading busi-
nesses in another coastal southern Fujian city, Xiamen. At the other end of the
country, he ran a martial arts film studio in Beijing. In 2001 he had launched
another tea business venture, investing two hundred million yuan—about
twenty million pounds sterling—in a large plantation of Iron Guanyin (Tie
Guanyin) tea and a tealeaf treatment plant, above his natal village of Kem-
ing. The village’s name means Exam Brightness, an older form of heritage of
passing the imperial civil service examinations, so enhancing the reputation
of a lineage. Fifteen years later, the new plantation was still not yielding a
profit. Profit is not Mr. Huang’s main concern in this enterprise, though it is
intended eventually. The plantation is private but also a public good, named
an “Eco Valley,” as he advertises it in English. In Chinese it is named Guo
xin, Heart of the Nation, but he had spelled it out on his noticeboards in
Wade-Giles, the transliteration of Mandarin used in Taiwan, as Kuo hsing
(with a mistaken addition of g) probably in respect of a Taiwanese master
with whom he had been studying the Yi Jing (Book of Changes). The alpha-
betical name of his tea enterprise is Keco, after his home village, Keming, in
which at this very time a festival for its main god was being held.
Mr. Huang confessed to a nostalgia—xiangchou—and feelings for home—
qinghuai—which he mentioned tentatively to explain why he had done a
number of things for and in the name of his home village. Another part of
Mr. Huang’s moral stance is guoxue, classical nation studies, as promoted by
the Chinese states of both the mainland and Taiwan. He showed me on his
phone a reconstructed Altar of Heaven, as in the national capital, Beijing,
but this was in Taiwan in the middle of a ceremony of ritualists dressed in
colorful archaic costumes in which his master Mr. Zeng had taken part. While
demonstrating for us the process of tea cultivation and curing he explained
the meaning of these images and practices by referring to the Three Powers
(san cai) working together: Heaven (tian: climate and seasons) and Earth (di:
soil), while the third power—Humanity (ren) he described as how he and his
workers watch the crop and then after picking the leaves carefully undertake
the processes of curing and fermentation. His explanation thus combined the
cosmology of ancient China with modern science, and a common national
heritage with a local specialty.
Mr. Huang must have taken many visitors, like us, around this tea curing
facility near the plantation. Indeed, the whole plantation is geared for visits,
a sure way of publicizing his product. Up on the tea terraces, Mr. Huang
showed us the plot rented to Mr. Zeng, marked with large characters saying,
“The garden of Master Zeng (Zeng shi) who strengthens guoxue and sup-
ports his disciples.” On a notice board are the names of others, from all over
China, who have rented terraces of his plantation, for two thousand yuan (two
hundred pounds sterling) a mu (fifteenth of a hectare) per year. With the lease
came a phone app that Mr. Huang had designed for his tenants to check their
gardens’ growth, humidity, temperature, and wind direction.
Further up, above the tea slopes, is Tengyun Peak, from which, as his no-
tice up there announced, the view is materially and spiritually spectacular. It
overlooks Anxi and the famous products of its townships, including wrought
iron and rattan, not just tea. On the top is a boulder-looking structure, a cave,
and a heart, all constructed out of concrete, to his design. The heart is strung
with wires onto which lovers can hang locks. The peak is open ground where
people are invited to camp, exercise and be entranced by the views. He has
made the whole complex into a new place to be visited for pleasure and en-
chantment, complete with a hotel for tourists.
Afterwards we had dinner above this hotel, where there were children’s
amusements (swings and a seesaw) and a large covered space of tables and
many hot stoves for woks or to turn meat in a Chinese barbecue. Many crates
of beer were brought to us. As we drank, Mr. Huang expressed his gratitude
to his local origin in this area. His village, he told us, was settled by migrants
of two lineages, Zhou and Huang, from Cainai District of Anxi County’s
capital city. The Zhou, he told us, had been the protectors of the Huang. The
title of his village’s guardian deity is En Gong, Lord of Benevolence. As he
told us this, the resident cook splayed a number of chickens, spiced them with
ginger and wrapped them in tinfoil to bake on hot stones for an hour or more.
While we waited, noticing my interest in En Gong, Huang impromptu offered
to drive us in his car down to his home village, to see something of the current
theater put on for the festival of the village god.
He told us that he had been head of Keming village in his youth about
twenty years earlier and had started the biggest local farm produce market
in the area, which is still going strong. When we arrived, the theater perfor-
mance was in full swing on the stage built outside the temple, where operatic
plays could be performed in honor of the god, as well as for the human audi-
ence sitting in the warm evening air in rows of seats that they had brought
with them. First, we went to see the god for whom the play was being per-
formed. It was a tree entwined with another, reminiscent of the two lineages.
The god’s personal name is Holder Zhou, Zhou Baorong. The Zhou hold the
Huang, just as one trunk of the tree holds the other.
After leading us for a glimpse of the backstage, Mr. Huang took us to his
family house, a three-story but modest home where his mother, father and
father-in-law lived, as well as his sister to whom we were introduced and
with whom we were photographed. This is his home residence, but of course
he has others.
From there he took us to the Huang ancestral hall, in front of which was a
figure of En Gong, the guardian and protector of the village’s dominant Zhou
lineage, with three offerings of meat before it and twelve bowls of sweets, a
version of the standard offering prescribed in dynastic Chinese state cults at
the lowest tier. A fuller title of En Gong was draped over a gown wrapped
around his figure: Ganying Zunwang, Venerable God who Responds. En
Gong is the title of a historical figure whose proper name was Zhou Kai, we
were told. In other words, he belonged to the dominant village lineage and
had his own temple nearby. There was a similar figure, also brought from En
Gong’s temple, in the Zhou ancestral hall. The ancestral halls of the two lin-
eages and the temple to the protector god of the village are the central foci of
the village as a territorial place. Indeed, the festival unites its households. The
residents who organize and celebrate the festival are the makers of their place
of residence through the gods whom they can petition for effective response.
Local protector gods such as En Gong are figures from the historical past who
have the power to respond effectively in the present.
So, in the village, Mr. Huang is an entrepreneurial benefactor, starting with

his activities as village head. He is well respected and there is no apparent
conflict between his benefaction, his plantation, his nostalgia for home or his
presence and the villagers’ ritual celebrations of their place-making divinity
and transmission of their local heritage. Mr. Huang evidently gains merit in
his own and others’ eyes from his own place-making and his promotion of the
village that is making its own heritage. The village is as keen as Mr. Huang
and the local state to bring modernity to their facilities and to bring the local
economy into the global economy. He is helping to re-make Anxi through
his modernized and much refined Iron Guanyin tea, one part of its heritage;
he has modernized his village into a marketing center but at the same time
sponsored his lineage hall, the local temple and its guardian god’s festival,
continuing another kind of heritage in which figures from the past are magi-
cally efficacious in the present while also presenting his own endorsement
of the civilizational state and its national heritage, linked closely to Taiwan.
He exemplifies the mediation between state pedagogical orthodoxy and local
residents and their place-making by successful heritage makers combined
with a personal, biographical moral mission.
A MEETING OF HERITAGE AGENTS IN QUANZHOU CITY
To get a better idea of the multiplicity of heritage agents and their interac-
tions, Wang Mingming took us to a meeting in “1916,” a creative industry
park in the city of Quanzhou, named after the year of the first industrial en-
terprise on this site. Up against three huge silos of a derelict flour mill, which
was being turned by a young entrepreneur into a high-tech Maritime Silk
Route venue, was the Minnan Cultural Development Center that included a
hotel and a hostel. The Center is the Quanzhou branch of the Minnan Cultural
Development Organization, a not-for-profit private organization run by a Mr.
Wu, an indefatigable collector of relics of buildings destroyed in Quanzhou’s
development, including a wooden gateway and some furnishings that now
framed a performance space. He had also collected ceramic pots, some filled
with tealeaves, that lined shelves or were displayed in vitrines in the meeting
room and dining hall of the Center.
The Center is a convenient meeting point for private entrepreneurs, like
Mr. Wu, interested in the preservation of southern Fujian heritage. The head
of the Quanzhou People’s Consultative Conference, a famous writer, plus the
ex-curator of the Quanzhou Maritime Museum and its current director were
present. Local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members present included
“big” Mr. Chen, vice head of publicity, plus the present head of publicity in
Quanzhou CCP, whose mission is now “culture” as he told us, as well “thin”
Mr. Chen, who had been the temple minder of the old portside temple to
Mazu, the Tianhou Gong, and was now curator of the National Museum in
Quanzhou for Taiwan and its relationship with southern Fujian, as Michael
Rowlands relates in greater detail in his chapter in this volume. Each had
different views about Quanzhou culture but they frequently came together,
and with different people, in the Culture Center’s tearoom, to discuss their
activities in promoting Minnan, and where events such as concerts of local
classical music could also be held.
Wang Mingming had on this occasion brought together these and other
regulars to hear a talented singer, Qiaoqiao, daughter of the head of the
Shanghai Music Conservatoire. Qiaoqiao is also a filmmaker, who was in
the course of filming singers and bands of Nanyin, the southern style of clas-
sical music, a live heritage of Quanzhou and Taiwan. Other performers of
Nanyin, included a Taiwanese student of Wang Mingming, who had already
completed a study of Nanyin there, and was now in the process of a parallel
study in Quanzhou. She joined other musicians to play for us. But this was
incidental to the overall business of the meeting, which was to hear presenta-
tions on the planning of conservation in the city.
The presentation was masterminded by Liu Zhaoyin, a Taiwanese woman
who was the head of a consultancy service advising the municipal gov-
ernment and other state agencies on how to mediate the preservation of
traditional Minnan with new and foreign attractions in old Quanzhou. The
presentation itself was given with power-point by another woman, one of Ms.
Liu’s team of planners, who said that because in the old city all space was
already occupied and should be left intact, investment should be devoted to
the creation and upgrading of public spaces in residential areas and connect-
ing up the lanes to improve traffic flow, ease tourist access, and make ways
for pedestrians and cyclists. Their consultancy had undertaken a survey of
local culture, including food and drink, with an eye to bringing the facilities
up to date to make them financially viable by attracting tourists, and encour-
aging them to communicate with one another. They had shown their survey
to the municipal government as an example of how to manage the city better.
Workshops with local participants were still now being held, as a corrective
to top-down planning. A film clip of one such workshop showed us that, in
fact, the participants were university professors and architects, wanting to
develop a perspective on tourism development.
This consultancy had recently been influential in the formation of a work
group that brought together the concerns of different state agencies. The mu-
nicipal government had then formed the Old City Development Company,
concerned with planning, policy, culture and publicity. The consultancy’s
recommendations to this development company had been to include residents

in their own right, to identify areas to improve, to make these areas more
“tasteful” (pinwei) to attract tourists, and to advise government on how to
create an environment friendly to independent businesses instead of repeating
the old pattern of destroying a site on which to build fake old streets.
When asked why Quanzhou’s temples were not once mentioned in the pre-
sentation, Liu Zhaoyin said her presenter was from Jiangsu, another mainland
province; had it been her presentation, coming from Taiwan, she would not
have forgotten the temples of Quanzhou. Even so, in the past when Luo Pan
was conducting participant research with the old city’s central district’s plan-
ning bureau, the voices of local temples’ management committee members
had been ignored. A similar story of heritage projects overriding, instead of
including, the heritage sentiments of local residents is told in Rowlands’s
chapter in this book on another part of Quanzhou city.
Curator Chen stressed the importance of family ritual and the seventh lunar
month festival of general rescue of orphan souls, when local residents invite
into their territory the souls of the dead who have no descendants to partake
in their offerings and then send them off again, on the waters or wastelands
bordering their locality. Ms. Liu agreed but said that others in her team would
not agree. Again, she seemed to be avoiding the topic and facts of ritual tradi-
tion as heritage.
The head of a Shanghai municipal planning institute, Professor Lin Jin-
song, a native of Quanzhou, stressed the need to balance ordinary people’s
(laobaixing) and governmental views and added that while tradition is part of
the life of older people, for their children it is not as important. Later on, he
commented that we have entered a new phase in planning in which develop-
ment companies have become so wealthy and powerful that they can afford
any rise in rates of compensation to residents and infringe controls. In other
words, the planning authority’s control of urban land leased to private devel-
opers can override residents’ own senses and centers of their places and their
heritage. On the other hand, temples could be understood to mean another
kind of heritage, that of building techniques and styles. Professor Dong Wei,
of the Dongnan (Southeast) University School of Architecture and Planning
in Nanjing, was present. He had been involved in old Quanzhou participant
planning initiatives with Professor Dan Abramson of the University of Wash-
ington (Abramson 2011). At that time, the late 1990s, Professor Dong had
ignored temples. But now he and his teams of students were conducting a
very detailed measurement and technical survey of many temples, and of the
artisans who continued the periodic restoration of Tang, Song and subsequent
dynasties’ woodwork skills.
In this meeting of differently minded members of the city’s heritage associ-

ation we can see tensions between different conceptions of what to conserve,
and on whether and how to involve local residents and the young. Each view,
from the urban planning authorities and their promotion of old buildings au-
thentically restored for the attraction of tourists, to the intellectuals and local
Party members interested in conserving secular Minnan musical culture, had
its own sense of value, authenticity, and moral basis, with some ways of find-
ing common ground. The exception to finding common ground referred to
views about the authenticity of responsive guardian gods and their festivals.
But what came over most strongly was that, in general, heritage must always
rely on funding and that the best economic basis for its preservation is local
business. Government funding is not sufficient and not sustainable.
TASTEFUL REDEVELOPMENT:
MS. ZHENG DAZHEN, URBAN HERITAGE ENTREPRENEUR
The following is an example of the viability of a business project, exemplify-

ing the Taiwanese vision of preserving the old city tastefully. But, at the same
time, Ms. Zheng takes us further, into the cosmology of civilization in China
in terms that depart from Mr. Huang’s endorsement of the central state’s na-
tion formation.
Ms. Zheng had opened a number of venues that are meeting places but also
commercial ventures in the lanes off Jiadi Alley (Top Candidate Alley), in
the old city of Quanzhou, near its West Street. Both the Alley and the Street
are sites for conservation of their buildings, principally the Kaiyuan Si, a
monastic temple founded in the eighth century. They are also sites for the
appearance of a lifestyle that West Street embodies, early Republican shop-
houses, and an earlier history of achievement of high literati status through
passing the imperial civil service examinations, as the Alley’s name suggests.
Our small group of visitors were waiting for Ms. Zheng in one of her en-
terprises, a hostel tastefully decorated in a refurbished house off Jiadi Alley.
Ms. Zheng came in, beautifully dressed in a fawn silk top over loose russet
silk slacks. She immediately led us out and further down the alley to her
teahouse. There she served us a special smoked tea. In another room, exem-
plifying the teahouse’s habitual clientele, a Dutch woman who had lived for
several years in Quanzhou sat together with two or three local friends, one
of whom was an architect, a member of the Quanzhou Institute for Urban
Planning and Design, who had been working with Professor Dong on his
project of measuring, mapping and recording old (re)construction techniques
of Quanzhou’s temples.
Ms. Zheng’s enterprises of refurbishment and reconstruction in total

comprised this teahouse, the hostel, and elsewhere nearby, a library of do-
nated books, a coffee house, a noodle house, and a craft workshop. All were
resorts favored by Quanzhou young intellectuals and professionals, artists,
Nanyin musicians, and others who enjoy their company at very affordable
prices.
Ms. Zheng told us she knew and liked Liu Zhaoyin, the Taiwanese urban
consultant I mentioned above. But she did not get on well with the main
architect in the Urban Development Company. He had no sympathy for
her and Quanzhou people’s viewpoints, she said. He could not identify
(rentong) with them, nor with their concerns with the geomantic orienta-
tion of the places in which they live, including Jiadi Alley and the whole
of Quanzhou City. He would not listen to her telling of the dreams that had
led her to open her tasteful venues in the alley across from the monastery
and temple, Kaiyuan Si. The first dream was of her finding in herself the
power to calm the anger of a tiger. The second was of a powerful phoenix
( fenghuang) with its head facing the Kaiyuan Si, forming the crux of the
geomantic value of the whole city with its two pagodas. The phoenix’s long
tail threaded down Jiadi Alley. The dream had given her the location where
she resolved to invest in her enterprises four years beforehand. The two
dreams referred to images of the encompassing universe by which locations
are chosen.
I was informed that Ms. Zheng, in fact, had been helped by another gov-
ernment agency through a friend, another young woman, who was the head
of one of Quanzhou’s city districts. What is more, Ms. Zheng’s were all joint
ventures with other investment partners. Her joint ventures exemplified the
economic basis for “tasteful” refurbishment of the alleys of old Quanzhou.
At the same time, she was at the mercy of the power of the planning depart-
ment to either help or to hinder her with permits or denials. Her dreams par-
ticipated in the cosmology used in geomancy and horoscopy. She mediated
between government, other entrepreneurs, and the materials and design of
interiors, the serving of tea and the imagery of the transmitted cosmology.
She had a vision. But her enterprises were far from the cultural worlds of
common local residents, their heritage of temples and the local festivals of
their liturgical communities.
Let us then turn to two case studies of such temples on the same Jiadi
Alley to shed light on more local interactions between residents, business-
people and officials. To understand their full significance, it is first neces-
sary to take into account the history of the recent destruction and rebuilding
of these temples.
THE RECENT HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION

AND REBUILDING OF LOCAL TEMPLES
Temples were destroyed or requisitioned for schools, factories or storage dur-

ing a number of campaigns, first under the Nationalist Republic in the first
half of the twentieth century, then under the People’s Republic (PRC) under
Mao, from the 1950s to the 1970s. From the late eighties onwards, older
residents initiated the rebuilding of temples and ancestral halls and restored
the holding of their festivals in towns and villages, but not in cities. Both
the rebuilding of city centers and the expansion of cities into the countryside
have entailed the dislocation of most residents and the destruction of their
local temples.
Planning authorities and the companies they authorize for redevelopment
and new building, including the transformation of villages into urban “com-
munities” (shequ) and towns into urban districts (qu), destroy local senses
of place and then attempt to replace them with self-managing communities
(xiaoqu and shequ) centered on Residents’ Representative Committees ( ju-
weihui) (RCs) (Feuchtwang, Zhang and Morais 2015). The great exception
to this is Quanzhou City. Temples had been destroyed, as everywhere else
in the PRC, but then from the late 1980s onwards very many of them were
rebuilt at the residents’ insistence. Their buildings were the responsibility of
street-level administration ( jiedao ban), which eventually delegated them to
RCs. The staffing of RCs is paid out of the rents from enterprises that still use
some temple premises. The rebuilding of temples was often on a different site
to the original temple. Nevertheless, under the municipal planning authority,
exceptionally in Quanzhou, most were rebuilt and managed by their own
temple management committees, usually consisting of older well-connected
residents. As I mentioned above, southern Fujian, including Quanzhou, is
famous both for its proliferation of temples and for its overseas diaspora that
donates funds for their restoration. Another possible reason for the retention
of this tradition in the city is that, unlike other cities, Quanzhou has not been
overwhelmed by new, immigrant residents so that local residential loyalties
are still intact and active.
It seems that the only temples that were not relocated in the course of the
development of the old city were two Tang dynasty (618–907) Buddhist
foundations of the eighth century: the above mentioned Kaiyuan Si and the
Chengtian Si. They are conserved as cultural heritage monuments and tour-
ist attractions. One other temple has been continuously preserved: the south
gate Xiao Wangye temple, called Fumei Gong that Rowlands discusses in
his chapter. Unusually it is a local protector god temple. Every time someone
attempted to destroy a bit of it, they died. This is a common trope of stories
of temple preservation in towns and villages. What follow are two other local
temples, both of them rebuilt after having been destroyed or requisitioned.
JIADI GONG: INTERACTION BETWEEN LOCAL STATE,

TEMPLE MANAGERS AND LOCAL RESIDENTS
The temple popularly known locally as Jiadi Gong is dedicated to Baosheng

Dadi, the title of a historical figure who responds to pleas in the present with
effective cures for illness. An RC office had been located in what is now
the main temple hall until 1995, when it moved into the building next door,
which had been a factory that paid rent to the RC. While the temple was req-
uisitioned for other uses, the god’s statue had been kept at home by a local
resident.
We were taken round the temple by the head of the temple committee,
which had twenty members. His name card gave the temple’s address and
named him not only as its manager but also as the vice head of the Baosheng
Dadi Followers (xintu) Branch Association of the Quanzhou Region Popular
Beliefs (xinyang) Research Association. He told us that meetings of the asso-
ciation of Baosheng Dadi temples of Quanzhou were held in one of the rooms
upstairs, as was the annual conference of temple committee representatives
of twenty-three other temples. The temple was in addition affiliated to the of-
ficially recognized Daoist Association of Quanzhou. This is a powerful list of
recognized associations that are channels of negotiation between official and
nonofficial authority. A measure of the temple committee’s power was that it
had raised sufficient funds from local residents’ donations not only to restore
the temple but to buy the factory building next door. The RC had moved its
administration to another location in its territory of jurisdiction.
On the third floor of this building next to the temple, when it was used
by the RC, there had been a museum. This is an example of how official
pedagogic heritage is couched, bringing the local into the national and civili-
zational state heritage. The museum commemorated Ouyang Zhan (758–801)
a famous poet and one of the first men from the Quanzhou region (he was
born in Jinjiang, the county neighboring the city) to pass the highest imperial
examinations. Now, instead of Ouyang Zhan, there is a shrine upstairs to Kui
Xing, a historical personage, though not local, and the star god of literary
learning. This is not a commemoration. Kui Xing is a magical aid to literate
achievement and examination success in the present. On the floor above that,
the temple manager’s brother runs a pharmacy, where the prescriptions that
result from petition-cum-divination to the main god can be bought. On the
ground floor is an Elderly People’s Association (laoren hui) room, for play-
ing majiang and chatting.
On another day we managed to talk to a recently retired head of the RC,
a Mrs. Fu, in its office. She was joined by the local police chief Mr. Lin to
answer our questions. We sat at a table in a room off the main office floor.
I asked why so many temples had been rebuilt or refurbished and Mrs. Fu
answered that the people had wanted them to be refurbished, while planners
had wanted them removed, and the factories that had been housed in them
went out of business. Once built, “developers in Quanzhou would not dare to
destroy a temple,” she said. “How do you deal with temple management com-
mittees?” I asked. “We would never intervene . . . just make sure they inform
us of temple activities.” “So that we can maintain security, and we inform the
Street Office” added Mr. Lin.
I then asked Mrs. Fu whether the RC had given the temple committee a
document about its use of the land. She said:
In the city plan it is simply gonggong yong di, land for public use. There is no
issue over this. The temple used to be a Street office storage room, but the re-
built temple took it over and things became complicated. Now it is just left to the
temple. If the Street tried to re-occupy the land, its officials would be haunted
by the god. Residents will make sure their temples are rebuilt.
Mrs. Fu told us that the RC’s funds for the salaries of its ten staff, including
seven elected representatives, came partly from the municipal government
and partly from rents on its properties, which included some of the temples
in its territory.
Next, she told us that young people participated less in temple activities
except on the big festivals, such as on this day of our meeting with her, the
nineteenth of the ninth lunar month, Guanyin’s birthday. She went on to say
that the young also want to be left alone by the RC.
It became apparent that the RCs have the upper hand in ownership of the
land but depend for staff salaries on income from the land of the temples
that the higher office, the Street, assigned to it. This interview also disclosed
the extraordinary respect won from the RC by the wishes of local residents
to restore their temples on their own terms, even infecting the local officials
with haunting by their gods. What happened here was true in other instances
of destroyed temples where statues and incense burners were preserved by
local residents until a new temple could be built for them. In addition, as at
the meeting in the creative industry park, “1916,” we should note the doubt
about whether the young want to maintain this heritage, preferring the big
Buddhist festivals that, I would add, are a more refined classical heritage
preferred by higher elites.
DA GE GONG
Another nearby temple provides a slant on how the local residents’ views
of their gods could be combined with the main function of promoting self-
management of a community, as the responsibility of RCs. The full name
of this temple is Longhui Da Ge Gong—Dragon Meeting Elder Brother
Temple. Da Ge is a “god of death,” in charge of spirits of the underworld,
and his statue is taken out in the seventh lunar month offerings to orphan
souls and in times of epidemic. In the early 1990s, every time a temple had
to be destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere, Quanzhou planners would, at the bid-
ding of the temple’s management and local residents, divine before this deity
to choose the day to destroy and the day to rebuild. This temple is itself the
result of destruction and removal for rebuilding on another site, joining into
one what had been three separate temples.
We talked to the current head of the temple management committee, which
was mainly of older men. He told us that the youngest committee member
was only twenty-five years old and he ran a Chinese pharmacy in the local-
ity. Other young people came to the temple as voluntary helpers, cleaning
and otherwise helping with the Elderly People’s Activities Center (laoren
huodong zhongxin)—an official sounding name but not run by the RC—ad-
joining the temple. We sat at a table in this Center to continue talking to the
head of the temple management committee after he had shown us around the
temple. In line with making it look official there were slogans all over the
walls indicating what the elderly could expect: medicine, entertainment, and
loving care. The fee for a majiang table was five yuan per day and winners
paid an additional amount, all income going to the temple’s maintenance
fund. In providing this facility, which the destroyed temples had also done,
the temple was proving itself to the RC by maintaining its old function of
social service without allowing the old sense of place to be destroyed and
therefore having to be regenerated.
Like the Jiadi Baosheng Dadi Temple the Elder Brother Temple is a mem-
ber of the Quanzhou Folk or Popular Beliefs Research Association, which
gives it status as part of a registered NGO (nongovernmental organization).
The manager told us that a government representative would visit the next
day to discuss turning this temple and others in the area into a joint intangible
cultural heritage site.
The gate to the temple on the alley had been erected by the RC office, but
the arch above it displayed four characters “longhui gudi” (dragon meeting
old territory) surrounding a Buddhist karma swastika, which was a reminder
of the site it had occupied before its destruction and rebuilding. The temple’s
manager said that this addition had been put up by the temple committee with
permission of the RC three years before, when it created the Elderly People’s
Center. As everywhere, the RC owns the temple’s land. But it is faced with a
temple manager who used to manage a construction materials factory for the
Municipal Construction Bureau. He knew how to combine the official with
the nonofficial.
The manager’s younger brother, also on the temple management commit-
tee, a former factory worker, then explained to us that the old location of the
Da Ge Temple was at the other end of the alley. An inscription on the wall
commemorates its rebuilding by the company that rebuilt the whole area,
under the Municipal Construction Bureau. The company took care of the
divination of dates for the rebuilding and the opening of the temple, as it did
later for the opening of the gate.
This example of the relocation and survival of a local temple illustrates
the concession by officials to the gods’ demonic power and to the cosmology
of divination even while, as always, having the power of land holding and
the official norm that condemns as “superstition” (mixin) the reputation of a
legendary person’s magical efficacy. It also illustrates the importance of local
temple leaders including those with managerial experience as officials. They
have connections. Yet, being an amalgamation of three others, this temple
shows that the municipal government has been able to reduce the number of
local temples in the city.
Temple management committees are the mediators between RC Party
cadres and paid staff on the one hand and local residents on the other. The
temple committees are effective because there are experienced ex-cadres in
them. But they are also effective because residents insist on their own histori-
cal transmission, their heritage of protector gods. It is quite possible that as
the older generations die, that insistence will change valence and favor more
refined Buddhist festivals and deities.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The rebuilding of temples is about the maintenance or the creation of a public,

common good. Most, if not all the actors involved, act in response to both
internal and external guides to what is good for the public for whom they act
and among whom they count themselves. Governmental agents at different
levels, such as the heads of RCs, act in a project of creating self-managing
communities, combining it with a didactic project of raising cultural levels,
for instance by commemorating the local through its high achieving dynastic
literati. Uneasily under their aegis, managers of temple committees revive
and maintain a self-funding community project of divine and demonic
righteous territorial protection, healing, reproduction, and salvation. Between

the two is the provision of rooms for associations of the elderly of the locality.
Quanzhou’s exceptional, popularly enforced state tolerance of local
temples may be subject to a trend toward a gradual abandoning of local ter-
ritorial protection in favor of more voluntaristic transformations of Buddhist
festivals and charitable versions of local festivals that are more acceptable
to official notions of culture. But for the moment Buddhist festivals coexist
with festivals of protector deities of local urban places. In the terms I used in
introducing this chapter, all three sets of perspective are combined uneasily,
with the local elites and businessmen on temple committees joining the local
residents in rejecting the more didactic culture project from the local state.
Preservation of a local festival and temple, ancestral halls, and the good
literati name of his village characterizes tea planter Mr. Huang and his use
of business acumen and acquired wealth. He supports the new culture proj-
ect of officially endorsed “nation study,” which he learned with elements of
traditional cosmology from his Taiwanese master. But he also supports the
protector god of his village temple. He has succeeded in combining all three
of the perspectives that I set out.
Ms. Zheng and her enterprises pay for the tasteful refurbishment of a
number of buildings in the Jiadi neighborhood and provide fee revenue to the
local government. But in the dream that inspired her investment, she engaged
with a more popular version of traditional cosmology. Being inspired in a
dream is also a characteristic of Daoism and of popular religion, declaring
the authenticity of a temple-restoring project. Very many of the stories of the
rebuilding of destroyed temples include the dreams of elders who remem-
bered the old temple. Their dreams were of the god of the temple missing
his or her residence and wanting it rebuilt. Ms. Zheng’s dream was of the
fengshui of the whole city into which her enterprises would fit. In this, she,
like Mr. Huang, crossed between quite different and possibly contradictory
formations of moral persona and of heritage. But her clientele are not like the
villagers whose trust Mr. Huang had gained, nor the local residents who were
represented by mediators on their temples’ management committees, or who
mourned the possible loss of their local temples that Rowlands highlights in
his chapter. They were customers with taste, artistic and intellectual, local
and tourist, but not the ordinary local residents with their heritage of local
territorial protector gods.
Different kinds of moral programs, combining innovation with preserva-
tion, have to find ways of funding their projects, by donations, rents, or by
entrepreneurial activities themselves. They are less destructive than the of-
ficials, the planners and the developers of didactic heritage projects. But they
are linked to planners through government connections, such as publicity
chiefs, just as temple managements are similarly linked through retired cadres
with continuing connections.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research for these studies was enabled and sometimes accompanied by
Wang Mingming and Luo Pan, to whom I am indebted and most grateful. All
the names I use in this chapter are the real names of individuals who publi-
cized them themselves.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abramson, Daniel B. “Places for the Gods: Urban Planning as Orthopraxy and Het-
eropraxy in China.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011):
67–88.
Feuchtwang, Stephan, Zhang Hui, and Paula Morais. “The Formation of Governmen-
tal Community and the Closure of Housing Classes.” In China’s Urban Century,
edited by Francois Gipouloux, 195–212. London: Edward Elgar, 2015.
Wang, Mingming. Empire and Local Worlds; a Chinese Model of Long-Term His-
torical Anthropology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009.
Chapter Six
Naming the Living Heritage

in Quanzhou
Michael Rowlands
Approaches to heritage that go beyond a management role have highlighted

the importance of putting people and human values at the center of an en-
larged, cross-disciplinary concept of cultural heritage (Council of Europe
2005 Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society, Scho-
field 2015).* In contrast to managing heritage through conventions and
protocols, popular heritage practices refer to the values and cultural practices
that people give to both tangible sites and objects and to practical knowledge,
emotions and well-being (Butler 2011, 2016). Heritage discourse has paid
much attention to developing inclusive ways of expanding participation and
involvement of people to “ensure the viability of cultural practices and tradi-
tions through various means” (UNESCO 2013:3, article 2). Heritage practi-
tioners, as many argue, should focus on employing heritage for the expansion
of individuals’ and communities’ ability to determine their own values and
aspirations (Basu and Modest 2014,14; Butler and Rowlands 2006).
This chapter addresses these questions through a focus on Quanzhou,
the center of the ancient Maritime Silk Road in southeast China, and on the
political issues raised by two UNESCO world heritage nominations. Recent
studies on the global role of UNESCO and its dominance have focused on its
authority in defining national ownership of world cultural property confirmed
after the 1972 World Heritage Convention (Meskell 2018; Brumann and Ber-
liner 2016). While this convention and following protocols emphasized the
value of particular sites and objects, a further shift since the 1990s and early
2000s to expand the common heritage of humanity worthy of preservation
to customary practices and cultural diversity, has brought more attention to
what may be termed “grassroots” heritage. At a “local” level, cultural elites
are usually treated within the category of universal experts because they
broker the gaps between the national and international definitions of heritage
133
134 Michael Rowlands
value. But this is rarely so simple an identification and fails to examine the
intimate spaces and cultural practices that create connections between local
and national aspiring elites and ordinary ways of living (Herzfeld 2016). If
these intertwined and intimate local networks support, encourage or com-
plicate the ideas, plans and policies of knowledgeable elites, then questions
are raised of how power becomes invested in these different levels. What we
mean by power in these settings is equally complicated and here we have
found Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible as the condition
of possibility for perception, thought, and activity “good to think with” in our
ethnography of one local situation (Rancière 2010).1
QUANZHOU—A BRIEF OUTLINE
Quanzhou is a relatively small city in Fujian Province in southern China but

has acquired recognition for its historical role as the origin point of the An-
cient Maritime Silk Road (Schottenhammer 2001), now associated with the
One Belt One Road program, launched in 2013. In 2001, a number of sites in
Quanzhou were nominated for UNESCO world heritage status and although
the application failed, the local authorities continued to develop several plans
for preserving the legacies of the Maritime Silk Road. As part of this, in 2015 a
research team under the leadership of the anthropologist Professor Wang Min-
gming carried out a heritage survey of Jubao Chengnan, the southern port area
of Quanzhou, designated to become part of a cultural ecology zone in the city.
To advise the planning of this “ecology” zone, an elaborate report was
produced emphasizing the long-term history of just one part of the city and its
unusual legacy of mobility and connections with waterways and the sea. As
a coauthor of the report with Wang Mingming, when I returned to Quanzhou
in April 2017, I was surprised to learn that another attempt was underway to
nominate sixteen sites in Quanzhou for recognition as UNESCO World Heri-
tage sites. Recognized as the most accessible part of the city to the sea and
where the ancient maritime port had been located, Jubao Chengnan was con-
sidered to have the greatest potential for cultural heritage development. The
official ethos for its preservation, expressed by a slogan of creating a “Min-
nan Cultural Ecology Zone” (Minnan wenhua shengtai qu) was conceived by
local elites to refer to those elements in Quanzhou’s history that had survived
the processes of modernization. “Cultural ecology,” it was argued in 2015,
would manifest a perfect fusion between the authenticity of Minnan culture
and the modernity of fashion and design. Now, two years later, the idea of a
single cultural ecology zone in the southern port area had been absorbed into
a multibillion-yuan heritage renewal program of sixteen sites in and around
Naming the Living Heritage in Quanzhou 135
Figure 6.1. Map of Quanzhou with Jubao Chengnan indicated. Quanzhou South Street
Print made by Quanzhou Engineer Bureau, 1922
Quanzhou. The city government believed this program was consistent with
the requirements for a successful inspection of the city by the imminent ar-
rival of a team of experts from the International Council of Monuments and
Sites (ICOMOS).
Quanzhou City currently includes Licheng, Fengze, Luojiang and Quan-
gang Districts, and the prefecture-level city of Jinjiang. Jubao Chengnan is
located in Linjiang, a subdistrict of Licheng, and stretches across two of Lin-
jiang’s smaller communities, Xinqiao and Ainan. The “communities” (shequ)
are basic level administrative units, as alluded to in Feuchtwang’s chapter.
Until recently, Xinqiao had 1,559 residents and 406 migrants and Ainan
2,496 residents and 830 migrants (Wang, Rowlands, and Sun 2016). To local
residents, a “community” means not a unit of registration, but a ritually de-

fined place that plays a significant role in family life and well-being. House-
holds and individuals are connected through shared practices of worship,
which establish the foundation of their “living together” in a community.
As part of the large-scale renewal program, on 8 April 2017, the district of
Carp Town (Licheng), within the jurisdiction of the Quanzhou government,
released a Draft Housing Acquisition and Compensation Plan of Jubao. Over
one thousand five hundred households in the Jubao Chengnan subdistrict
were affected by relocation. By the end of April 2017, a work team had
already started to visit households in the area, resulting in a visibly tense at-
mosphere. Jubao Chengnan seems to have been selected for renewal, as seen
in figure 6.1, mainly because it was recognized historically to have been the
area of settlement of foreign merchants in the heyday of the Maritime Silk
Road trade (1000–1400 CE) (Schottenhammer 2001; Wang 2009).
Most of the elderly people living alone refused to open their doors. They
were to be the last ones to leave Jubao, not because they were dissatisfied with
the compensation, nor because they did not trust the government. An elderly
woman whom we met in the Fumei Temple, one of three significant port temples
in Jubao, insisted on not leaving Jubao because if she left, her family’s ances-
tors would not be worshipped. “If I lose the land, then the ancestors will leave
me, and I will become a ‘leaf.’ So I will not leave. I would become a shameless
descendant of the whole family.” Most of the elderly people preferred to die in
their old houses, because they believed they would then live with their ances-
tors’ souls. Some of the elderly women even tearfully claimed, that they would
commit suicide if the government took away their houses. Their fears were that
if they could no longer honor their ancestors, these might become ghosts that
could harm themselves or their children. Such reminders of the need for ances-
tors to be nurtured bring to mind Robert Weller’s and Keping Wu’s work on
the revenge of ghosts on the living when ancestral graves are disturbed in the
processes of new building construction (Weller and Wu forthcoming).
By late April, when the work team went in to Jubao Chengnan, an archi-
tectural designer and heritage reconstruction team from Beijing were already
at work landscaping the area around the Deji Gate, the southern gate of the
old city of Quanzhou. Rapid decisions had already been taken. Speaking to us
about their plan, one of the architectural designers told us that in order to fit
the requirements of “interacted display” and make the area “tidy,” they had
buried one stream of the old river system of the city of Quanzhou that went
through the DeJi Gate Site and constructed a fake stream above the concrete
channel. An older businessman, living nearby, complained to us that this
development would finally lose the old “watery” character of Quanzhou. He
insisted on showing us a painting in his house, as seen in figure 6.2, of “Old
Quanzhou” that he nostalgically described as the “Venice of the East.”
Figure 6.2. Ideal image of Quanzhou in the 19th century—Quanzhou as Venice of the
East, author’s photo
By early 2017, Quanzhou members of the local government had been

replaced by outsiders, ostensibly because local officials were reportedly too
slow in implementing the changes required for the evaluation of the nomina-
tion by an ICOMOS expert team. Little is known about the internal politics
leading to this change, except that most of the new officials came from Xia-
men, a neighboring city further down on the Fujian coast and an economic
and political rival to Quanzhou. We can also assume they were appointed to
bypass resistance by local cultural elites and thus hinder their capacities to
mobilize protest among local communities. The new administration’s deploy-
ment of expert teams from outside Quanzhou facilitated implementation of
a formal heritage management scheme for the city. Chief among these was
the Tsinghua Tongheng (Design and Planning Company) based in Beijing’s
famous Tsinghua University, but since 2012 a powerful private company
advising on heritage reconstruction across China. As a state-owned company
it had a long history of heritage planning, including the 2018 restoration of
the Potala Palace in Lhasa and the tomb of Genghis Khan in Mongolia in
2017; it also contributed to the 2008 post-earthquake reconstruction in Sich-
uan. In this manner, the most powerful top-down ideology of “real” heritage
reached Quanzhou from the outside in the form of management teams, urban
planners, designers and other outside experts initiated and supported by a
government-led administration.
The issue of relocation and house reconstruction in Jubao was subsequently
deferred. But the issues raised by the resistance of the “elderly ladies” (lao
taitai) refusing to leave their houses suggests a clash between two ideas of
heritage: on the one hand, “real heritage” constituted by heritage management
schemes based on translocal, and in this case, UNESCO-inspired ideas of pres-
ervation and reconstruction; and on the other, the “lived heritage” of people
concerned with the reproduction and transmission of their everyday ways of
life. For the purposes of this volume, the central question posed by this clash is
what constitutes heritage for the people of Jubao in the present? The contradic-
tion between these different views of heritage would not arise if the agenda set
by the Faro Convention concerning “the need to put people and human values
at the center of an enlarged and cross-disciplinary concept of cultural heritage”
were followed (Council of Europe, Faro Convention 2005). In other contexts,
an ethical approach has subsequently been widely advocated among heritage
professionals and scholars, namely, to follow the call to “be true advocates
for heritage by caring for and defending strongly and passionately human
lives and cultural objects alike, past and present” (Hamilakis 2009, 57). The
problem this presents depends on the issue of what kind of heritage might be
advocated for or by local people. Does the elderly woman who complained
that once moved she would “become a leaf,” have a voice? If not, who might
we include as a voice or a non-voice to answer this question?
INTELLECTUALS AND A “REAL HERITAGE”?
The two worlds in Quanzhou that we wish to identify as separate and yet
connected forms of heritage transmission, include, on the one hand, a cul-
tural elite of groups of intellectuals and local officials, and, on the other, the
ritualized world of everyday life (and death) of ordinary people. The descrip-
tor “local elites” in today’s China generally includes government officials,
research institutions and personnel, local intellectuals, provincial officials,
private corporations and leaders of emerging semi-governmental and nongov-
ernmental organizations. The term “local cultural elite” also refers to a more
precise grouping both in function and ideology, and yet may share in common
with generalized “local elites” a sense of “intermediate political rationale”
between local communities and higher authorities, as Feuchtwang suggests
in this volume, and play the role of forming a “cultural nexus of power” be-
tween local and official interests. Native to where they are born and raised,
they have those “rare and exclusive qualities” that the social anthropologist
Abner Cohen describes as combining familiarity with the locality as well as
the ability to adapt to the world outside, of finding outside resources that cor-
respond with and influence the locality (Cohen 1981).
Identifying a cultural elite in this broader sense that functions in a diverse
and rather ambiguous way to orchestrate a certain idea of cultural preserva-
tion, draws attention away from overt power holders to those intellectuals
who have a more emotional attachment to place and lifeworld. As such, they
feel the need to organize local associations or meetings to name, identify
and conserve what they see as under threat and therefore vulnerable to loss.
They include, for example, cultural entrepreneurs, artists, theater groups and
folklore associations, involving those who may rarely figure in local power
politics and yet symbolize strong attachments to tradition and place. We
draw on Zhang Lisheng’s observation that to possess feelings (you qinghuai)
may describe someone whose actions demonstrate strong feelings toward, or
attachment to origins or traditions (Zhang 2020, 20, 64). However, the term
encompasses much broader and nuanced meanings indicating a level of self-
awareness and pride, which may convey a moral or ethical sense of care for
others. In official narratives, guojia qinghuai (lit. state/nation feelings) has
recently been popularized to praise strong patriotic feelings toward the na-
tion. The alternative use, jiaguo qinghuai (lit. family/home nation feelings),
follows a more neo-Confucian ideal to organize the nation on the founda-
tion of the home, patrilineal family and kinship.2 To display individual acts
consistent with jiaguo qinghuai would make ideals of family and hometown
comparable with patriotic acts and could lead to being rewarded with bureau-
cratic rank. “You qinghuai” is to show feelings or respect for a person’s moral
value regardless of education or bureaucratic achievement. Sometimes used
to describe people’s emotional attachment to home, among other things, the

term implies deep feelings of caring for land and origins that may be evoked
in discrete ways that do not map onto familiar levels of hierarchy and politi-
cal manipulation. Mr. Huang, the owner of the traditional tea factory in Anxi
that Feuchtwang’s chapter describes, used the term “qinghuai” to describe his
own feelings of pride for reviving the traditional ways of making tea, bringing
the value of tea to his own village along with his other contributions to revi-
talizing the community. The term may explain why people who achieve great
wealth or political status can spend considerable money and time on building
up a collection of paintings and artifacts or undertaking acts to benefit the
community or country. In recent years, these terms—“jiaguo” (home/country),
“guojia” (country/home) and “qinghuai” (moral feelings) have come to be
regarded with some ambivalence because of their linkage with the central
government’s grand patriotic narratives. Indeed, some can be quite cynical
about their use for commercial and political gain. On popular platforms like
newspapers and the Internet, critiques of qinghuai are centered around its use
as a resource for marketing.3 While Mr. Huang would use the term qinghuai
to describe his feelings for his village, other more intellectual figures would
consciously choose not to use terms like jiaguo qinghuai to describe their
scholarly achievements. For instance, Fan Jianchuan, the founding director
of Anren’s famous Jianchuan Museum Cluster that is the focus of Zhang
Lisheng’s chapter, has no strong feelings for “feudal superstitious activities”;
he only treasures “heritage” related to the Anti-Japanese War, the Cultural
Revolution, and old Mao-era style of living—in other words, his “feelings,”
were he to use the term would be for the nation/country (guojia qinghuai).
Such heritage is more or less “secular” and “old style” in the sense of the
“revolutionary,” encompassing the legends which he lovingly tells; he rarely
speaks about religious issues. By contrast, in Fujian, many of those “elites”
who have a deep comprehension of the importance of local culture/religion
in history and who are willing to understand local people’s “beliefs,” may be
regarded as possessing jiaguo qinghuai. Yet, such a local sense of jiaguo qin-
ghuai is not promoted in the official press unless it can be clearly identified
as love for local culture linked to its contribution to Chinese national culture.
While this language and its ambiguities do not produce a cohesive “elite”
power block as a single unified source of identity, there is thus a certain well
understood knowledge of what actions might mean and how they might be
evaluated. Instead of Rancière’s “policing of power” (Rancière 2010), we
may find instead a dispersed set of personalities that are quite different in
their reputations for possession of mystique, emotional attachment to knowl-
edge, the past and the value of future things. We thus need to explore how
they might share some sense of “jiaguo qinghuai” even if they are ambivalent
about using this term to describe their own work or sense of achievement.
To invoke elites as part of the answer can lead to a misunderstanding given

that the issue often crystallizes into a debate about nationalism and the role
of national elites (Nairn 1981). Nairn describes the role of elites with refer-
ence to the need to invite the masses into history in a language they under-
stand (Nairn 1981, 340). Language—what one speaks in, when and in what
context—is immensely important in the case we describe. Minnan language
is indigenous to Fujian and much of Taiwan, but the ideal of a single exclu-
sive group of powerful families/educated intelligentsia being able and willing
to achieve a unique elite cultural identity in Quanzhou is debatable. Instead,
in his inspirational contribution, Abner Cohen encouraged the idea that a
more performative process underlay the development of a mystique in the
articulation of elite culture; a claim that particular people may possess rare
and exclusive qualities essential to society at large (Cohen 1981). Overall,
the warning is to avoid an instrumental idea of elites as some closed group of
power holders. However, this does not stop us using elites to describe those
actors who for some reason do want, in certain circumstances, to mobilize
movements for change. This is not to deny that there are those eager to mo-
nopolize access to the state and state resources for their exclusive benefit. But
reduced to such a category, they tend to exclude the presence of schoolteach-
ers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs with nostalgic cultural ambitions, leaders of
theater groups and folklore associations, as well as political officials who at
the same time as performing their duties, harness a desire to restore tradition
and local ways of life.
LOCALIZING “FEELINGS FOR HOME-FAMILY-NATION”

(JIAGUO QINGHUAI)
If we can identify an elite in this broader sense that functions in a diverse and
rather ambiguous way to orchestrate a certain idea of cultural preservation,
then our attention is drawn away from bureaucratic power holders to those
who have a more emotional attachment to place and lifeworld.
Wu Youxiong is professor in the history department of Quanzhou Normal
University. We met him in his family home where his courtyard features a
small museum of stone carvings rescued by his father Wu Wenliang, who
first started to collect them in 1928, when the city walls and southern gate of
the city were demolished to build the city’s main artery, Zhongshan Road. A
subtle and engaging man to talk to, Wu spoke movingly of his father who was
killed in the political events of the 1970s. While he would say little about the
circumstances of his father’s death, it was clear he bitterly resented the injus-
tice of his fate and reveres his memory. Wu’s museum of stone carvings was
initially based on his father’s collection of gravestones and their inscriptions.

Wu developed this further, in particular deciphering how their inscriptions of
names and families contribute to understanding the medieval past of the city.4
In the past two decades Professor Wu has been deeply involved in local reli-
gious revival and, as early as the 1980s, soon after the beginning of the post-
Mao open-door reform, he and Lin Shengli, another intellectual involved in
the religious studies of Quanzhou, focused on the history and revival of the
Fumei Temple in Jubao. In the course of studying the Fumei Temple inscrip-
tions, Wu revived the study of the “songwang chuan” (sending boats ritual)
and organized some early academic seminars on the subject (Feuchtwang,
Rowlands and Sun 2021).5 The current fame of Fumei Temple and the re-
discovery of its wider Wangye temple network in Fujian and Taiwan owes
a lot to his work as a scholar.6 Yet he tends to look down on the organizing
temple committee of Fumei because in his terms, its members are not well
enough educated to really understand its history. He stresses the importance
of Confucianism in the continuation of folk religious belief, implicitly regard-
ing himself as a member of what could be called the “old gentry” (shenshi) in
contemporary Quanzhou local society. He, like many other Quanzhou intel-
lectuals, can trace his gentry status back to ancestors who passed the imperial
exams in the late Qing dynasty and thus consider themselves “old gentry” by
contrast to those who gained intellectual status through modern, often over-
seas, graduate education.
Another person who would similarly identify himself as “old gentry” is
Wang Lianmao, former director of the Maritime Museum in Quanzhou and a
celebrated national master of tea. As a trained historian, he has a very credit-
able record of historical research on the urban development of the city since
the 1920s. When he was director of the Maritime Museum, he established
and built up a research team to work on the earlier maritime history of the
city. Since retirement he returns to the museum several times a week to make
and serve tea to former colleagues and honor celebrated visitors. Professor
Wang’s love for tea is a passion for a kind of “art of life,” that combines a
sense of self-preservation and style that has more to do with an aesthetics of
life than a sense of moral obligation, although it is inseparable from a sense of
ethical well-being. Like Professor Wu, he implicitly disavows the term “jia-
guo qinghuai” since his conduct is “old gentry” in style and follows a certain
neo-Confucian ideal of virtue. However, striving to build an aesthetic value
for life may not only just be different from moral obligation and bureaucratic
achievement, for it possesses a different kind of parallel value, associated
with nostalgia. Wu’s nostalgia also seems to be based on building up his “art
of life.” Deep in his heart, his reverence for his father and silent desire to
restore his memory from his unjust death contributes to his commitment to
understanding the history of Wangye temples and “folk religion” in general

in Fujian.
This may also explain how his research trajectory as one of the most emi-
nent of Quanzhou historians, was directed toward the histories of temples and
his involvement in their restitution after their destruction during the Cultural
Revolution. The importance of the Fumei Temple for Wu is that it is dedi-
cated to a Wangye deity. His scholarly efforts to make it famous in Quanzhou
are connected with the Fumei Temple’s main deity, Xiao Wangye, whose
name is Xiao Wangzhi and who died in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE).
Xiao was originally a prince’s teacher and a great Confucian scholar who
was wrongly accused by the emperor, so chose to commit suicide to assert
his innocence. Wu’s research on Xiao may also have implied a connection
between his deep sympathy for this Confucian scholar from the Han dynasty
and his reverence for his father, similarly victim of an unjust death. Alongside
developing his father’s research on stone carvings, he also had a mission to
study and curate folk beliefs. Yet as an old gentry-like figure, he retained a
class tendency to look down on his fellow devotees for what, in his view, they
lacked. Alongside his implicit dislike of feelings (qinghuai) as a motivating
force for his commitments, his emphasis on reasoned argument, consistent
with the scholarly tradition ideal, foregrounds him as an intellectual who
carefully attends to facts and truths, hates propaganda and distances himself
from terms like jiaguo qinghuai, even though he does not object to others
describing him as such.
A similar distinction of status and personal value can be seen in the career
of Chen Jianying, present director of the Fujian-Taiwan Museum (Mintai
yuan bowuguan) and formerly the director of Tianhou Temple (Empress of
Heaven Temple), Quanzhou’s largest temple honoring Mazu, Goddess of
Salvation at Sea. Trained as an archaeologist, Chen claimed to have a deep
understanding of the importance of cultural heritage for development. He
was involved in the original nomination of Quanzhou for World Heritage
city status in 2001 and had a significant role in advising the provincial gov-
ernment on the 2017 application, including recruiting local archaeologists to
provide materials and advice on developing the sixteen world heritage sites
mentioned above. He coordinated the 2015 East Asian Arts Festival in Quan-
zhou, the first to be held in China, and promoted the resuscitation of three
different categories of intangible heritage from Quanzhou (Puppet Theatre,
Boat Building, and Nanyin Music) for the UNESCO nomination. So he is an
important cultural figure located within political networks of officials whose
work, up until recently, would have been regarded as of minor importance
carried out by one of the many officials always asking for more money with
little promise of return. However, under Xi Jinping, this has changed to an
emphasis on cultural renewal and development. Director Chen’s rise in bu-

reaucratic status gave him significant political networks to call upon and in
particular to mediate between cultural elites in Minnan speaking Fujian and
officials in the Quanzhou and Beijing governments. The great charm and skill
with which he negotiates these political relationships, he extends to academic
colleagues both nationally and internationally who want to do research in
Fujian. An unusual conversation with him can still reveal a shadow of some-
thing that echoes Wu Youxiong’s pride in the “old gentry” status. Chen’s
political ambitions make it difficult now for him to invest in local temple
communities and help restore their efficacy as Wu has done. Rather, he
prefers to expand his network outside Quanzhou and interact with the wider
national circle of museums. What others describe as his jiaguo qinghuai repu-
tation, due to the work of his museum establishing the common histories of
ancestral lineages between Quanzhou and Taiwan, has increased his political
status in promoting cross-Strait Fujian and Taiwan links in cultural affairs.
One important dimension of this has been the restitution and revitalization
of temples in Quanzhou through the financial support of their lineage temple
networks in Taiwan.
As noted above, Director Chen was one of several people involved in the
2001 application for recognition of Quanzhou as a UNESCO World Heritage
site. He did not want to talk too much about why, after politically support-
ing the 2017 second application for Quanzhou’s UNESCO World Heritage
status, he then did not support the renomination made in 2019. He mentioned
only that his position had made it quite difficult for him with local officials.
Instead of supporting the restoration of Quanzhou’s Licheng District, he had
instead put a lot of effort into the conservation of a small village that was
being incorporated into the urban city. This he claimed was a more authen-
tic way to preserve the “real heritage.” He invited us to return to study his
achievements the following year in 2018, although he did not follow this up.
However, he emphasized that his ambition was to record local material tradi-
tions and craft/art practices in film and video interviews. He also took pride
in having helped develop the Minnan Cultural Ecology Zone project in 2013
because of its promotion and transmission of local indigenous knowledge.
When questioned about his ambivalence over the UNESCO nomination, he
said he wanted to emphasize “living heritage” over material objects in con-
servation programs that could only be classified, documented and physically
preserved. While Chen was quite open about his actions being understood
as a form of “love for the country,” and he would not object to his work be-
ing described as such by colleagues, he was also ambivalent about it being
described as “jiaguo qinghuai,” which he disparaged as easily becoming a
slogan for top-down cultural revitalization and education. While, like Mr. Wu
and Mr. Wang, he seeks a “gentry” status revised to fit Quanzhou’s modern
conditions as pointed out in Feuchtwang’s chapter, he is also one of many lo-
cal intellectuals who supports the seventh lunar month ghost festival, because
it engages local residents, even if it is regarded nationally as “superstition.”
We have presented several cases in which, although diverse, a certain pat-
tern emerges of the relative value of jiaguo qinghuai. We have interpreted this
diversity as feelings of attachment for home or locality and their moral value
depending on the context in which they are used. We can also see there is po-
tentially an inverse relationship between official status and local value, in the
sense that those of high official/bureaucratic status may admit to less jiaguo
qinghuai than their official inferiors. Jiaguo qinghuai is also used by officials
to compliment people for their sense of historic duty, their admiration for
tradition and origins. For those in the rising/risen “middle class” it emerges
as a way of commending them for not being consumed with wealth-seeking
and power. On the other hand, men like Professor Wu or Professor Wang
express their superiority in their “old gentry” style and are able to exercise
a certain supervisory pressure on cultural officials like Director Chen. They
care about getting things right. For them, history is a matter of strict scholar-
ship and they follow the Confucian ideal of “renzhe an ren” (the virtuous
rests in virtue). While a version of jiaguo qinghuai, as a sense of moral duty
to country or family, may be in general use, neither Mr. Wu nor Mr. Wang
personally want to use the term. Mr. Huang and other cases we could cite, on
the other hand, would use jiaguo qinghuai to describe their moral commit-
ment to community and place, as well as their respect for classical Confucian
study, indicating their attachment to a fundamental idea of what it means to
live an ordinary life.
Despite these very clear differences of status and social, even class, distinc-
tion, in an everyday sense intellectuals and local Quanzhou people are all,
or almost all, caught up in a shared living tradition. When a family member
dies, they profess belief in the other side of the world, and believe that ghosts
or ancestors will return to affect their children, their longevity, or fate. Yet
why is this everyday tradition, because of its official suppression, treated with
ambivalence by these local intellectuals? They are immersed in it as nostal-
gia, but they cannot boldly name the source of this quite real legacy. Why
it should be shameful to believe in the god-ghost tradition is a complicated
historical question. In particular, Confucian gentry believe that “while re-
specting spiritual beings, [they need] to keep aloof from them” ( jing guishen
er yuan zhi), as stipulated in The Confucian Analects (Legge 2014, 100).
Quanzhou has inherited the tradition of “li” (reason) ever since the Neo-
Confucian revival of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Fast forward to the
New Culture Movement of the early twentieth century, we find that Chinese
intellectuals were profoundly affected by the secularization movement, be-

lieving that ideas about ghosts and gods were far from the modern creeds of
“science” and “democracy.” For intellectual elites, talking about ghosts and
gods was, and remains uncivilized and unenlightened. Here, although both
Wu and Chen feel that talking about gods and ghosts reduces the status of
intellectuals, Wu is willing to join the revival of folk temples, such as host-
ing academic conferences for the Fumei and other temples, writing academic
papers about their history, and the meaning of their beliefs. Chen’s approach
is to plan and transform the entire community from the government’s per-
spective by gentrifying a village but “with a good taste.” Yet, at the same
time, he supports local celebration of the ghost festival in the seventh month.
Despite these differences, their purpose remains as “gentry reformers” to
transform or enlighten. For various reasons, political and secular, the differ-
ent elements we can identify as a dispersed cultural elite, resist the idea that
heritage can incorporate everyday lived traditions of folk religion and rituals,
and hence the critical importance of house and temple, except as a personally
repressed category. What we might call the ontology of everyday life and
“lived heritage” making life worthwhile, as Butler puts it in her contribution
to this volume, is embedded in “Quanzhou tradition” and in its everyday
realities of life and death. Moreover, cultural officials, academics, school-
teachers, entrepreneurs with nostalgic ambitions to revitalize culture, and
political elites with diverse ambitions cannot escape it however repressed its
categories might be. Even those officials who try to eliminate “superstition”
are faced with the “human condition,” so they might at some stage, come to
understand what they oppose.
WHEN IS LIVING HERITAGE?
In the sense that “real heritage” is constructed as part of public life, it is part
of a hierarchy largely distinguished from the visible and the audible of the
living domestic and private spheres, except for specific occasions. When, in
2017, the local government announced plans for the relocation of households
in Jubao, this was an occasion when ordinary people were quick to grasp that
saving the material conditions of their lives would depend on what challenge
could be made to the local government. Local resilience depended less on
confronting or resisting officials’ authority than making arguments about
what would be lost in terms of social cohesion and tradition. In Jubao in April
2017, confronted by the emotional turbulence generated by the relocation
and “rebuilding” (chaiqian) plan, particularly among the elderly population,
the district government decided to open a face-to-face meeting to answer
the residents’ questions. Given the official perception of the Jubao area as a
mixed and cohesive population lacking a strong lineage and hence ancestral
organization, the officials found the first meeting was surprisingly packed
with people, many of whom had apparently been in contact with each other
through online WeChat groups. A local leader had already been selected—a
retired middle school teacher who gave an inspiring speech in the meeting
room about the conditions of loss effected by the heritage plan. In fact, it was
older people who dominated the meeting and, selecting several charismatic
figures as their leaders, proceeded to argue not against the refurbishing or re-
building of the district per se but that it should be done in ways that respected
“local tradition.” By this, they meant in consultation with household owners
and guarantees that they would be able to return to their houses after the work
had been done.
Local people had no illusions that the fabric of their houses and the general
infrastructure of the Jubao Chengnan subdistrict were in “decay.” As one of
the poorest parts of the city with relatively little new development, local in-
habitants were fully aware of the lack of investment in basic facilities and the
problems created by variable patchy “modernizing” of housing. Our encoun-
ters with several elderly women in Jubao threatened by relocation in 2017,
made clear that however decrepit their houses might be, retaining possession
was, for them, of paramount concern while they would also welcome refur-
bishment. As elsewhere in China, a house and its land are the basis of both
lineal family relations and territorial neighborhood relations. The women
were fully aware that their houses needed refurbishment, and, through their
children, were anxious to reach financial arrangements for their restoration
with the Licheng administration. But their feelings of respect for the house
were much more deeply embedded in the family and lineage history, includ-
ing their relationship to ancestors and land, as in a different context, is also
discussed in this volume by Ran. Their concern to retain possession of their
houses revealed a deeper ontology rooted in a quest for that which makes
life worth living. It is this which, if not regularly acknowledged, is shared by
many officials and members of Quanzhou’s cultural elite.
The issues involved were well expressed by one of our informants, Aunt
Li, who lived near the Baohai Temple with the youngest of her three sons.
This is one of the oldest Buddhist temples in Quanzhou, run by women in
residence who in many cases were orphans, brought to the temple to be raised
in the community. Born in the late 1940s, Aunt Li came from a well-off fam-
ily and was married to a local entrepreneur at a young age. During the social-
ization campaign in the 1950s, when private businesses became state-owned,
she and her husband became factory workers. Li’s husband soon died and
she managed to bring up her three children on her own. In the early period of
economic reform, in the early 1980s, her eldest son found success in business,
as did his younger brothers soon afterwards. After retirement, Aunt Li spent
most of her time in the local temples worshiping gods and attending ritual
ceremonies. The Baohai Buddhist Temple is the one Aunt Li frequents as she
lives close by, but she is also a keen goer to the Houshan and Fumei Temples
that organize rituals and celebrations of other religions. Apart from going to
the temples, Aunt Li busies herself by worshiping the family ancestors. She
learned to master these ritual practices from her mother-in-law, when she
first married.
As her grandchildren have all settled in different cities, Aunt Li was wor-
ried that the future veneration of ancestral rites would not be sustained by the
younger generations of the family. She asked to have her and her husband’s
remains stored in Suyan Temple, where they would be given prayer services
every day by Buddhist monks. On the face of it, Aunt Li was concerned with
the decline of ritual traditions and knowledge, and yet the real issue was
her fear that she might end up a lost soul after death without proper family
worship. She would become a “leaf” as the elderly woman mentioned above
described herself.
So what is it that Aunt Li and the other households in Jubao felt they were
in danger of losing? The strong sense of loss felt by Aunt Li was undoubtedly
shared by most local residents affected by heritage developments in Quan-
zhou. Loss is accompanied by apprehension and fear, producing an emotional
force with potentially violent outcomes. Destruction was/is a key issue in the
obvious sense that the threat was/is a tangible one, of bulldozers, picks and
shovels sweeping away the actual material environment in which many were
born and lived for many generations, much as Evans also describes in this
volume and elsewhere with reference to the very different context of the old
environment of Dashalar in central Beijing (Evans 2020).
More generally, the threat to cultural identity has produced a significant
heritage conflict literature which veers toward asserting that “destruction and
loss are not the opposite of heritage but part of its very substance” (Holtorf
2006, 101). Following Ingold’s argument that both people and buildings are
continuously reborn, constantly growing through processes of ever-creative
transformations, loss comes to be viewed as something that is not to be
averted, but converted into remembering and commemoration and thus into
potential for community reconstruction (Ingold 2012). Of course, the pos-
sibility of this depends on political and cultural systems. Whether Ingold’s
argument corresponds with the real consequences of destruction for people’s
lives in war-torn conflict zones has rightly been disputed but it significantly
raises the question as to how loss or threat of loss is seen and acted upon by
its victims.
Aunt Li was not one of the respondents we met who threatened suicide
if expelled from their houses, but her anguish was palpable as to the conse-
quences of what the loss of her house would be to herself, family and lineage.
In the more local Quanzhou sense of feelings for family, home and county,
people expressed much angrier feelings about the loss of family virtue that
comes with household dislocation. The issue, raised many times in Quanzhou
but also elsewhere in China, is the consequence of histories of exclusion of
religion and household rituals from considerations of economic develop-
ment and change (Wang 2009). The anxiety, anger and shame expressed by
Aunt Li and others, stress one aspect of this exclusion, namely the role of
households and ancestral rituals in the general complex of temples and spa-
tial cosmology. The bonds between people and place involve “folk religion”
and a folk religious landscape well known to local people but which does
not figure in official history writing. Aunt Li’s story takes our concern for a
“grassroots” heritage for Quanzhou in this direction. It relates to what Butler
describes in this volume and elsewhere (Butler 2016) as embedded heritage
or “heritage and wellbeing,” and to what Wang Mingming in this volume and
elsewhere calls the human-object/human-human/human—deity relationship
(Wang 2014, 295). These relations are managed in a house with an ancestral
shrine that contains the means to ensure reproduction of life and the pursuit
of ancestral relations as a proper attendance of the dead.
In Jubao, as widely found in Quanzhou, an invisible but real idea of
territorial belonging exists in the relation between household and temple
(Feuchtwang 2004). Spirits evoked through ritual and divination can affect
the present as well as decisions about the future, for individuals and their
households, and for collectivities such as neighborhoods. This starts from the
local, whether this refers to territorial boundaries protected by a god or to the
ancestral line of descendants invoking a household. Both seek to acknowl-
edge suffering and thus the need to vindicate those who were unjust victims
of suffering. In Jubao, a house is where fire and incense from the local temple
and from its associated inland mountain are fixed in a place where people
gather, just as Ran argues in his description in this volume of the Naxi house
as a center where the ritual and the everyday meet in the bodies of those who
occupy it. The name and origin of many houses are attached on a board above
the entrance and on a lamp above the table in the dining room, so the origin of
the source of the fertility of the family can be traced, married into or avoided.
To destroy these attachments is threatening, but the most fearful thing con-
cerns the regulation of the definite cut-off between life and death, for which
successful conversion of the spirit of the dead to ancestor is paramount. This
requires the ritual expertise of Daoist or Buddhist specialists to open the gate
and conduct the spirit of the dead to a spirit heaven. But the final ritual has to
be conducted outside the house of the dead person, in a specially constructed

house for the spirit of the deceased. There is, in Quanzhou, thus a deep con-
nection between house, land and ancestors, and even if a new owner moves
into the house, he or she has to worship the ancestors of the old owner called
“the host of the land” (di jizhu). This deep connection, maintained as a kind
of permanence of dislocation, also brings to mind Weller and Wu’s work
on ghosts surfacing during the upheavals of building construction to wreak
their revenge on the living in retribution for their failure to respect the dead
(Weller and Wu forthcoming).
Ancestors, and the local temples between them, regulate the boundaries of
the lineage and protect the household and land. It is the permanence of the
house on land, even with rebuilding and refurbishment of the structure that
protects the land. Ancestors protect by naming their descendants wherever
they have moved. Hence the importance of names being inscribed over doors
and inside houses and ancestral shrines, for newcomers who bring attach-
ments of and to their ancestors to join others on the land on which the house
to which they are moving is built. Unrecognized spirits of the dead, who
have lost or have been denied their ancestor relationship, become threaten-
ing ghosts with malevolent intent to the living. Hence the elderly woman
describing her fears of “becoming a leaf” evokes connotations of being adrift
and abandoned. Given their current mobility, people resolve this problem
by paying to have prayers to their dead ancestors carried out in Buddhist
temples. But it is the absence of a house where descendants assemble to feast
and tell stories and remember the histories of the family/lineage that is seen
as particularly dreadful.
Ancestors are the named dead. The first step in a funeral ritual is to con-
vince the dead person they have died. This is crucially the role of the Daoist
or Buddhist expert who comes to “close the eyes” and transfer the spirit to
a parallel life. A fundamental point is that the death of a family member is
a source of pollution for the house. For families, minimizing the pollution
caused by the new death in the home and smoothly transferring the dead souls
to become their ancestors are their main concern in the funeral arrangements.
Even after the funeral, the dangers of the dead soul still exist and so, with the
help of ritual experts, more has to be done to survive the current misfortune
by overwhelming the spirits of the dead so that they remain kind and helpful
to the living.
Southern Fujian is widely recognized as a center where temples which have
been built and rebuilt, flourish in contemporary China. After the destruction
of the Cultural Revolution, people in Fujian have shown enormous resilience
in rebuilding temples on original sites. This has particularly been the case in
Quanzhou where in Jubao Chengnan, for the purposes of our analysis, house-
holds have special relationships with certain temples, and although members
may frequent more than one as aspects of their social life and concerns to care
for their deities, usually one has special significance for them in relation to
holding festivals and rituals at particular times of the year.
Fumei is one of the inland port areas along the Jin River to which many
residents of Jubao belong. It consists of six neighborhoods, historically
identified principally by the rotation of two of the neighborhoods working
together on a three-day cycle. Intense rivalry used to exist between different
inland port areas in terms of the rotation of times when each could access the
port and enjoy monopolies in goods to trade. In 1872, the local government
erected a stone tablet to regulate the loading and unloading of goods by speci-
fying the different commodities each neighborhood could trade in and the
days in rotation when they could access the port. Their earnings would vary
every day but would be shared out equally among all those who participated
in the rotation. The idea of everyone “having a part” (you fen) was central to
building this sense of communal identity in Fumei and it is undoubtedly of
long-standing importance for understanding the relationship between temple,
household and trade. The idea was also reflected in local ritual practices, in
particular to “yan wan” (banquet bowls) that refers to the offerings Fumei
people make to their temple deities, to which everybody would contribute
“a part.” In Fumei, yan wan had three sizes—large (twenty-four bowls of
offerings), medium (twenty) and small (sixteen)—of meat dishes, vegetable
dishes and fruits. The size and content of a household’s contribution were
decided by drawing lots. In a word, everyone had a part and would share in
the distribution.
The Jin River system has a distinct network of temples called Wangye and
each, for example, Fumei Temple and Houshan Temple, can be identified
with a neighborhood. The boundaries of each temple may be invisible and
yet are clearly known by local residents. The rivalry between different neigh-
borhoods created an organic solidarity within each one based on principles
of public fairness (gongyi) and sharing orchestrated through the temple and
ritual practices. Fumei Temple is dedicated to Xiao Wangzhi, or Xiao Taifu,
who, as mentioned above, was a court official in the Han dynasty who, when
falsely accused, committed suicide. The theme of recognition and remem-
brance of an individual who suffered an unjust death translates the spirit of
the person into a god who will subsequently defend conditions of justice and
fairness (gongyi). The central and auxiliary deities in Fumei Temple are gods
of justice, closely associated with violence and punishment. Mr. Chen, the
chairman of the temple committee, recalled hearing sounds of chains and sob-
bing outside the temple when he was small, coming from the Wangye’s inter-
rogation of criminals. The Wangye figures are normally rendered powerful
and intimidating, and people do not take photos of them for fear of being
overwhelmed by their power. Wangye gods are also potentially heroes that
save and protect others, for example sailors and fishing people who might die
at sea and, as in the case of Fumei Temple, form the means for recovering the
merit of an unjust death which deserves to be redeemed.
The territorial boundary shown us by one of the two heads of the temple,
Mr. Huang Tianshou, had no physical mark yet the invisible borderline was
respected and strictly adhered to by members of different communities. In
the annual God-Welcoming Festival (yingshen saihui), statues of deities are
carried from local temples to bigger and higher-ranking temples to revitalize
their efficacious power by “ripping the fire (incense)” (ge huo). “Ripping”
seems to convey the often quite rough act separating the embers and, spread-
ing the “fire,” or “incense” to each of their households. This cyclical proces-
sion is a vital way for a community to mark its territory and showcase its
power and wealth and therefore usually involves martial arts performances.
Fumei Temple is not only the home of the principal deity, Xiao Wangye,
but also of twenty-four others related to neighboring areas whose members
take their local versions to have their potency recharged by spending time
in the main temple and sharing in the incense burning. The idea of sharing
and distributing parts is thus basic not only to the idea of neighborhood and
the special connection between house and temple but also to the networks of
temples and houses, which in the case of Fumei Temple extends well outside
Quanzhou to the countryside and beyond.
In 2019, the heads of the temple committee from the Yu Zhi Feng Tian Tem-
ple in Taizhong, Taiwan, went to Fumei to collect the god named Lei Wangye.
This god is the senior of the twenty-four Wangye in Fumei Temple, which
in Taiwan is named as the temple of origin for Lei Wangye. The committee
from Taiwan were sent by Lei Wangye to greet Xiao Wangye in Fumei to
acquire a new image of their god to replace the old one. It is not unusual
for a god to demand that an old image needs to be replaced and its efficacy
increased. We met the delegation, seen having their photo taken in figure
6.3, buying the image in a special shop in Quanzhou where it was dedicated
to Lei Wangye by a Wangye priest from Fumei Temple. Taken back to Fu-
mei Temple, it was consecrated and fed with incense by Xiao Wangye. Lei
Wangye in Taiwan had sent a written message ( fu) with the temple committee
to Xiao Wangye. After being delivered, read and burnt, its ashes were depos-
ited in the ocean at Quanzhou port. Lei Wangye in 2019 was “commander”
of all the Wangye temples in Taiwan and Xiao Wangye ordered Mr. Chen
and Mr. Qiu, the heads of Fumei Temple, to give the Lei Wangye commit-
tee members a model boat to take with them to Taiwan. The gift entitles the
Taiwan temple to carry out “songwang chuan” (send boat ritual), the burn-
Figure 6.3. Visitors to the Fumei Temple, author’s photo
ing boat exorcism ritual mentioned above, marking the historical relation-
ship that exists between the original temple and dependent temples between
Quanzhou and Taiwan. Lei Wangye was an official who had lived at some
time in the Qing dynasty and died an unjust death. When extended to an ideal
of inclusivity, this principle of fairness and everyone “having a part” gener-
ates a certain moral truth. Wangye both control and save the unnamed dead,
while mediating with ancestors who are the named dead and the subject of
household rituals. Wangye regulate the boundary of the community and the
ancestors regulate the boundary of the lineage. If the households are wiped
out, the Wangye temples would also die.
The fact is that they have not called attention to the ethical values that
mediate the relation of temple and household in Jubao. Central to building a
sense of community in Fumei, the idea of everyone having a part in getting
access to the port and to trade is embedded in the ritual practices of both
temple and household. As noted above, the invisible boundary of the temple
neighborhood is in fact quite explicit and well known to inhabitants adher-
ing to its ritual practices. The deities and mythology in Fumei Temple also
speak of the public fairness and justice supported by the deity, given that
the founding charter of the temple is the redemption of an unjust death, that
of Xiao Wangye. The authority of the Qiu family, of which one of the two
temple heads is a descendant, and the influence that the head of the lineage
wields in communal affairs comes from the loss of life they suffered in the
past when fighting with rivals for the community’s survival. The sacrifice
of those killed is a debt owed to the Qiu family that has been inherited over
generations. Today, some senior managers of Fumei Temple still insist on
having someone from the Qiu family on its board. The most recent is eighty-
five-year-old Mr. Qiu Chuanzong, one of Fumei’s last generation of martial
artists with a national reputation for his gongfu skills. For Mr. Huang and Mr.
Qiu, the two temple heads, the Qiu family’s inherited status as Fumei’s “head
person” (touren) manifests the wisdom and fairness of the local traditions of
social practice, as well as the exercise of martial arts to maintain such “public
fairness.”
The ethic of “having a part” suggests that powerful alternative modes of
feeling have developed to describe moral commitment to community. Nor are
these of recent origin. A British doctor who retired in 1888, used donations
to build a Presbyterian church in Jubao Street. It still stands, heavily recon-
structed, on the site where a group of five women were trained in 1889 to be
doctors, and some as midwives, in a clinic attached to the church. All five
generations of one of these women still remain in Jubao as doctors and adhere
to the admonition that you cannot belong to both Presbyterian church and
temple. Since there are over a thousand Christians living in this part of Quan-
zhou, having access to medical help and a pharmacy attached to the church
is a major benefit, but for some people in Jubao, including non-Christians, it
prohibits their membership of Fumei or Houshan Temples. However, there
is an ancestral shrine and photographs of all five generations of the Hong
Qi Shan family, descended from one of the original midwives, reproduced
through adopted children, in the family’s house in Jubao Street. Yet the fam-
ily heads profess that, devoted to the Christian God, they do not need to feed
ancestors nor are they afraid of them, nor do they need to hold a special day
for their commemoration. Instead, every day “they pray from the heart” for
the dead family members and to convince people to convert as a way to learn
how to do medicine. Yet who will remember their ancestors, they confess,
remains a problem for many converts.
CONCLUSION
Defining the two main sections of this chapter as “real” and “living” heritage
might suggest a distinction between secular and religious heritage, as some
are arguing elsewhere (Feuchtwang, Rowlands and Sun 2021). Yet their
content is much more mixed and ambiguous than this dichotomy supposes.
“Real heritage” comprises the categories and classifications of real life that
intellectuals and their local officials develop through their work as historians,
the makers of cultural categories in museums, heritage sites and the map-
ping of cultural domains. Living heritage is scarcely inaudible or invisible
in Quanzhou and yet its existence is suppressed or treated with ambivalence
as superstition by intellectuals and officials as they map the distribution of
the sensible. Yet, the living heritage of Quanzhou rests on a presupposition
of equality by all those who participate in the nurturing and care shown to-
ward household and temple within a community of the living. The hierarchy
of intellectuals and officials is thus challenged by their own need to refuse,
obscure or participate in the fundamentals of living heritage. Remember-
ing and practicing basic family and household responsibilities are treated as
more than an obligation and are built into the ordinary daily expectations of
people’s lives. Complicated feelings of loss and fear of the consequences of
neglect, of dealing with illness and with death, create a shared sense of obli-
gation to lineage houses and ancestors, temple and gods, imbricated as they
are in each other’s futures. The idea of all houses being entitled to a shared
part forms a constant measure by which actions are evaluated and outcomes
appreciated, whether in everyday business or relating house to temple. The
irony is that real heritage is scarcely secular in practice, if the majority of
participants not only study religious sites, but have helped to restore them,
and also recognize the essential importance of their participation in rituals of
life and death. None of our intellectuals nor the officials they mediate, deny
the significance of gods and ghosts, or of their own sense of or wish for im-
mortality as ancestors.
As a random process, real and living heritage are not different regimes or
genres of discourse. This is why, as a “worldview,” both real and living heri-
tage underlie and translate into the actions of members of local elites in Quan-
zhou. If jiaguo qinghuai is loosely taken to mean a union of family, county
(xian) and country through connections with bureaucratic levels and political
ambition, it has a variable or suppressed importance for different members
of Quanzhou elites. The ambivalence expressed by those cultivated and edu-
cated members we have conversed with is also their reaction to the sense of
social status and distinction given to them by others. But in the same way that
Mr. Huang would use qinghuai as a way of describing his feelings for local
village life, others would also use it to evaluate their respect for Professors
Wu and Wang and others like them in terms of their accumulation of merit.
What keeps local elites separate from the bureaucratic outsider is what they
share as “living heritage” with everyone else in Quanzhou. But the feelings
of ordinary people, relating to the work they do to feed and placate hungry
ghosts, or to look after, clean and feed the temples, to welcome strangers and
anticipate the return of children and offspring for ancestor rituals and funer-
als in the house, are meritorious acts on which personal qinghuai will also be
assessed, perhaps in some individual or family sense of merit or shame. The
ideals of “public fairness” existing as a grassroots consensus of ordinary life,
validated by temple and house rituals, is consistent with the ideal of everyone
having “a part of things.” However, it may be affected by current cynicism,
“jiaguo qinghuai” suggests the value of internalizing inter-personal respect and
the harmony that comes from correct behavior and actions. While we have fo-
cused on this as a shared ideal of elites and the ordinary people in Quanzhou, it
needs to be noted that some officials appointed by government do not subscribe
to it. In fact, it is the growing conditions of loss of such “merit” accumulated
over long periods of time by families and remembered on ancestral tablets that
may well be felt as the really shocking thing by those “living” in Quanzhou.
For the elderly woman describing herself as like a leaf, a grinding erosion
of the “living” tradition is the basis of her sense of injustice. Essential acts of
commemoration may not require a laborious effort of remembering as much
as a conscious everyday experience of an as-ever-presence. Conditions of
mobility like inscriptions and tablets are vital not only because they name the
value of heritage but mainly because they can be taken down and moved to
a safe place. What is being preserved are sedimented layers of moral com-
mitment, images of which are also the most intense objectives of iconoclastic
acts of demolition and destruction. This is why understanding what heritage
“means” at the local level is not reducible to the more overwhelming presence
of a UNESCO universal value.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am most grateful for the support and inspiration gained through collabora-
tion with Harriet Evans and the other members of the Leverhulme project.
For their support in carrying out our research, we extend our gratitude to Min
Hong, Wang Mingming, Cai Ying, Chen Jianying and Wu Youxiong. Sun
Jing also expresses her gratitude for financial support from the Quanzhou
Normal University’s scientific research start-up fund for introducing talents
and the Quanzhou Municipal Government. All the names I use in this chapter
are the real names of individuals who publicized them themselves.
NOTES
1. Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible refers, literally to what it

is possible to apprehend by the senses and as such establishes the condition of pos-
sibility for perception, thought, and activity. He partitions the sensible into various
regimes and in so doing, delimits forms of inclusion and exclusion in a community
(Rancière 2010). We use these insights in making the distinction between “real” and
“living” heritages.
2. Thanks to Wang Mingming for this observation.
3. Selling qinghuai to sell products—for instance, see the short piece on Sohu
.com titled: “In an Age of Qinghuai Peddling, Are We Lucky or Not?” https://www
.sohu.com/a/245716542_100614. Last accessed on 7 August 2018.
4. He has recently published two books on the rock inscriptions in the Jiu Ri Shan
Temple complex, a temple dedicated to the mountain deity Tongyuan Wang, erected
at the confluence of the east and west rivers leading into the Jinjiang River. This was
where in the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), officials went to pray and left in-
scriptions so that the great fleets of junks of the Maritime Silk Road could sail at the
correct time of the year.
5. “Wangchuan” is an exorcism ritual originally concerned with driving out plague
and now functions in a more general protective sense against malevolence. The ritual
of sending boats (wangchuan) is an ancient tradition in Quanzhou and other coastal
areas of China. Whenever there is a plague or disaster, the boat will be released in the
estuary area. With the management of modern national coastlines, it has evolved into
burning ships, that is, burning paper ships in the estuary.
6. Fumei Temple has strong links with other temples in Fujian, like Hui’an, Jin-
jiang, Anxi and Nan’an. Fumei also has stronger links with Taiwan. Almost over 80
percent of Wangye Temples in Taiwan across Xinzhu, Tainan, Jiayi and Gaoxiong
claim they come from Fumei Temple.
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Chapter Seven
Commitments to the Past

Cultural Transmission in a Naxi Village
Peter Guangpei Ran
A few days after I started my fieldwork in Zheba, I met the Smart One, a man
in his mid-thirties who works in the ticket office of the local tourist site.*
Zheba has long been recognized as a spiritual center for the Naxi people. It is
known as the place where most of the Naxi ritual texts were compiled. This
narrative continues to gain currency in recent years due to the development
of tourism and promotion of ethnic cultural heritage. People from Zheba also
developed a contentious or even hostile attitude toward Lijiang, the Naxi
urban center that has won huge commercial success thanks to its recognition
as a world heritage site in 1996 and its tourism development thereafter. They
often criticize cultural activities in Lijiang such as ritual performance and
paper-making techniques for being commercialized and fake, claiming that
they themselves are the bearers of authentic Naxi culture. The Smart One had
a slightly different view. He pointed out that as a matter of fact, Zheba has
always been under the influence of Lijiang. For instance, people in Zheba
used to live in shingled houses or mulefang as they call them.1 Later, when
two-story houses became popular in Lijiang, locals followed the same trend
and started building them as well. He concluded that the “culture” of Lijiang
was bigger than Zheba; the former had more influence on the latter, not the
other way around.
The popular perception of Zheba being more authentic corresponds to
other ethnographic observations of ethnic tourism in southwest China, that
often present the geographically remote countryside as the repository of
“real” or “authentic” cultural heritage in contrast to its urban counterparts
(Kendall 2017, Chao 2012, Weng 2010). Nonetheless, it is not the primary
concern of this chapter to problematize the authenticized rural as such. I see
it part of the larger problem in which the rural and the urban, the local and
extra local, “small” and “big” cultures, as the Smart One put it, dynamically
159
160 Peter Guangpei Ran
constitute one another in creating, maintaining and reinventing people’s

senses and identities of place.
Without assuming that local people uncritically submit to some default
place-based identity in essentializing and localist terms, I intend to show a
more complex picture at the grassroots level in which the interplay between
local values and outside sources of influence continually shapes people’s
cultural lives, the imposition of cultural heritage and the question of authen-
ticity being only instances of such processes. The translocal perspective I
take follows the anthropologist Charles McKhann’s call to study the Naxi
“against the practices of neighboring groups and in the context of the politi-
cal, economic and religious systems within which they develop” (McKhann
1998, 41). This approach overcomes the limits of existing anthropological
discussion on southwest China that tends to be neatly situated within ethnic
categories. Bringing to light the dynamics taking place between and within
apparently clearly defined ethnic boundaries allows us to gain more nuanced
insights in understanding local conceptualizations of time and space which
are crucial in shaping the processes of cultural transmission.2
This chapter focuses on a group of Naxi people living in a mountainous
area called Zheba in northwest Yunnan. It looks at transmission of local
cultural practices through the processes in which shifting forms of the out-
side continually come to be the point of reference and source of significant
transformations. Following Feuchtwang and Rowlands’s (2019) recent re-
conceptualization of civilization, I see cultural transmission as processes of
encompassment through which inside and outside are continuously related in
borrowing, exchanging and differentiating with regard to shifting contexts.
I trace how local cultural practices are transmitted and transformed through
local attempts to channel and, to varied extents, resist various external forces,
including dominance of neighboring groups, the political suppression of
ritual practices during Mao era, and the later development of ethnic tourism
and cultural heritage. In a border region like Zheba, the relationship between
inside and outside is at once hierarchical and indeterminate. It gives rise to
mixed and ambivalent expressions of grassroots values that do not necessarily
remain coherent with one another, but coexist and often intersect in people’s
understandings of their homeplace in relation to the outside worlds. This
brings to mind my friend, the Smart One, who holds local traditions dear to
his heart, as I discuss later, and at the same time stands in awe of the material
advancement achieved by the urban center nearby.
The transmission and transformation of local cultural practices are subject
to influence of external forces which are both potent and dangerously violent.
They often violate local senses of moral propriety with catastrophic and frag-
menting effects. The fragmentation is experienced as a distinct sense of loss
Commitments to the Past 161
of a strong connection with the cultural past that local people lament. At the
same time, this also encourages initiatives to retain a sense of locality through
spatialized practices of physically bringing the past in/back from afar and at-
tempts to keep the outside at bay.
I first recount two episodes from the life story of Aming, a legendary
spiritual master originally from Zheba who is also recognized as the reincar-
nation of the founder of dongba ritual practices. It is also a story in which
Zheba became a sacred center for all Naxi people. In his pursuit of spiritual
accomplishment, Aming stole ritual knowledge and skills, as well as material
objects and scriptures, from a Tibetan Buddhist master. After escaping back
to Zheba, he elaborated the Naxi indigenous ritual practices by incorporating
the Tibetan source of influence. He later was seen as the rival of the celestial
king of Lijiang, who eventually murdered him by poisoning. This unjust
death is often referenced by the locals to account for the decline of Zheba as a
prosperous spiritual center. Through telling Aming’s stories and the material
practices of passing down the ritual script, people in Zheba struggle to main-
tain a sense of spiritual and moral superiority while living under the strong
dominance of neighboring groups.
I then turn to scenes of everyday conversations in which people living the
fragmenting effects of the historical processes of the past century find it dif-
ficult to retain a deep connection with their cultural past. They experience an
overt sense of loss as local cultural practices become increasingly fractured
by forces whose origins lie elsewhere, but which are irreversibly transform-
ing local ways of life. Such a sense is heightened by the imposed discourse
and practices of cultural heritage that have brought economic success and
international recognition to the rival town, Lijiang. Some aspire to retrieve
that connection by physically travelling to more remote areas, tracing the an-
cestral road, a mythic route linking all Naxi ancestors to the homeland. Such
efforts, I argue, are appeals to an external source of moral superiority through
spatialized commitment to a deep past.
I last move on to discuss the practice of incense offering in the worship
of the shu spirit. Cosmologically designated as the embodiment of the realm
beyond agricultural and domestic activities, namely wild spaces, the shu spirit
occupies an intermediate space that can channel extra local forces with the
help of ritual practice. The popularity of the incense offering ritual and other
attempts to bring the incoming tourists under shu spirits’ control speak to the
nowadays intensified movement and exchanges between the inside and the
outside.
Before I start detailed discussion of the cases outlined above, I first pre-
sent a brief account of the ethnographic context. The materials for this chapter
come from two periods of fieldwork in Zheba. I carried out my first fieldtrip
in 2014, which was eleven months in total. In 2017, I returned and stayed
there for over a month. Zheba lies about 170 kilometers to the northwest of
Lijiang and one hundred kilometers to the southeast of Shangri-La. It is clas-
sified as a Naxi Autonomous County under the administration of Shangri-La,
a Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture formerly known as Zhongdian. Culturally,
it has long been considered a spiritual center and pilgrimage site where the
dongba ritual practices originated. These ritual practices were degraded in
the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury by the urban-residing Naxi elites who came to regard Han culture as
more superior through the education they received (McKhann 2010, 187).
The more severe condemnation came in the Mao era when the emphasis on
“class struggle” took precedence over ethnic differences, and ethnic prac-
tices, including religious and cultural practices, were suppressed. Facing the
same fate as many other spiritual activities across China, dongba rituals were
overtly forbidden. The pictograms used for ritual texts, believed to have been
compiled by Master Aming, were labelled as “niu gui she shen” (literally ox
ghost and snake deity) or monsters and demons. Following the 1980s, when
the political climate became more tolerant of ethnic cultural and religious
difference, dongba practices were revitalized. The revitalization greatly ac-
celerated after China joined UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of
Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004.3 The promotion of dongba practices as
Naxi cultural heritage is associated with ethnic branding as the main strategy
of tourism development. It also links to ethnic identity politics in configuring
China as a multinational country in the post-Mao era (Chao 2012). In this
process, dongba has become, or has been selected as, a synonym for Naxi
heritage as a whole and a carrier “of Naxi culture in urban, national, and
international discourses” (McKhann 2010, 188). Yet, as Evans discusses in
this volume, the elision between Naxi cultural practices and “dongba culture”
carries with it limitations and exclusions of many, particularly gendered di-
mensions of Naxi culture. Due to its close association with dongba practices,
Zheba has undergone significant changes through the times of both political
supersession and the later market driven revitalization, as the rest of this
chapter shows.
SLAVE, THIEF AND SPIRITUAL MASTER
The village settlements in Zheba all lie on one side of a U-shaped valley. On
the other side to the northwest stands a mountain called Mɯts’ydʐy (n.) or
the “sky support.” Close to the top of the mountain, seen under the clouds in
figure 7.1, there is a cave that is believed to be where Master Aming attained
his divinity. The founder of dongba ritual practice is dongba Shara, a deity
often summoned in rituals. Born in one of the villages in Zheba, Aming was
regarded as the reincarnation of Shara or the second patriarch.
Legend has it that Aming was born in a poor household.4 His father worked
on a horse caravan and owed a lot of debt to some Tibetan aristocrat. Unable
to pay it back, his father ran away from home, leaving Aming and his mother
behind. Later, when the debtor came, they forced young Aming to work for
them as a slave. Aming was talented and able. He worked very hard and
quickly won the trust of the Tibetan aristocrat. There was a living Buddha or
Tulku teaching Tibetan Buddhist scriptures to his apprentices in the master’s
house. Aming was instructed to tend to the lamps while they were studying.
He listened to the Tulku’s teachings quietly from the side and secretly kept
them in mind. Year after year, he worked at mastering all the scriptures and
magic spells. The Tulku later found out about this and forbade him to learn
any further by sending him out to herd the horses. Missing home a lot, Aming
trained one of the horses to cross bridges and rivers while whipping the rest if
they did so. One day, he took a set of Buddhist scriptures and talismans from
the Tulku and ran away. When the Tulku found out, he sent his apprentices
to run after Aming but their horses refused to cross bridges and rivers. In this
way, Aming managed to escape.
Although he successfully made his way back to Zheba, he still feared that
the Tulku and apprentices would come to the village to get him. He decided
Figure 7.1. A view of Zheba Valley, author’s photo

to hide in a cave up on Mɯts’ydʐy. Over the following years in the cave, he

accomplished his ritual skills and compiled hundreds of volumes of dongba
scripts. Eventually, when the debtor and Tulku stopped searching for him,
Aming returned to his village and practiced rituals for his fellow villagers.
The cave hence became a spiritual place named after Aming. It serves as a
pilgrimage site regularly visited by dongba. Even to this day, local dongba
practitioners told me that they visit the cave at least once a year. They conduct
a specific ritual there to enhance their spiritual power. During my fieldwork,
there was also a group of dongba traveling from E’ya on the border of Yun-
nan and Sichuan to Zheba to make a pilgrimage to the cave.5
It is believed that due to the territorial connection with Aming, dongba
from Zheba are particularly skilled and spiritually powerful. In a way, their
spiritual power is seen as directly descending from that of Aming. They also
used to outnumber practitioners elsewhere. This attracted a lot of novice prac-
titioners from other Naxi areas. They came to find accomplished local dong-
bas as their masters. Staying in their masters’ houses, they undertook years of
training in ritual skills, in return for which they worked as free labor for their
masters. The lengthy apprenticeship would eventually bestow the practitioner
the title of “great dongba” with the rights to wear a white cape and conduct
powerful rituals (Mueggler 2011, 92). This kind of common arrangement
made Zheba a vernacular training center for dongba practices in contrast to
the formal organization of monasticism in neighboring Tibetan areas.
The story accounting how Aming realized his spiritual attainment speaks to
the long history of taking the outside in as the Naxi rituals first evolved. The
initial indebtedness of Aming’s household acknowledges Zheba’s long exis-
tent economic and, by extension, political dependency on the Tibetan groups
in neighboring areas with Zhongdian/Shangri-La as the obvious center. This
hierarchical relation results in Aming’s serfdom and displacement. In the
same vein, Tibetan Buddhism is also traced as a superior spiritual power,
serving as the base for Aming’s spiritual development and the elaboration
of dongba practices. The enslavement imposes physical constraints but at
the same time puts Aming in close contact with great sources of spirituality
leading to the acquisition of necessary ritual knowledge, skills and materials
to become a spiritual master. Interestingly, the later arrangement of homestay
in Zheba to train dongba followers also mirrored the enslavement of Aming
in the Tibetan household. It became a crucial form of territorial centering
(Feuchtwang 2004), realized by movement of the incoming apprentices,
through which Zheba asserted its spiritual superiority over other Naxi areas.
Aming’s morally dubious acts of eavesdropping and stealing seem to be
justified as defiance of the control of his Tibetan master. His heroic escape is
also depicted as a well improvised tactic which successfully challenged the
more privileged Tibetan apprentices. His return as a thief and escapee reso-
nates with James Scott’s (2009) general observation of the movement pattern
in the wider geographical region of southwest China and southeast Asia,
in which peripheries serve as places of escape from centers of civilization.
Nonetheless, Aming not only resisted the control of the Tibetans through es-
cape, he also laid claim to the spiritual power of Tibetan Buddhism by steal-
ing and bringing back volumes of scriptures and ritual items. In other tales,
after becoming a spiritual master, Aming is often featured in competition with
Tibetan lamas and outdoes them with great ease. Such accounts speak for
cultural transmission as spatialized encompassment. Processes of borrowing,
mixing and differentiating between inside and outside continuously shape
the sense of locality and its cultural practices (Feuchtwang and Rowlands
2019, 41). The hierarchical relation between inside and outside is not fixed
and static, but indeterminate and fluid with the potential of reversal and “the
encompassing of the contrary” (Dumont 1980, 240). As a result, each of the
oppositions maintains a spiritual distinction while sharing deep and intimate
connections that allow for further interactions.
SPREAD AND TRANSMISSION OF DONGBA SCRIPT
Aming’s spiritual attainment made Zheba a hub, attracting generations of

dongba practitioners who eventually returned as accomplished masters to
their respective home places, together with powerful ritual knowledge and
skills acquired in Zheba. The primary medium for the transmission and
spread of dongba practices is the ritual texts nominally compiled by Aming.
Dongba use a pictographic script to write the ritual texts. The invention of the
script is recounted in the Naxi anthropogenic myth. In the story, the Naxi, be-
ing the second eldest of the three sons of the first human ancestors (the eldest
being the Tibetan and the youngest the Bai), is the only one who is illiterate.
He decided to draw everything as he encountered them, which eventually
developed into the pictographic system. Similar to Aming’s escape back to
Zheba to develop a spiritually distinct tradition, the invention of the dongba
script can also be read into the struggle of the early Naxi groups to establish
and maintain their cultural distinction and autonomy, albeit in subordination
to neighboring groups.
The training undertaken by the incoming practitioners involves prolifically
copying the script. Unlike the Tibetans who had adopted woodblock print-
ing techniques as early as the fifteenth century for the production of Bud-
dhist manuscripts (Helman-Wazny 2014), handwriting has been almost the
exclusive means to produce Naxi ritual texts. This may have well suited the
home-based form of transmission alongside ordinary agricultural and pastoral

activities. More importantly, the ways in which the script is written bear spiri-
tual significance. The calligraphy of dongba script not only has an aesthetic
value, but also speaks for the spiritual accomplishment of the copyist. When
novice practitioners copy ritual texts borrowed from their masters, they at-
tempt to develop spiritual affinity by imitating their masters’ handwriting. In
this way, lineages of dongba practices can be traced through different styles
of writing. Those who were trained in Zheba shared a distinct style that could
be traced, in principle, all the way back to Aming. The reproduction and cir-
culation of ritual texts therefore sustain the spiritual network between Zheba
and other Naxi areas. More importantly, the dissemination has contributed to
the rise of Zheba as a sacred center for dongba practices. By the nineteenth
century, Zheba emerged as one of the four main schools of dongba writing
distinguished by its style of writing and by particular ceremonies (He and
Guo 1985). This centering process also placed Zheba in fierce rivalry with
other centers, most prominently Lijiang as discussed later.
The circulation of ritual script is inseparable from the material base of
handmade paper. Dongba in Zheba use a specific type of wild plant called
ɑdə˞6, which commonly grows in surrounding mountains, to produce paper.
The papermaking skills are kept within certain households, whose dongba
practitioners also enjoy higher local prestige. Influences of the fixed-mold
papermaking of the Tibetans and the movable-mold technique of central
China can be found in the Naxi papermaking practice (Li 2003, Fan and
Zhang 2009). As Naxi papermaking skills were nominated as intangible cul-
tural heritage in 2006, some of the local practitioners were identified as rep-
resentative transmitters of this practice. They receive various annual stipends
according to the level of recognition accorded them, as Evans notes in this
volume. These transmitters emphasize the distinct material they use for pa-
permaking as different from that in the Lijiang basin and other ethnic groups
in Yunnan. The differentiation goes along with other attempts to define and
fix ethnic characteristics in creating a distinct Naxi identity.
Producing such paper involves lengthy treks into the mountains to collect
ɑdə˞7 and hours of boiling, washing and smashing of the cambium peeled off
from its bark, as seen in figure 7.2.
The mashed cambium is squeezed into balls, then diffused in water, reas-
sembled with the help of a sieve and eventually dried by the sun before it
lends itself to writing.8 All these labor-intensive efforts are to increase the
resilience of the paper in the process of transforming the ephemeral plant into
an enduring writing medium. The cambium of ɑdə˞ has a mildly poisonous
effect which can cause swelling if the skin is in contact with it for too long.
Due to this property, the paper produced for ritual texts can resist the damage
Figure 7.2. Papermaking, photo by Harriet Evans
over time done by worms and microbial disintegration. The date of the earli-
est dongba texts available now can be traced back to the eighteenth century
(Mathieu 2003). The durability of the paper makes possible the transmission
of the ritual texts in the long term. Nonetheless, such quality became inad-
equate when thousands of volumes of ritual texts were thrown into the fire in
the anti-superstition campaign during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
Local people often lament that at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the
Red Guards confiscated and burned thousands of copies of dongba scriptures.
It has become a local legend that the pile of texts was so big that it took an
entire three days and nights to burn them down into ashes.
Once a copy of ritual text is produced, it is regarded as spiritually potent in
itself. The local activists who led the campaign to burn the ritual texts all died
prematurely. Fellow villagers attributed their premature death to the violence
against the spiritual power embodied in the ritual texts. Some of the texts did
survive the destruction as their owners improvised all sorts of tactics to hide
them away.9 After dongba practices were revived in Zheba in the 1980s, a
man turned up at his neighbor’s who had managed to keep some ritual texts
through the Cultural Revolution. He came up with an excuse to borrow the
texts but later claimed them to be his own. The neighbor later found out that
this man had sold the borrowed copies for six hundred yuan. He spent the
money on a horse which only lived one month after the purchase. The death
of the horse is also inferred as the manifestation of the retributive power of
the ritual script. As the embodiment of higher spiritual power, the ritual script
mediates a local sense of moral propriety which was heightened in people’s
impulses to save the texts when assaulted in the political anti-superstition
campaign. Such spiritual power not only enables dongba to channel life-giv-
ing forces through ritual and make household and communal lives prosper,
but also demands retribution by taking lives once it is violated.
THE DEATH OF AMING
The proliferation of ritual script and its spread sustain the influence of Zheba
over the surrounding Naxi areas. It became so strong that at a certain point
Zheba seemed to have posed threats to the rule of the Mu chiefs in Lijiang.
This tension features in the following account leading directly to Aming’s
death. It continues to feature in Zheba’s contemporary rivalries with Liji-
ang as expressed in the popular perception of the latter as being fake and
inauthentic.
The great repute of Aming as a spiritual master drew the attention of the
Mu chief in Lijiang, mystified as tianwang or the celestial king. There are
different versions recounting how they initially met. In one of them, the Mu
king’s wife fell seriously ill. None of the famous doctors or dongba sum-
moned knew what to do. Aming happened to be in Lijiang at the time and
volunteered to have a try. He conducted some healing ritual and the king’s
wife was swiftly cured of her illness. The Mu king then invited Aming to
Lijiang several times and assigned a series of tasks to test Aming’s capacity,
including praying for rain to alleviate drought and deciphering messages in
bird songs. Each time Aming performed miraculous magic work and easily
handled the Mu king’s challenges. This only won him more popularity and
inevitably brewed lethal jealousy in the Mu king. For fear that one day Am-
ing would threaten his rule, the Mu king schemed to poison him to death and
succeeded. The methods of poisoning vary in different accounts, but they
converge at the point when Aming realized his destined death. He predicted
that three drops of blood would come out of his mouth and instructed the per-
son by his death bed to throw two of them in the direction of Zheba and keep
one in Lijiang. The intention was to direct his blessing back to his homeplace
so that more people with talents would be born there. However, this person,
who in one account is the Mu king himself, disobeyed Aming’s will and did
the opposite. Ever since then, the number of talented persons in Lijiang in-
creased, whereas Zheba had very few.
The Mu king in the story is likely to be the mythologized figure of Mu
Zeng (1589–1646), a great military leader of the Mu kingdom under whose
rule the Mu dynasty reached its heyday (Mueggler 2011, 183). Supported by
the Ming court, the Mu chiefs started to expand their military forces to the
border areas of Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet. Zheba served as the front line of
this military conquest between 1485–1487 when Mu’s troops fought fiercely
with the Tibetans (ZDXZ 1997, 413). The Mu chiefs took hold of the whole
Zhongdian plateau around 1553 and continued to garrison troops in towns
and villages to take control of the route to Tibet. Large numbers of people
were mobilized to settle in the sparsely cultivated land, including Zheba.
A stone found near the local sacred water terraces, as I introduce later, has
inscriptions of a Chinese poem.10 This poem is likely to be composed by Mu
Gao (1515–1568), Mu Zeng’s predecessor, in 1554 (Zhao et al. 1998), per-
haps with the intention to assert political control of the surrounding areas by
marking the victory of his military conquest.
In the early years of his reign, Mu Zeng pacified rebellions in Zhongdian
and pushed further north until his armies took hold of the whole Muli area
in southern Sichuan. He consequently came to be known as tianwang (the
celestial king) and was later idolized in some local temples. After conquering
Muli, Mu Zeng violently suppressed the local Gelugpa sect of Tibetan Bud-
dhism. Following the steps of his predecessors, Mu Zeng had been educated
in the Confucian classics. He developed a lifelong zeal for Han culture and
became an accomplished poet. He was also friends with the great traveler and
essayist Xu Xiake (1587–1641). The Mu chiefs spared no effort to cultivate
their literary achievements in order to claim close affinity with the Ming
imperial court that backed up their reign. It was also to demonstrate their
superiority over the other Tibeto-Burman groups they had conquered.
Although there is no evidence that Mu Zeng gave orders to dispel dongba
practitioners as he did with the lamas in Muli, this pro-Han attitude might
imply distancing himself and the ruling class from the indigenous dongba
cult. The rivalry between the Mu king and Aming dramatized in the story
indicates the strong possibility of an increasing tension and potential schism
between sovereign power and spiritual worship. Although this never resulted
in any dramatic outbreak, the unjust death of Aming at the end of the story
prophesied the decline of dongba practice starting from the eighteenth cen-
tury, when it gradually retreated from the everyday life of the towns in the
Lijiang basin while strenuously keeping the mountainous hinterland as its
stronghold (Mueggler 2011, 46).
The competition between Aming and the Mu king places Zheba in contrast
with Lijiang as alterity or mediation of the outside. The mythic figure of the
Mu king represents external power and violence that do not belong to the
same spiritual hierarchy of Aming’s and hence possess the potential to de-
stroy the life of the latter. This narrative provides a variation of the stranger
king paradigm (Sahlins 2008) with the king never fully incorporated into
the local cosmic world, but commanding life-taking forces from a distance.
Such forces are presented as arbitrary and immoral, against ordinary senses
of moral propriety and justice based on spirituality. The destruction of ritual
texts and the suppression of dongba practices launched by the Cultural Revo-
lution mirror the same configuration. However, in both cases, the outside
does not gain a total control over the life of the local world, but meets with
local struggles to maintain the existent spiritual and moral hierarchy as resis-
tance to coercive power and violence.
The misarrangement of Aming’s blood drops stresses the uneven distribu-
tion of political significance and material wealth as the result of geographical
and political divergence. It expresses the longing for due recognition that
Zheba has hardly ever enjoyed as a spiritual center. The grief for Aming’s
unjust death is also grief for the unfulfilled vision that spiritual significance
would endure and continuously empower its believers in all aspects of life.
At the same time, it allows people from Zheba to express their jealousy—in
the form of righteous indignation—over the material success that Lijiang has
gained as the heart of polity and a market town. The accusation of the Mu
king’s use of poison echoes the stereotypical impression of Lijiang dwellers,
commonly shared by villagers in Zheba even to this day, as canny and mor-
ally corrupt peddlers. This distrust contributes to uneasy or sometimes even
hostile feelings about Lijiang. People from Zheba take pride in their spiritual
piety and moral righteousness to assert their dignity and esteem as followers
of the upright Aming, in contrast to the scheming Mu king.
Musing on Hannah Arendt’s thesis that storytelling creates “subjective-
in-between” in which multiple interests are problematically in play (Arendt
1958, 192–184), the anthropologist Michael Jackson emphasizes the exis-
tential value of stories as mediation between local and extra-local worlds,
facilitating dynamics to “redress imbalances and correct perceived injustices
in the distribution of being” (Jackson 2013, 52–53). In passing down Aming’s
life stories, people in Zheba took pains to claim some sense of autonomy even
though they have long been in the shadow of both Zhongdian and Lijiang.
Such stories constructively bring to life the translocal networks developed
by generations of dongba practitioners through sustaining pilgrimages and
industrious practices of copying, conserving and disseminating ritual script.
Through commemorating Aming’s legendary life and unsurpassed spiritual
potency, local people come to relate to Zhongdian and Lijiang not as sheer
subordinate and outcast. While acknowledging their political dependence and
economic disadvantage, they emphasize their spiritual piety and moral integ-
rity. Storytelling is hence crucial in the practice of place-making, not through
denying and severing translocal connections, but by actively incorporating
these connections in the ebb and flow of narratives. The outcomes are not
fixed conclusions and static relations, glorifying one end while trampling on
the other, but are more indeterminate, full of ambiguity, allowing storytellers
to express perplexed and ambivalent feelings toward both their homeplace
and the outside worlds. In the following section, I shall account how in daily
conversations, local people continue to make sense of the current situation of
Zheba in relation to Lijiang and in ways that echo the story of Aming’s death.
STRUGGLES TO RETRIEVE THE PAST
About two months into my fieldwork, I was chatting with a couple of guys
one day. As I was at the time learning the ritual script from a local dongba,
they asked me about my progress. I confessed that I had only made a start.
One of the guys in his early fifties, known as “Whisker,” suggested that I go
to Lijiang if I wanted to make fast progress. He said people in Lijiang had
come up with systematic methods to teach the script, so it would be easier
and more efficient to learn it there. The Smart One, whom I introduced at
the beginning of this chapter, opposed the idea. Contradicting his previous
comment of Lijiang as a “bigger” and more influential culture, this time he

went along with the popular view that Lijiang people were frauds as they had
invented pictograms like car and television, which did not exist in the origi-
nal script. He insisted that I should carry on my study in Zheba as the local
dongba script had been passed on from the past for generations. “We have
got enough tradition to learn and inherit from the past. There is no need to
reinvent!” the Smart One exclaimed. Whisker laughed at his naïve attitude.
He agreed that Lijiang people did reinvent the script, “but they also got recog-
nized on the world-wide level.” Nor did Whisker believe that the local script
was more authentic. He pointed out that a young dongba in his village was
not skilled in chanting and did some “reinvention” once. It was in a funer-
ary ritual when the dongba was unable to go on with what was written in the
texts, and he randomly improvised a couple of verses. It was all very obvious
for the assembled crowd as the meaning of those verses were hardly relevant.
Just like any other discussion of this sort in everyday conversations in Zheba,
no conclusion was drawn.
On another occasion, the Smart One was challenged by one of his col-
leagues. Half-jokingly, this colleague questioned him that if he loved local
tradition so much, why he wanted his daughters to speak Putonghua (standard
Chinese). He should have insisted on them only speaking the local Naxi lan-
guage. The Smart One has two daughters; the elder one was six and about to
start primary school, and the younger was one year old. In response, he said,
“I have to teach my daughters Putonghua because the lessons at school are
taught in Putonghua. I don’t want them to be left behind compared to other
kids when they enter school.”
The clear sense of disjuncture expressed in both conversations is in line
with Aming’s stories recounted above. In the initial acquisition of ritual
knowledge and skills, Aming escaped the Tibetan master’s chase and hid in
the cave which became a mystical source of spiritual power, coming from the
outside but as a theft. The spiritual potency contrasts with Aming’s unjust
death in being overpowered by the Mu king. Key episodes of external threat
were subsequently successively posed by the Qing imperial court particularly
in the nineteenth century, the political suppression of the Mao era, and finally
the commercial success of tourism and heritage branding in Lijiang, all of
which have contributed to the loss and rupture that people from Zheba feel in
their bones. The transmission of dongba rituals highlights the moral contrasts
between the spiritual power, stolen from the Tibetans, that made Zheba flour-
ish in the first place, and life-threatening forces in various forms, all remain-
ing at a distance but conceived as violent and immoral. What’s at stake is the
local conceptualization of authenticity as connected to Aming’s cave, which
constitutes a deep past with the capacity to continually give, regenerate and
reconquest life (Bloch 1992). This connection has been continually fractured
by later historical processes.
Local people like the Smart One value their connection with the deep past
and hope to keep a sense of authentic life, as passed down over generations.
At the same time, they are deeply frustrated as their sense of authenticity does
not promise merited recognition. Their connection with the deep past is also
perceived as tenuous and obscure. The political suppression in the Cultural
Revolution greatly accelerated the decline of dongba practice that had been
already in place for over a century. By the time I arrived to do fieldwork, of
the eight villages in Zheba, all but one of the dongba practitioners who had
completed their training prior to the Cultural Revolution had passed away.
Since the market reform in the 1980s, many young people regularly migrate
to Shangri-La and Lijiang in search of work. Those few who stay at home
and care enough to undertake dongba training are noticeably less skilled,
as witnessed by Whisker in the incident of the clumsy improvisation by the
young dongba. Most rituals suspended during the Cultural Revolution have
never been recovered. Lack of opportunity to expose themselves in ritual
contexts alongside the loss of the ritual texts result in young dongbas’ incom-
plete spiritual training. Being unable to perform ritual properly, and unable
to learn the script in its entirety, having to teach one’s child a language that
is not one’s own, all these perpetuate the loss of the connection with the deep
past on the part of people in Zheba today. They experience an overt sense of
helplessness that echoes the death of Aming who failed to direct his blessings
back to Zheba.
Some people travel to other, especially the geographically more remote,
Naxi areas in an attempt to retrieve the connection with the deep past. Most of
the dongba ritual texts depict a kinetic geocosmography in which the history
of migration of the early Naxi ancestors is crystallized as a linear path linking
the current settlements to their mythical origin (Ran 2020). At funerals, it is
essential to recount the place names along such ancestral roads to guide the
deceased back to the ancestral homeland reuniting with their predecessors. As
an attempt to reconnect with the lost past, starting from the early 1990s, Mr.
He, then director of the township cultural center of Zheba, put huge energy,
time and resources into visiting all other Naxi as well as neighboring areas.
Although some of the place names recounted in the ancestral roads remain
unchanged in reality and are hence easily recognizable, others appear to be
obscure and incomprehensible. In particular, the ones closer to the ancestral
homeland are highly mystified places in heaven. With the ambition to identify
the more obscure places, Mr. He invited local dongba to travel with him. They
cut through snowy mountains and dense forests, crossed the upper reaches of
the Yangtze River, and marveled at the landscapes they had only come across
in myths and rituals (He 2016).11 They stayed mostly in Naxi villages where
they were well received by the local people upon hearing that they were from
Zheba, the famous spiritual center and home of Master Aming. In 2014, after
finishing the last of these expeditions, Mr. He sorted through the abundant
notes taken over the years of travels and edited them into a book.
The accuracy of Mr. He’s identification projects is beside the point. Keep-
ing the route of the ancestral roads depicted in ritual texts in mind, his com-
mitment to the deep past is a spatial one. The endeavor to retrieve the past is
realized through physically moving across the broad landscape that the Naxi
ancestors had traversed long before. These expeditions also overlapped with
some of the journeys carried out by those novice dongba practitioners who
eagerly went to Zheba to pursue their spiritual training during past centuries,
only now in reverse directions. The translocal networks were once again re-
enacted to rediscover Zheba in its past flourishing glory.
INCENSE BURNING AND THE SHU SPIRIT
On the west of Zheba valley, a group of white sinter terraces covers the cap
of a hill. It is known as Baihuaping, a spiritual place regularly visited by lo-
cal people. The terraces are formed by calcium carbonate in spring water. A
stream of water that continually feeds the terraces originates from a spring well
in a forest half a mile away. It flows through a flat clearing on top of the hill
where several shallow pools are formed before it goes downhill. The water in
the spring well, as seen in figure 7.3, is clear and appears to be turquoise blue.
Figure 7.3. Sacred spring well, author’s photo

It wells out from the cracks between rocks at the bottom where offerings
like eggs, rice grains and coins lie. Circulating the spring well along the edge,
there are incense stick ends and bamboo tablets painted with pictographic
paintings. Tibetan prayer flags fixed on surrounding trees flutter as the wind
blows. Two big stone shrines associated with different villages in Zheba
stand on either side of the spring.
As is commonly practiced among various ethnic groups in southwest
China, spring wells are regarded as the embodiment of water deities (Wellens
2017). In the dongba cosmology, these water deities are envisioned as half
human, half serpent forms, known as shu spirits. Shu is associated with
mountains, forests and water sources. They are in charge of the realm loosely
corresponding to the notion of nature (ziran), as opposed to farmland and do-
mestic spaces. This split is recounted in the myth that features the male pro-
genitor of human and shu as half-siblings. Since their initial pact dividing up
cultivated and wild spaces, human beings continued to transgress the bound-
aries in hunting practices and land reclamation. The transgressive activities
often enrage the shu who would then punish the humans by stealing their
souls, hiding their livestock or even causing natural disasters. As these trans-
gressive acts carry on, it is essential for humans to perform rituals regularly
to pacify the shu.12 As Mueggler (2011, 111) points out, rather than settling
the conflicts once and forever, such rituals result in temporary resolutions to
redress the separation of different spaces traced back to the initial pact.
In Zheba, the worship of shu applies not simply to the tension in the binary
split between nature and culture, but also implicates a negotiation between lo-
cal and extra local forces. Shu spirits occupy the boundary space between the
inside and the outside where external forces can be potentially mediated with
the help of ritual. The shu spirits residing at Baihuaping are a pair of male
and female deities known as Shuizibu and Shuizimu. People regularly visit the
spring and perform incense offering rituals called tʂ’upɑdʐɪ. The occasions
for such rituals include the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month and
annual festivals such as the second day of Chinese New Year and the eighth
of the second lunar month. For individuals, it is also beneficial to perform
tʂ’upɑdʐɪ on the days of their Chinese zodiac animal. A dongba idiom has it
that the Tibetans keep track of time in terms of years, the Bai people keep
track of time in terms of months, and the Naxi keep track of time in terms
of days. For the Naxi, the correlation between one’s zodiac animal and dates
connect the life and well-being of an individual person to the broader cosmo-
logical order. In the case of tʂ’upɑdʐɪ, conducting the ritual on the right day
substantiates an intimate link in which the well-being of individuals comes
under the protection of shu.
There are two locally well-known tales often recounted to instantiate the
shu spirits’ powerful protection. One is about a group of miners from Zheba
whose lives were saved from the collapse of the minefield by a warning from
a bird, sent by the shu from Baihuaping. The other was about local people
who joined the anti-Japanese war. They managed to miraculously dodge the
bullets on battlefields, while those marching behind them were shot dead.
Their survival is also attributed to the power of this protector deity. The
beliefs in the protection of the shu make it essential for local people to go
to Baihuaping and make incense offerings on appropriate days, especially if
they have a close family member who studies or works away from home. The
spatial separation between family members, most recently caused by the in-
creasing translocal movements since the market reform in the 1980s, and the
worries and anxieties consequently entailed are managed through maintaining
the intimate link between the absent person and the protection of shu in the
regular Tʂ’upɑdʐɪ practice by those left behind.
In the mid-1990s, Baihuaping was developed as a tourist site due to its
unique landscape of the sinter terraces. The sacred spring hence became
one of the scenic spots visited by tourists. Ajia, an accomplished dongba
practitioner from the adjacent village took the initiative to sit next to the
spring. When tourists came, he would offer them incense sticks and recite the
chanting of tʂ’upɑdʐɪ, with the expectation of obtaining money donations.
People from the village at the foot of Baihuaping also took advantage of
this opportunity to provide tourists with homestay, catering and horse-riding
services. Although the development of tourism has expanded the income
avenues for local people, there is also growing concern that increasing tour-
ist activities at Baihuaping may be transgressive toward the shu spirits. The
widely known catastrophic earthquake in 1996 in Lijiang was precisely seen
as an act of vengeance from the shu deity of the Jade Dragon Mountain, who
was disturbed by the rapid tourism development there (McKhann 2010). In
Zheba, people share similar concerns about the pollution, in both material and
spiritual senses, brought to the sacred spring well and the local world by more
and more tourist visits.
As McKhann (2010) observes, on various occasions when dongba prac-
titioners from Lijiang were invited to perform ritual practices, whether for
“cultural” experts seeking a meaningful experience of Naxi religion or for
tourists, they invariably chose to perform the sacrifice to the shu spirit. These
performances now often take place in places like museums and theme parks,
out of the original ritual context. Duzhizo, a local dongba from Zheba, was
also invited to do such performances for incoming visitors. He insisted on do-
ing them on the hillside, a space under the control of shu, rather than at home
or in the village. These deliberate attempts to direct outsiders to the supervi-
sion of the shu point to the potency of the wild spaces as boundary areas that
can potentially channel external forces through ritual. Providing ritual service
at the spring well in this sense is also guarding the boundary space of the local
world. By encouraging tourists to participate in incense burning, local dongba
make them subject to the control of the shu who help keep at bay the polluting
and dangerous effects caused by their intrusion. If the tourists refuse to take
part in such rituals, dongba often condemn their acts as unclean and violating.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have traced the long processes of encompassment in which

varied forms of external forces come in contact with the world of Zheba and
consequently shape local cultural practices. The life-giving force of spiritual-
ity was first stolen by Master Aming from the Tibetans. It established Zheba
as a spiritual center, but was subsequently challenged by various forms of
life-threatening power that came from the Mu kingdom, the Mao era and,
more recently, the development of tourism and cultural heritage in the
market economy. Local people inevitably find themselves caught up in the
moral contrasts between the inside, as the center of spirituality and moral
propriety, and the outside, in shifting forms of fatal violence and devastation.
The transmission of dongba ritual practices, including learning the skills and
knowledge, producing paper for dongba script, copying and spreading the
ritual texts, salvaging spiritual items when they were under assault, are all ef-
forts to retain the connection with a deep past. Such efforts sustain the moral
and spiritual integrity of the local world throughout processes of continuous
borrowing, mixing, competing and differentiating in the dynamic interactions
with the outside. They speak for the local conception of authenticity that can
be traced all the way back to the spiritual accomplishment of Master Aming.
Local people’s commitments to the deep past involve negotiating borders
as a way of compensating for or protecting from loss and fractures incurred
in the various historical processes accounted in this chapter. The shu spirits
occupy such intermediate spaces and oversee the welfare of the local popula-
tion. They are evoked to manage the anxieties and concerns caused by the
increasing scale of translocal movement in which people become ever so
vulnerably exposed to forces beyond the local world, a prominent instance
being the commercialization encouraged by heritage development. Under
such circumstances, people in Zheba identify strongly with Master Aming
through their spiritual piety and moral righteousness in contrast with Liji-
ang. At the same time, they also lamentably link the unfulfilled visions of
material prosperity and recognition to the tragic fate of Aming’s unjust death.
Recounting Aming’s life story thus allows for expressions of mixed feelings
about their homeplace as well as the outside world that cannot be reduced to
place identity in exclusive and binary terms. This narrative becomes crucial
for them in struggling to reconcile senses of dignity and loss while inhabiting
a world full of drastic changes leaving fragments of the deep past.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Westmin-

ster for supporting my research in Zheba. I would also like to thank the two
editors of this volume for their critical and insightful comments on an earlier
draft of this chapter. With the exception of Mr. He (He Shangli), all names
that appear in this chapter are pseudonyms.
NOTES
1. A mulefang is “built of pine logs trimmed to eight flat surfaces and piled to form
the walls, with a roof of loose pine shingles weighted with rocks” (Mueggler 2011,
56). “Mu,” meaning wood in Chinese, is also the surname of the chieftains in Lijiang.
Local accounts have it that the Mu chiefs forced his subjects to live in such buildings
with high door sills and low door frames. Each time the residents passed through the
door, they had to bow to the wooden frames (or mule), as a way to pay tribute to the
Mu chiefs (Zhonggong zhongdianxian gongwei sanba diaocha zu 2009 [1960], 21).
2. There are more and more attempts to overcome the limits of the ethnic-bounded
approach, e.g., McKhann (2012) and Wellens (2017). Yet some works that intend to
look at the interactions between different ethnic groups in history, for instance, Zhao
(2014), still insist on prioritizing ethnic identities (in accordance with the contested
ethnic classification projects in the 1950s and 1980s) as basic unit of discussion and
analysis.
3. In 2006, the “Naxi dongba hua” (dongba painting of the Naxi) and “Naxi zu
shou gong zao zhi ji yi” (the manual skills of papermaking of Naxi people) were
listed in the first group of national intangible heritage, followed by the identification
of “Naxi zu re mei cuo wu” (Naxi ghost-driving dance) in the second group in 2008.
4. The following stories are summarized from the oral accounts collected by He
and He (1991) in the 1980s. They are still widely circulated among the locals.
5. E’ya is located in southern Muli County of Sichuan Province, bordering Yun-
nan. It is a more isolated mountainous area also populated with the Naxi. Due to its
geographic remoteness, it is considered as a rural place where the most authentic Naxi
culture nowadays can be found.
6. This plant is identified as Wikstroemia delavayi Lecomte (Thymelaeaceae) by
some ecologists (Yang et al. 2011).
7. Encouraged by heritage development, an increasing number of local people are

engaged in papermaking. They now have to travel longer distance to collect ɑdə˞ as
the easily accessible ones around have been harvested. It takes years for the remaining
saplings to mature before they are ready to use.
8. For the whole process of papermaking see my documentary film, “The Gorge
is Deep.”
9. Some women rescuers improvised to hide the ritual texts alongside with other
ritual items in the stove holes right before the Red Guards came to confiscate them.
For a detailed discussion of the efforts people in Zheba made to save the texts see
Ran (2018, chapter 1).
10. It is beyond my capacity to render this poem as it is in English. Instead, I of-
fer a translation based on its meaning as follows: “Five hundred years ago, there was
a wandering monk. He used to live in this land of the Buddha and developed great
talents. The landscape looks like thousands of waves made of clouds and snow. It
also looks like small hills made of jade and silver. The streams flow through without
being polluted by dirt. Layers of water like fine jade well out and become crystalized.
The Yangtze River is always the love of my heart. I envy this talented Monk who had
supreme knowledge.”
11. I have obtained Mr. He’s permission to make reference to his book in this
chapter.
12. For more discussion on shu spirits see McKhann (2017, 388); Rock (1952,
291).
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Chapter Eight
Threads of Time
in a Small Naxi Village
Women, Weaving and Gendered
Dimensions of Local Cultural Heritage
Harriet Evans
What value is accorded our cultural pasts? Who decides what is valuable
and what isn’t?* Who has the authority to record and narrate what is and
what is not considered culturally important? To decide how, what and where
objects, voices, images and performances are displayed? What is the role of
state authority and dominant international discourses of cultural heritage in
determining such things? What difference to our understanding of history
and to what counts as cultural heritage, as displayed and narrated in public
monuments and museums, would it make to reflect on the gender of what is
displayed and narrated?
In this chapter, I reflect on these questions on the basis of fieldwork I con-
ducted in late 2014 and early 2015 in Gerdu, the same small Naxi village in
northern Yunnan, that Ran discusses in the previous chapter. I am first par-
ticularly interested in how space, bodies and gender are mutually constituted
within kin and social groups across temporal differences and generational
boundaries—in other words, to the shifting interplay between these elements
across time. In recent years, young people have been tending to leave the
village in search of better employment or social opportunities elsewhere, in-
cluding through marriage. Against such a backdrop, this interplay, embodied
in specific material activities, including preparing food and weaving, also
becomes a focal site where, as Stafford famously argued, women become key
guardians of local community unity against the forces of fragmentation and
separation (Stafford 2000). Second, I reflect on the relatively minor attention
accorded women’s skills in spinning and weaving in state displays of Naxi
cultural heritage, or what, since the 1980s in particular, has been represented
as “dongba culture.” Recognition of individual women as “transmitters of
intangible cultural heritage” for their skills in spinning and weaving does
not, in itself, earn women a prominent place in official displays of “dongba
183
184 Harriet Evans
culture,” even though the products of their skills in the form of wedding and
funerary garments have been essential to the proper conduct of local marriage
and death rituals. I argue that the relative side-lining of women’s handicraft
skills in both official and civil (minjian) representations of “dongba culture”
can be interpreted as an effect of the state’s appropriation of the androcentric
textual and scriptural elements of dongba culture for dominant commercial
and heritage purposes. In so far as this gender bias in the official representa-
tion of dongba culture has been absorbed by at least some Naxi communities
as part of their own self-identification, and is rehearsed by them in their own
renderings of Naxi (or dongba) culture, it is producing a system of gender-
ing that is more associated with dominant Han notions of zhongnan qingnü
(lit. privileging men and belittling women). It is significant in this context
that the so-called dongba script (dongba wen) was, in 2003, recognized as
the world’s only living pictographic language in UNESCO’s Memory of the
World register, thus implicitly giving Naxi men an internationally unique
“fame” (White 1997).1
SPACE AND GENDER IN GERDU
I begin my discussion with a description of an event while I was in Gerdu

in October 2014. Gerdu is a small village of no more than one hundred
households at the foot of a series of sacred terraces in Zheba. Located on the
Zhongdian plateau in northwest Yunnan bordering both Sichuan and Tibet,
Zheba consists of eight village settlements in a U-shaped valley, surrounded
by mountains, as seen in figure 7.1. In the distance some of the higher moun-
tains are always capped with snow. Although most of the local residents are
officially Naxi, they closely interact with the neighboring Yi, Tibetan, Hui
and Han groups within a range of about sixty kilometers. I was staying in a
small guest house run by Xiaoker and Barnie, the youngest son and daughter-
in-law of Namu, an elderly spiritual leader, or dongba. Xiaoker was in his
mid-forties and Barnie was eleven years younger. Their two sons were both
at high school in Shangri-La, where they lived in an apartment the couple had
bought.2 Already in his late eighties, Namu was known locally, regionally
and in Beijing as one of the most important dongba of his generation.3 He
was also formally acknowledged at state level as a “cultural transmitter” of
papermaking. His eldest son, Guzo, was acknowledged for the same skills at
provincial level, and Xiaoker, my host, at county (xian) level, in 2016.4 When
I first met him, Namu was already too frail to make paper, or to paint, and
both these activities had been taken over by his sons, who had to fulfill quotas
for the amount of paper they made and paintings they produced to send to a
Threads of Time in a Small Naxi Village 185
cultural organization in Beijing devoted to the promotion of dongba culture.

For this they were paid an annual fee.5
Just as we were finishing dinner one evening, around 7:30, Barnie received
a phone call to tell her that her father-in-law’s younger half-sister had just
died. She was more than eighty and had been diagnosed with lung cancer
about a year beforehand. She was completely deaf, and was unable to speak,
and was one of the poorest women in the village. Everyone’s funeral in the
village, no matter what their gender or social status, was a major event, at-
tended by large numbers of people from all the nearby villages. Given the
deceased woman’s kin relation to Namu, the elder dongba, this funeral was
larger than many. Xiaoker and Guzo shouldered the responsibility for the
funeral feast arrangements; Barnie announced that she would have to make
a number of phone calls, and would be up all night with her sisters-in-law
preparing for the funeral feast. But first we went to pay our respects to the
deceased in her house where she had just died. This house was one of the
oldest in the village. It was a simple small shingled house (mulefang) con-
structed of wooden beams following Naxi traditions of domestic architecture,
as described by Ran in chapter 8.6
The windowless main room featured a raised platform, in the middle of
which was a wood-burning fire in a low metal grate covering a shallow
firepit. Outside the room, a number of men were sitting about in a big circle,
smoking and chatting in subdued tones. In the gloom inside, four men sat
side by side along the left-hand side of the platform, all smoking cigarettes.
The deceased woman was lying on a padded mat under a length of shiny
greenish-turquoise colored fabric, at the top right-hand corner of the platform
in a place normally reserved for men. Women are normally expected to sit
and lie on the left side. Barnie told me that women can only move beyond
the left-hand side to the right back of the hearth when they die. Was this an
instance of gender inequality she rhetorically asked?7 At the side of the dead
woman there were already a few offerings of walnuts, sweets, rice, and two
men were rolling lengths of lavatory paper to make into wicks to burn in
bowls of oil by her head. We didn’t stay long, and once back home it was as
if Barnie shifted into another gear. She made some phone calls to her sisters-
in-law and a couple of near neighbors, who all appeared within about half an
hour, with huge sacks of potatoes, carrots, garlic, bowls and chopsticks. They
set to, peeling the potatoes and washing the vegetables, and then sat around
the wood burner in the main living room peeling a sack full of garlic, while a
huge wok of rice boiled away in the corner to make round sticky rice cakes,
symbolizing togetherness and reunion. Each rice cake was embossed with a
wooden stamp, hand carved with a simple floral design by Xiaoker, and kept
in a drawer in the kitchen.8 A number of other women turned up, not doing
186 Harriet Evans
an awful lot but talking and laughing to keep Barnie and her sisters-in-law
company. I couldn’t understand anything they said, since they spoke in Naxi,
but there was a lot of hilarity. They were up making the rice cakes until about
three in the morning. The men, together with the deceased woman’s daughter
and son-in-law kept vigil in her house through the night. At some point before
the following morning they made the bier in which, as I discovered the next
day, she was to be cremated.
Come morning, more women arrived at Barnie’s around 8:30. Ear-splitting
sounds of a pig squealing came from the house next door, which belonged to
Xiaoker’s uncle, the dongba’s younger brother and other half-brother of the
deceased woman. The women set to, busying themselves in the yard in front
of our guest house, grating the carrot, mixing it with a chili marinade, chop-
ping the garlic and the other vegetables, washing bowls, and so on, clearly
for a large number of people. The men appeared a short while later carrying
the pig tied by its feet to a pole. Once in the yard, they slaughtered it by
stabbing its neck with a knife. They then took the pig to the small vegetable
plot behind the main building of the house, where, to prepare for cooking it
as figure 8.1 shows, they skinned and scraped it on big metal sheets that they
kept washing down with boiling water.
Figure 8.1. Men preparing the pig for cooking for the funeral banquet, October 2014,
author’s photo
They then slit it down its stomach and took out the intestines and every-
thing else; a lot of the lean meat was then minced in a machine brought in
for the occasion to make sausages. The family did not have the resources to
slaughter an ox for the funeral, which some said was standard practice for a
big funeral in the village. They asked the township government for funds to
purchase a second pig, which was slaughtered and cooked in the house next
door, belonging to Xiaoker’s uncle.
Around 9:30 Barnie told me I should go again to the house of the dead
woman, this time with the other women. In the yard in front of the room
where she was laid out the previous night stood a small open bier on four
legs, around a meter high. The deceased was still covered with the same
shiny turquoise fabric I had seen the night before. On top of this was a ran-
dom pile of white material, some of it already in strips, that the mourners
used as headbands. A pair of scissors lay on top of the material. My hostess
gave me a strip of white fabric to tie around my head. To the right of the bier
was a low wooden stand supporting bowls of walnuts and rice, pork, oil, and
sweets, and from time-to-time mourners poured enamel mugs of oil under
the bier, or threw small bits of omelet, pork fat, and rice on top of the bier.
One of the mourners told me that the offerings at the side of the bier were
for the ancestors of the mourners. Two women then approached the coffin
from outside the yard, both already wailing: the first, one of my host’s elder
sisters, wailed loudly, and clung to the top of the left leg of the bier; the other
woman tried to coax her away, looking intently into her face and talking to
her to sooth her. She soon allowed herself to be led away, despite her efforts
to cling to the bier. Then an older woman approached the bier, wailing even
more loudly. Unlike the first mourner, she seemed much less willing to let
herself be coaxed away.9 Two youngish dongbas from another village then
read a scripture, one of them clanging a small bell throughout. Throughout
all this, the daughter and son-in-law of the deceased stood to one side of the
bier with their heads bowed, both dressed in mourning gowns made of what
looked like undyed hempen cloth. Once the dongbas finished their recitation,
they both approached the bier; the son-in-law knelt down in front of his dead
mother-in-law, while his wife stood at his side.
I asked the mourners standing near me when and where the cremation
would take place. They told me that women were not allowed to attend cre-
mations; one said it was because women did not have the courage to watch a
body being cremated, so they were only allowed to accompany the bier half
way along the road.10 Another who joined in the conversation said that it was
because women “had too much yin” (yinqi tai duo), meaning that the excess
of their “negative/female essence” could cause harm to the proceedings.11
188 Harriet Evans
I relate this story here because it sheds light on how space and gendered
bodies constitute each other in sometimes clearly delineated practices that
are embedded in the ritual practices of ordinary life. What emerges is a very
clear sense of a gendered world in which nearly every routinized activity and
the products of that activity (rice cakes, pork) are inseparable from gender-
ing acts and concepts. Before this event, I had already read about how the
gendered body in Naxi culture could be understood in terms of analogies to
the interior spaces of Naxi houses (McKahnn 1992; Ran 2018). Witnessing
the activities surrounding the death of Namu’s half-sister provided a specific
instance of how ideas and practices that are crucial to the proper enactment of
basic rituals draw on gendered social behavior distinguished by spatial meta-
phors (Mueggler 1991). Here, also, was living evidence of how “naturally”
women and men of different ages observed this mutual constitution of gender
and space in a gendered/spatial sequence of activities befitting the conduct
of the funerary rituals. Hence, select women, all older kin, were permitted to
approach the bier holding the corpse and to wail while everyone else, includ-
ing all the men, stood around looking on. The night before the funeral, the
group of men sitting smoking, drinking, chatting and laughing in a circle just
outside the small shingled house where the elderly woman died, was also a
gendered expression, in this case, possibly of regard for the dead person. As
Mueggler noted in referring to a Naxi funeral, it was thought that laughing
and looking cheerful was a sign of respect for the deceased.12
The sacred associations of men killing the pig that McKhann noted reveal
another instance of gender differentiation and hierarchy in the basin Naxi of
the Lijiang area (McKhann 1992, 150–151). They also gave an indication of
the social prestige associated with men’s ability to display their masculin-
ity, traditionally associated with skills in hunting, through displaying their
largesse as hosts (White 1997). On the other hand, the busy involvement in
the food preparation of groups of women in response to Barnie’s bidding was
indicative of her “prestige in being able to mobilize labor networks among
other women” (White 1997, 319).13
The unspoken, and seemingly spontaneous observation of gender distinc-
tions concerning who could go where and when, suggested, on the one hand,
a literally embodied respect for an instrumental control of space prioritizing
differently gendered spheres of activity in the funeral rituals, and, on the
other, men’s dominance of the final stages of the funeral. The embodied
sequence of these activities clearly inscribed space with conceptual mean-
ings. In the process, space, bodies and gender formed a mutually constitutive
system of gender that corresponds, on the one hand, with the dominant Han
system in which women emerge as both deficient and dangerous, alongside
their publicly powerful menfolk and, on the other, with a locally embedded
system of gendering characterized by the work of relatedness that women and

men were doing as they prepared for the funeral.
WEAVING
One day I had a discussion about the gendered division of labor in the vil-
lage with my hostess, Barnie, who had set up a stall near the sole entrance to
the water terraces, selling fruit and medicinal herbs to what she hoped was a
captive audience of tourists. She claimed that men do the ploughing because
it is heavier work than women’s work. When I suggested that pushing the
motor-driven plough was not as strenuous as many other tasks, she still in-
sisted, although she agreed that physically women were certainly up to doing
it. But in any case, she said, it was basically unthinkable because there was
no way that men would start doing women’s work of weeding and bundling
the corn stalks, so if women took over the work of ploughing, men would
be left with little to sustain their status—“they wouldn’t have any face left.”
She repeatedly referred to how Naxi society privileges men over women,
using the phrase “zhongnan qingnü,” although she felt that the situation for
women had improved in recent times. Referring to her own personal his-
tory, she described, with mounting vehemence in her voice, how her father
had treated her mother. Her mother’s first two children were girls, and her
husband, Barnie’s father, began to deride her for her inability to bear sons.
As her third child was due, he pushed her out of the house and gave her a
bunch of pine twigs, telling her to give birth to the baby outside and to use
the pine twigs to lie on. She did, and it was a boy, so she was able to return to
her home as a fully acknowledged wife and daughter-in-law. However, as a
small girl, neither Barnie nor her second sister were allowed to go to school,
and the two grew up with a deep resentment against their father. However,
Barnie had a good voice and was a good dancer and was noticed by a team
of cultural heritage professionals who visited her village as part of a project
to recruit young “minority” people to participate in a “cultural transmission
training course” in Kunming. It was there that she met Xiaoker. Years later,
as a wife and mother living in Xiaoker’s village, Barnie’s relationship with
her father had not improved, although she was extremely close to her mother.
It was Barnie who first introduced me to the importance of women’s weav-
ing in the village. She had a small room at one end of the main building of her
house, which was dedicated to the household’s handicraft activities. Most of
the room was taken up by a large wooden loom on which she would weave
white cloth in the slack season. On waist-high wide shelves around the sur-
rounding walls were her husband’s paintings on hand-made paper and a few
190 Harriet Evans
painted by her elderly father-in-law. It was only during the second time I
stayed in Barnie’s guest house that I realized that this room was used as much
to display and sell her husband’s paintings as it was to weave. Between her
duties in the fields, caring for the family vegetable plot, cooking and minding
her stall at the entrance to the water terraces, Barnie had little spare time to
weave, so from time to time her neighbors would drop by in the evening to
help her out a bit.
In summer months and when the weather is clement, the porch and the yard
in front of village houses are the site of many activities involving household
members, relatives and neighbors; animals, notably chickens and dogs, wan-
der about in the yards when they are not shut up in their cages. The yard is
simultaneously the threshing ground for grains after the harvest, the drying
ground for grains and corn, and the place where household members and their
neighbors sit to chat and pass the time of day. It is the place where animals are
killed and food is prepared for important ritual and ceremonial events. And it
is the place where the villagers gather to donate their gifts and eat at funeral
and wedding ceremonies.
In the early spring of 2015 when I was staying in the village for a couple
of weeks, the porch of most yards had a wooden loom, where the women of
the household used to weave cloth from time to time when they were not en-
gaged in other activities in the fields or in the house. The yard was also used
as a large enough space to stretch out the yarn around stakes hammered into
the ground, and then twisted into skeins in preparation to make the warp for
the household loom. Women’s farming and domestic tasks took up most of
their time, day in, day out. Every morning between six and eight o’clock, the
sounds of horse hooves clattering on the concrete surface of the lane running
along the side of my guest house heralded the arrival of a steady stream of
women, chatting and laughing, mostly wearing blue caps and with big wicker
baskets on their backs, leading their horses and donkeys up the lane to the
main road that ran through the village to the fields below. By midday, they re-
turned, their baskets full of fodder or loaded with firewood. The older women
seemed to be bent almost double under the weight of the baskets on their
backs. Come the afternoon, after lunch, the same women went back to the
fields, only returning to the village in the late afternoon, in time to get home
to prepare the evening meal. It was only after dinner, if at all, that they would
give some time to weaving.14 Most women I knew tended to weave on their
own, concentrating hard in the fading light of the evening. However, Barnie
and her sisters-in-law regularly visited the home of another sister-in-law who
was so ill with cancer that she couldn’t move from her bed to attend to her
weaving. Every other evening a small group of her sisters and sisters-in-law
used to turn up at her home to weave for her, as we see on the front cover.15
Even though they did not have much time to devote to weaving, most vil-
lage women over the age of around forty or so were adept and even highly
skilled weavers. Weaving at the larger wooden looms had to be done sitting
on a stool. In contrast, simpler lap looms were operated sitting on the floor.
In these, the long warp threads were stretched between two beams, one of
them attached to a fixed point like nails on a wall, while the other rested on
the weaver’s’ lap enabling her to feed the shuttle through the warp threads to
form the horizontal weft.
What Mueggler has called a “detailed texture of formal rules and sched-
ules” governing village reciprocity (Mueggler 1991, 201) applied to many
activities in the village, including cultivating the rice seedlings in the terraced
paddy fields, tying and storing the grain in sheafs to dry before threshing, and
repairing and building houses. Many of these activities involved both women
and men. However, the unspoken boundaries of gendered difference were
evident in just as many acts and ideas, including women’s weaving practices,
as I’ve described above. However, while in a single slice of everyday time,
these boundaries may seem stable to those observing them, they are movable
across time. As I try to explain below, changing environmental and social
conditions, including geographical distance, changing labor practices and
market availability of labor-saving devices, such as motor-driven plows or
thread and fabric, take effect in producing meanings associated with these
boundaries that are articulated in shifting ways that seem to oscillate between
the predictable and the unpredictable. Gendering thus emerges as a social
process of the work of relatedness, with changing, though uneven, meanings
across generational and cohort difference.
The most accomplished weaver I knew was an elderly woman in a vil-
lage some thirty minutes’ walk away from Gerdu whom Barnie referred to
as “Granny” (nainai). Granny was well-known for her exceptional weaving
skills and was introduced to me by Barnie as the single best weaver around. In
fact, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, I had already come across her
during a picnic outing I had joined the previous week of mainly middle-aged
and elderly women, when she had asked me to carry her basket up the hill on
my back, much to the amusement of local people who were standing looking
on as our rather rowdy group passed by. “You’ll never manage to carry that
up to the top” one young man called out to me, lounging on the ground at the
side of his horse. “You’d better ride a horse up there.” Of course, as soon as
I saw her waiting for Barnie and me at the time we had agreed in front of the
small shop she ran in her village, I realized that she was the same person I had
met on the picnic the week before. Her shop was a small room with a loom
at the back and a spinning wheel in the front. Many women, some of whom
I recognized from the same picnic trip, were sitting in front of the shop, the
192 Harriet Evans
inside of which was full of blue Naxi aprons, fabric baby carriers, and black
velvet women’s dresses. Nainai soon guided us along the road to her house.
This turned out to be the house of her third son who was away working in
Shangri-La. At its entrance was also a small shop that her husband seemed
to be running. Nainai took us upstairs to show us the hemp thread she had
spun, lifting each skein up in turn and explaining to us how it was made,
from the thin bark of the hemp plant into coarse fiber, then finally soaked in
water before spinning it to make the final softer white thread used to weave
clothes. She then took all sorts of clothes out from plastic bags stored appar-
ently randomly at the end of her bed in the adjacent bedroom: coarse hemp
trousers for men, men’s tops with side openings and small strips of multi-
colored embroidery, a man’s white belt with the same-colored motifs at each
end, and a long woman’s gown, also white, with an embroidered collar. Some
of these garments, Nainai told us, were about fifty to sixty years old. A man’s
tunic, she said, would take about six months to make from beginning to end.
She urged us to don the costumes for a photograph, but in some embarrass-
ment, we refused. Nainai told us that she often used to teach younger women,
including her own daughter, to weave on the loom at the back of her small
shop. She made no attempt to boast about her skills, but her account of how
she had learned to weave when she was ten years old, and her husband’s
description of her as an accomplished weaver before he married her, made it
clear that her skills were second to none. She used to grow the hemp in her
back garden, until, she told us, the authorities banned it as an undesirable
plant, ironically, since they were explicit in their support for the preservation
of local cultural heritage.16
Nan was the other accomplished weaver I knew. Nan was Namu’s sister-
in-law, married to Xiaoker’s uncle. She lived next door to our guest house,
and at age seventy tended to spend an hour or so most afternoons weaving on
a wooden loom she had installed in the corridor of the upper floor of her two-
story house. One day when I went to visit her, she was upstairs decorating
the warp thread with small ties of wool in various bright colors as decorative
additions to the white panel she was weaving. In faltering standard Chinese,
she chatted about her life as she worked, occasionally looking up and smil-
ing at the memory of some event or encounter. She talked particularly about
how the man who became her husband wooed her with compliments about
her weaving skills. She then took me into her bedroom to show me garments
she had made some time before that were carefully folded away in a suitcase.
She opened the suitcase and took out two garments, one for her daughter who
lived and worked in Shangri-La, and the other for her son-in-law, both for
festival and ceremonial purposes. She had also woven two smaller garments
for her grandchildren. The daughter’s had a black velvet collar interspersed
with a few folds of bright blue, yellow, red and green satiny fabric. The
central panel at the back of the long white tunic featured a pattern of colored
weft lines woven into the cloth and small ties of brightly colored thread. The
man’s long tunic had a small band of black velvet around the neck and similar
patterns of colored thread along the back hem.
The references these two grannies made to the length of time and skill
necessary to produce “traditional” hemp garments such as these could give
no more than a glimpse of the effort and hardship women of their generation,
and their mothers’ generation invested in this craft. This was echoed by a
young man, the youngest of eight siblings born in the 1970s, who noted that
when he was growing up, his family could not afford the cloth available on
the market, and that almost all the clothes he wore were made of hemp cloth
woven by his mother and eldest sister, who in his memory used to stay up
weaving until midnight most days.
Under the effects of the market economy, however, weaving had become
associated as much with poverty as with respect for women’s skills in main-
taining ritual. In 2014, Xiaoker commented that the only women who now
had to weave their garments were those who were too poor to buy the read-
ily available machine-made products. A visit to Dasao (elder sister-in-law),
Guzo’s wife, brought this home to me. Despite the official title of “transmit-
ter” for his skills in papermaking, Guzo and Dasao were poor, even by village
standards. Dasao used a lap loom rather than the more sophisticated wooden
loom seen on the front cover. Their house bore the marks of age and scarcity.
There was very little furniture, and the only decoration was an old calendar
on the wall, featuring Mao’s portrait, alongside of which were a few very old,
dirty photographs. The walls were darkened with decades of smoke, and the
windows were so thick with grime that you could barely see through them.
There was no refrigerator, and their diet was very basic. Most days, their
lunch was just baba (flatbread) and tea.
A couple of days before, I had come across Dasao winding black thread
onto the spindle for a new backcloth/cloak called a “ngurua” she was weav-
ing. When I asked her if I could visit her to watch her weaving, she invited
me to lunch the following day after spending the morning distributing manure
in her family’s fields. A mule was tethered and a number of chickens were
wandering about in the yard in front of her home. The unfinished ngurua was
covered with a sheet of plastic held down by a stone and a thick log. The cross
beam at one end of it was attached to two stakes inside the outer wall of the
yard. Dasao spread the plastic out on the ground to sit down, mounted the
lap loom onto her lap and began to feed the shuttle across the warp threads.
As she wove, she told me in her customary quiet tones that her daughter had
learned to weave when she was small, but since leaving the village when she
194 Harriet Evans
married, she had basically forgotten. In any case, Dasao added, weaving was
extremely laborious, and she was glad that daughter could now buy the gar-
ments. Yes, Dasao missed her daughter a lot, but as long as she returned home
from time to time, that was what mattered.
For an earlier generation of women, before the advent of machine-made
fabrics, the labor-intensive activities of spinning and weaving had been es-
sential to providing the family’s garments, everyday and ceremonial. Dasao’s
continued practice of weaving in conditions where other women had few
qualms about relying on the market, seemed to bear out the validity of her
brother-in-law’s comment that if you were poor you had no option but to
weave. No, Barnie opined. The main issue was lack of time to be able to
devote to weaving. Many married women, however, found a compromise
between these two positions, by purchasing machine-made fabric and the em-
broidered border to then sew their own garments. The fact that sisters-in-law
and friends would from time to time drop in to weave at her loom, while she,
Barnie, was busy cooking for the visitors to her guest house or tending her
stall at the foot of the entrance to the water terraces, may also have indicated
an implicit claim to prestige in the terms that White discussed, as mentioned
above.
Even so, women insisted that for big celebrations and festivals, all women
and young girls had to don the traditional-style Naxi costume of off-white
embroidered fabric with a small apron tied around the waist. Barnie also told
me that the dead had to be clothed in pure hempen shrouds before being cre-
mated, and that every woman used to weave her own burial clothes, as well
as those of her husband. Even though she, Barnie, was not yet fifty years old,
she had already woven two sets of burial clothes, for herself and her husband;
her mother-in-law had woven one for herself, and another for her husband,
Namu, long before her own death in the early 1990s. Women were expected
to do this soon after marriage, Barnie said, and if she had had a daughter, she
too, in turn, would have learned how to weave.
Women’s practice of weaving is thus regarded as essential to the integrity
of major life and death events officiated over by men. Older women voiced
their acknowledgment that younger women were losing the knowledge of
weaving with an evident, though muted, regret. As long as their daughters
returned to the village for major festivals and events, their lack of weaving
skills was not seen as a tragedy. The physical process of weaving and its
material realization in the form of fabric thus emerge as gendered metaphors
for family and social reunion embedded in the activities of daily life. In
this sense, as Ran has pointed out, drawing on Stafford’s arguments about
women’s role in safeguarding community unity against the forces of separa-
tion and fragmentation, “married out daughters, and ancestors, are mobilized
in the physical and imaginary forms of return to create an idealized occasion

of reunion that overcomes the separation incurred by marriage and death”
(Ran 2018, 90).
HERITAGE MEANINGS
Despite the historical importance across time of Naxi women’s skills as weav-
ers, both to the welfare of the family and household and to the major rituals
of marriage and death, very little attention is given them in official render-
ings of Naxi/dongba cultural heritage in comparison with the relative promi-
nence given to local male practitioners of papermaking and script writing/
painting. Indeed, the only officially named provincial level “transmitter” of
weaving I heard of in Zheba was a woman who lived in the same village as
Nainai. This transmitter worked at a loom set up for her in a space specially
allocated to her for the display of her skills. I had anticipated that as a “trans-
mitter of intangible cultural heritage” she would use “authentic” hemp yarn to
weave. Far from it. She told us that she had to weave so much fabric now that
she was a transmitter that she had no option but to use factory made thread.
When I related this to Barnie, who, readers may recall, had introduced me
to Nainai, her response was predictably cynical. In any case, she added, the
main reason why this woman had been honored with the title of “transmitter”
was because for years she had been the mistress of a well-known local official
who was closely linked into regional cultural heritage networks. Barnie then
became quite worked up as she described her resentment at this official using
his position to promote one of his acquaintances for recognition as cultural
heritage transmitter, rather than acknowledging those, like Nainai, who re-
ally deserved the title. Even elsewhere, such as Mosuo villages near the Lugu
Lake, where weaving has become much more fully absorbed into the intan-
gible heritage system and the local tourist economy, who gets “crowned” as
transmitters of weaving “has as much to do with who knows who as anything
else” (Blumenfield 2018, 172).
On another occasion, we learned that a local TV crew was arriving in
another village to make a film of a song and weaving routine organized by
a local cultural events organizer who was well known as a cultural figure in
the surrounding villages. Guangpei and I turned up at the house of a woman
we knew in the village who had agreed to take us to the village square where
the filming was going to take place. In her house we found her already pre-
pared for the performance in her traditional Naxi costume. She was dressing
her little granddaughter in the same outfit, and there was a palpable sense of
excitement in the air. After a while we walked off to the village square where
196 Harriet Evans
there were already a few other women similarly dressed in Naxi gear, setting
up temporary looms, like the one in figure 8.2, specially put together for the
performance.
It was already dusk, and by the time the sun went down, we were all rather
chilly, even a bit downhearted. Where was the film crew? Eventually a car
arrived, and everyone perked up. A couple of young people emerged, a cam-
eraman with a small video recorder, and the director, a young woman. They
looked more like students completing a study assignment than professional
filmmakers. The filming began, with the women singing as they performed
the motions of weaving. But the mood of excitement we had felt earlier in the
evening had dissipated. Guangpei and I left, cold and rather tired, before the
event ended. It reportedly did not end until 10:30 p.m. So, while the promise
of the event had seemed to suggest that media and commercial recognition of
intangible cultural heritage could offer cultural and leisure activities of which
the village—or at least its women—could be proud and in which they could
take pleasure, as Blumenfield observed in Lugu Lake (Blumenfield 2018), the
evening petered out on a rather disappointing note.
The rich ethnic diversity of southwestern China has long been com-
modified as a source of local tourist income (Blumenfield 2018; Oakes 2013;
Schein 2000; Zhu 2018). To put it in other terms, the ethnic essentialization
that lies at the heart of local heritage tourism has long been used as a “new
frontier for capital accumulation” (Anagnost 2004, 189, in Chao 2012, 11).
Figure 8.2. Naxi women setting up temporary looms for filming, author’s photo
Alongside this, however, southwest China’s ethnic mix gives heritage work
in the region an important ethical and political dimension, which while by no
means absent from heritage work in Han areas, is distinctive there. For most
of the twentieth century, local ethnic minorities throughout China, including
in the southwest, have been subjected to state political campaigns in which
local cultural practices have been condemned as “primitive,” “backward,”
and “superstitious.” To assert the significance of the past in heritage projects
that take locality as the key site of the impulse to preserve therefore requires
interrogation of local people’s understanding of their own cultural practices
and their self-identification as ethnic minorities, alongside their understand-
ings of their communities’ histories, inextricably bound up as they are with
memories of violence and loss as effects of central Han state interventions
(Mueggler 2001; Ran 2018). The preservation of the past in local heritage
projects thus stretches the notion of heritage far beyond the standard terms
of heritage practice in China—of categories, funding and management—and
gives it a profoundly ethical dimension as a series of practices and meanings
that are crucial to local people’s sense of what it means to be a person and to
their ongoing self-identification as a distinctive community. In this grassroots
sense, while accepting that most local people are not conversant with the lan-
guage of “cultural heritage,” the cultural transmission of these practices and
meanings is inseparable from ethnic and cultural sustainability and therefore
the future well-being of the local (Butler 2006).
Lijiang is the name now most commonly associated with Naxi cultural
heritage projects. A devasting earthquake destroyed the former small town
of Lijiang in 1996, following which it was rebuilt and designated a World
Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1997. Since then, Lijiang Old Town (gu cheng)
has developed to become one of Yunnan’s main tourist spots: its cobbled
lanes and intricate pattern of waterways and bridges have, stage by stage,
transformed what was a distant “backwater,” frequented by young Western
backpackers in search of an alternative China, into a holiday destination for
mainly domestic tourists, wanting to escape the pollution and stress of large
urban centers.17 As such, the commodification of Naxi handicrafts, such as
paper and silver, exploded into a major source of local income. Lijiang’s “Old
Town” is also a well-known destination for young couples in pursuit of ro-
mance in hotels offering packages of authentic Naxi wedding rituals presided
over by dongba masters (Zhu 2018). A seemingly endless number of small
wooden fronted shops and “traditional style” guest houses line the sides of
the cobbled lanes and waterways, turning the “Old Town” into a consumer
paradise where ethnically enhanced fashions and decorative ornaments can be
bought alongside picturesque photo opportunities.
198 Harriet Evans
Alongside the bright colors, lights and sounds of the “Old Town” are more
sober museums and displays of local Naxi culture, the main ethnic group of
the immediate region. Naxi culture, as I’ve mentioned above, is now invari-
ably characterized as “dongba culture.” As ritual and religious practitioners,
the dongba were the elite of Naxi society; their activities and responsibilities
included chanting and writing the religious texts, dancing and singing at
key ritual events, particularly funerals, and practicing divination and heal-
ing. However, as Ran describes in the previous chapter, such practices were
suppressed during the Mao era, particularly during the Cultural Revolu-
tion (1966–1976), and, alongside other ethnic and folk religious practices
elsewhere in China, were defined as a “backward” legacy of feudal society
which had to be eradicated.18 Indeed, dongba practices had long been deemed
antithetical to the modernizing “civilization projects” of successive central
governments, from the late Qing dynasty through to Mao’s China (Chao
2012; Harrell 1995, 2001; McKhann, 1995). Between outright coercion and
complicity with the dominant Han authorities, dongba ritual practices disap-
peared from public view, and dongba scriptures (written texts on the hand-
made paper) were routinely destroyed. Naxi religious practices were forced
underground into obscurity, often kept alive in everyday household practices
away from public scrutiny.
Dongba religious and cultural practice began to witness a partial revival
in the 1980s in an economic and political climate conducive to the limited
and carefully monitored reemergence of ethnic cultural and religious ac-
tivities. However, after their experience of the suppression of their ritual
and religious activities in previous decades, local ritual (and political) elites
became increasingly clear that their interests could not be served simply by
upholding local (traditional) cultural and religious practices. With the arrival
of the market, they welcomed the prospect of deploying their ethnic identity
in the service of commercial gain. The revival of “dongba culture” in Lijiang
exemplifies Helen Siu’s insightful argument about how state sanctioning of
the “ritual revitalization” underway early on in reform-era China “divested
those rituals of substance in the service of commercialized secular displays
and political control” (Siu 1989, 132–133).
The restoration of dongba practices as “Dongba Culture” was part of a
deliberate policy from the late 1970s managed by Lijiang’s Dongba Culture
Research Institute. Established in 1981, this institutionalization of “dongba
culture” sought to manage the articulation of local ethnic and religious iden-
tity in sanitized terms that corresponded with official policies to promote
public expressions of ethnic identification as potentially lucrative sources of
local income. Chao argues that the appearance of “Dongba Culture” was a
“defining project” promoted particularly by local Naxi government officials
and intellectuals in the 1990s to “beneficially define the distinctiveness of

the Naxi ethnic group” in terms that “no longer educed the controversial
effects and memories of ethnic classification during the Mao era, but rather
celebrated the ‘ethnic diversity’ of the new post-Mao era” (Chao 2012,
49–50). The revitalization of Naxi religious and cultural practices then
received a huge boost when China joined UNESCO’s Convention for the
Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004. The “Naxi dongba
hua” (dongba painting of the Naxi) and “Naxi zu shou gong zao zhi jiyi”
(the handicraft skills of papermaking of Naxi people) were listed in the first
group of national intangible heritage in 2006, followed in the second group
in 2008 by the identification of “Naxi zu re mei cuo wu” (Naxi ghost-driving
dance). During these processes, the term dongba emerged as a synonym for
Naxi heritage and a metonym for Naxi culture as a whole. In Lijiang, the
scrutiny of official cultural institutions and the commercial orientation of the
revitalization of “dongba culture” to support the booming tourism industry,
necessarily meant that many everyday cultural practices of Naxi people who
continued to live in the mountains were left out of the picture. One of the ef-
fects of this process was that the former category of the sanba, a traditionally
female ritual specialist was eclipsed by the higher status male dongba. “The
conceptual bifurcation of Naxi ritual practitioners into masculinized (orderly
and literate) and feminized (chaotic and illiterate) categories resonated with
popular local representations of Naxi women as traditional, illiterate, and
backward, in contrast to Naxi men, . . . associated with Chinese practices,
literacy and civilization” (Chao 2012, 61).
The privileging of “dongba culture” in official institutional renderings of
Naxi culture thus extracted a delimited set of gendered activities out of a very
large range of practices. Many of these were associated with dongba textual-
ity, broadly conceived, including courting songs and funeral wailing. Given
the traditional indispensability of hempen garments to funeral rituals, at which
dongba specialists recited religious scripts, hemp weaving could also be consid-
ered as an inalienable component of this broader conceptualization of dongba
textuality. Yet “Dongba Culture,” in its now established form, narrows down
these possibilities of intertextual renderings of weaving and script writing to
the masculinist practices of papermaking, writing and painting. The discursive
reach (and potential commercial gain) of this emphasis in the production of
“Dongba Culture” is apparent beyond official sites such as Lijiang’s Dongba
Cultural Research Institute in the appearance of nonstate (minjian) projects,
such as one initially established by a retired local Naxi official committed to
sustaining the cultural meaning and handicraft skills of his community and
initially named the “Dongba Culture Village” (dongba wenhua cun) in Zheba.
200 Harriet Evans
Furthermore, the exclusion of other, and particularly women’s, cultural

practices from these versions of dongba cultural heritage function to reassert
the hierarchies of difference already associated with men’s prerogative over
the learning, reading and writing of religious texts. People in Gerdu were not
infrequently quite vociferous in their claims to cultural authenticity in con-
trast with what they saw as the vulgar commercialization of traditional Naxi
culture in Lijiang, as Ran noted in the last chapter. Conversely, as White has
argued, the more modern and educated basin Naxi of Lijiang could be depre-
cating of what they considered to be the more “backward” and less educated
Naxi communities elsewhere. In this hierarchical frame, Gerdu Naxi were
therefore already disadvantaged. The virtual exclusion of women from such
a frame thus added a further layer of disadvantage that corresponded more
with dominant Han renderings of zhongnan qingnü, than with the claims
to recognition and validation associated, as I’ve mentioned above, with the
gendered differences in the creative work of relatedness in local Naxi society.
The current marginalization of women from public displays of “Dongba
Culture” is not simply a recent phenomenon, although with women’s full par-
ticipation in the contemporary market economy, its forms and meanings have
changed. Moreover, as Blumenfield (2018) has argued, the situation varies
enormously from locality to locality. After the Chinese occupation of Lijiang
in 1723, Naxi cultural practices, which apparently sustained a matrilineal
system, were replaced by Chinese practices, which, in time, completely trans-
formed Naxi gender relations, exchanging the former fluid marriage and kin
practices with child betrothal, arranged marriages and patrilineal inheritance.
In the process, women’s exclusion from Naxi ritual practices was reasserted,
in part at least, because of the money that men’s ritual practices brought
in (Chao 2012, 65–78). What was obscured behind the emphasis on men’s
ritual activities, however, was the indispensability of an activity that involved
considerable skill to the public performance of ritual. Women’s food prepara-
tion activities and weaving that I have described above suggest not simply a
ritual inferiority as Chao put it—although the attribution of polluting powers
to women noted in my description of the funeral preparations above would
substantiate this inferiority—but rather the public invisibility of creative ac-
tivities without which men’s ritual performance could not take place.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Local village life in Zheba reveals an understanding and a practice of gender

that is simultaneously highly segregated but also very fluid and relaxed. As
we have seen, the spaces and the activities ascribed to them acquire explic-
itly gendered meanings that in many instances are essential to the grassroots
sustainability of local ritual, and hence to the transmission of local meanings
of cultural value. While they might grumble at the onerous burdens of agri-
cultural and domestic work they had to undertake and implicitly therefore at
the imbalance between their own and their menfolk’s responsibilities, none of
the middle-aged and older women I knew gave any suggestion of resistance
to such arrangements. Yet while these older women seemed to perform clear
understandings of gender, in their daily activities, their narration of their ex-
periences, and their expectations of self and others of the same cohort, their
approach to gender difference did not indicate a completely stable or set posi-
tion, but rather one that implicitly acknowledged its mutable character across
time.19 Moreover, across the different cultural practices I have discussed here,
the intermingling of changing educational, social and political opportunities
and their respective discourses with generational shifts, is producing different
forms and meanings of gender, associated on the one hand with—particularly
but not exclusively women’s—“traditional” gender work of relatedness and
reciprocity, and on the other with dominant androcentric Han discourses,
backed by notions of modernity and science, inscribed in the muted tones of
criticism and self-deprecation apparent in Barnie’s comments about zhong-
nan qingnü.
For herself, Dasao considered the practice of weaving her ngurua a com-
pletely acceptable aspect of her responsibilities as a woman, and although
she regretted her daughter’s distancing from the knowledge embodied in the
practice and product of weaving, she did not consider this to be a tragic dis-
turbance of their relationship or of her daughter’s performance as a woman.
On the contrary, Dasao welcomed her daughter’s access to machine-woven
fabrics. The important thing was not a reification of the material processes of
weaving but her daughter’s regular return to her natal family for key annual
events. The threads of time woven into Dasao’s ngurua and into the gran-
nies’ garments they so proudly showed me, sustained a fluid enmeshment of
women’s changing practices within the precarious conditions of the market,
as a source of labor and commerce. So long as younger women continued to
return to the village for key ritual events and moments, the threads binding
them to the fabric of their mothers’ weaving skills may have been attenuated,
but they were not broken. Echoing Stafford, their return, as well as the fabric
woven by their mothers, sustained their crucial role, at least from their moth-
ers’ perspectives, in holding the village community together (Stafford 2000).
That said, the pride my grannies took in showing me the garments they had
woven was in marked contrast to the rather matter-of-fact approach to weav-
ing that the official transmitter demonstrated. It was also in contrast to the re-
signed, “it’s-just-a job”-like attitude that the two brothers, Xiaoker and Guzo
202 Harriet Evans
demonstrated when making the paper required of them in their capacity as

officially recognized “transmitters” of the heritage practice of papermaking.
The distinction between the grannies’ pride and the brothers’ apparent indif-
ference referred in part to their respective material practices. The grannies’
handiwork was an integral and creative part of the relational livability of
the family and kin group, while the brother’s engagement with papermak-
ing was in significant part a response to the requirements associated with
official heritage recognition. In this, the difference derived from the effect
of the heritage industry effectively deracinating a handicraft practice from
its association with the authoritative rituals of Naxi culture and transforming
it into a market commodity, recognized by UNESCO for its global status.
In contrast, the grannies seemed content to engage in an activity that they
deemed to be crucial to the maintenance of a notion of family and kin unity.
It was an activity that they could own and that gave them a dignity in own-
ing. Recall the delight local women expressed when preparing for the arrival
of the film crew. This was echoed in a different form by Nainai, when after
lunch with her and her husband, she invited us to watch a video taken of her
together with other women of her cohort, all dressed in traditional costume
and dancing at a village festivity some years beforehand. In these instances,
women’s delight in participating in what an outsider might well see as an
artificial acquisition of authenticity spoke more of an implicit celebration of
their own status in the reciprocal work of relatedness. While they took evident
pleasure in this self-recognition, they were nevertheless willing to accept the
diminishing knowledge of this practice among their daughters as evidence of
sometimes welcome social changes.
The grannies’ weaving skills enmeshed long threads of family and kin
memories across time into material garments that were essential to the sus-
tainability of life’s major events of marriage and death. The literal materiality
of these garments changed over time, such that the grannies did not criticize
their daughters’ non-engagement with activities that they, the older women,
considered essential to Naxi womanhood. Rather, the older women could
acknowledge the labor-intensive pressures of demanding that their daughters
continue with the practice, by replacing the symbolic significance of weaving
as a practice sustaining family cohesion, with celebration of their daughters’
return visits to their natal families at key moments of the cultural calendar.
The material substance of the fabric woven by Zheba’s Naxi women
absorbed new components that were not commensurable with a purist no-
tion of authenticity defined, for example, by Nainai’s weaving skills. Time
and the changing circumstances of the market—employment, education and
mobility—similarly shaped very different, and even competing, systems of
gendering. Barnie personified the grating encounter between these different
systems when she asked if the women sitting on the left side was nanzhong
nüqing, alongside her observance of highly gendered and time-honored re-
sponsibilities and obligations. In terms of grassroots practice, there was a
kind of gendered reciprocity between the women’s spinning and weaving of
hemp and the various kinds of embroidery and patternmaking they created
and the men’s papermaking and dongba writing on the other. However, the
heritage appropriation of men’s handicraft activities of papermaking and
painting in official museum displays of Dongba Culture produced a very
different and stilled notion of gender, effectively excluding from recognition
women’s role as weavers in the sustainability of men’s public ritual position
as representatives of “Dongba Culture.” The reciprocal quality of Zheba’s
gendered worlds is thus invisible to those interested in exploring contempo-
rary displays and meanings of Naxi culture.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Mike Rowlands and Bev Butler for their inspirational insights
about heritage throughout the course of this project, and to Peter Guangpei
Ran for his totally indispensable support and advice during my research in
Zheba. I also wish to thank Erik Mueggler for his insightful critical sugges-
tions after reading an earlier draft of this chapter.
NOTES
1. http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/mow
/nomination_forms/china+Ancient+Naxi+Dongba+Literature+Manuscripts.pdf. Last
visited on 27 November 2020.
2. Zheba had primary and lower middle school, but after the age of thirteen local
children had to board in schools in Shangri-La. Xiaoker and Barnie had for a while
tried to run a small restaurant in Shangri-La, and had bought a small apartment to do
so. After a year, they returned to the village, leaving their two sons to fend for them-
selves in the apartment on weekends. One or the other of the parents would periodi-
cally visit their sons to check that everything was OK.
3. “Dongba” is the pinyin romanization of the name given to indigenous ritual
specialists, sometimes described as shamans, of the Naxi folk religion.
4. Xiaoker’s title of “transmitter” was probably a response to the fact that his
father was elderly, and no longer able to meet the quotas of paper and paintings
required by Beijing. Xiaoker, Barnie and Namu shared the same household, so nam-
ing Xiaoker as a transmitter was a way to boost the household income. Thanks to
Guangpei for this information.
204 Harriet Evans
5. At the time, a transmitter at national level received ten thousand yuan per year,
at provincial level, five thousand. As national-level transmitter, Namu had no clear
obligations, but could expect regular visits from heritage bureau officials, filmmakers
and the like. In 2012/2013, Guzo and Xiaoker were commissioned by the copyright
bureau in Beijing to produce twelve thousand pieces of paper for seventeen thousand
yuan. This was apart from the annual salary they received as provincial and county
level transmitters. A former local official suspected that the “products” produced by
local transmitters were sold abroad. Thanks again to Guangpei for this information.
6. The buildings in the “Dongba Culture Village,” constructed on the outskirts of
Zheba, as mentioned above, were reconstructions of these simple single room wooden
shingled houses, using recycled materials from local houses as they were dismantled
and replaced by structures using more “modern” materials.
7. The terms she used was “zhongnan qingnü” (male preference), lit. “privileging
men and belittling women.” Barnie was the only woman in the village who used this
term when talking about gender relations with me. She was also the only woman in
the village who had grown up in a mountainous area near the Lijiang Basin, which
was considerably more influenced by Han social and cultural practices, including the
use of Chinese in everyday language, than Zheba. However, it is also possible that
she used this phrase, anticipating that it was one I was familiar with. On other occa-
sions, she made comments about gender relations that were unequivocally embedded
in local belief systems about gender boundaries.
8. Each rice cake was individually embossed with this wooden stamp. In my field
notes I commented “the making of the rice cakes is laborious in the extreme, as well
as a waste of grain (guests didn’t necessarily want to eat them and would use them as
pig fodder) and a recent party meeting decided that women would no longer have to
make them to give to guests at weddings and funerals. Traditionally, five were given
to each guest—two rice cakes and three wheat cakes at funerals.”
9. In one of his very early works, Erik Mueggler described a much more vivid
scene of women “thrashing their arms and legs, wailing their kinship designation for
the deceased,” followed by other women “holding the wailing women down,” before
supporting them by the arms and leading them away. He went on to say that this is
the only one of the ceremonies that surround a death in which “grief causes people to
lose control of their bodies” (Mueggler, 1991, 220–21).
10. In the same article, Mueggler wrote that when he asked the same question he
was told it was because “Women cry easily, and people here believe that if anyone
cries while burying the coffin, the dead person will have bad luck in the other world”
(1991, 221).
11. In dominant Han culture, possession of “too much yin” has long been associ-
ated with the negative and potentially harmful effects of substances and qualities
associated with the dark, negative and female forces of nature and the cosmos. It is
still used in much the same way in popular sayings today. While on the one hand,
the balance between yin and yang is crucial to Han Chinese cosmology, a hierarchi-
cal element between them is apparent in this kind of comment, as it is in traditional
Chinese medical thought (Furth, 1986). Reproduced in this way during the funeral
proceedings, it offers another indication of how Han gender discourse has over time
been absorbed into local culture. It also reminds us of Emily Ahern’s famous argu-
ment about the taboos against women’s participation in ritual activities due to the
polluting harm of female substances to the efficacy of men’s public ritual practices
(Ahern 1976).
12. Again, Mueggler relates how when the coffin was being buried, one of the men
present at the funeral said “See how everyone is cheerful and some are laughing? This
is out of respect for the dead person” (1991, 221).
13. The idea of prestige can certainly incorporate affective ties, although in my
comments here I make a distinction between “prestige” as a form of social, cultural
and potentially political capital, and affective ties. Barnie was one of the only Party
members in the village, she was known for her entrepreneurial flair, and was the
live-in daughter-in-law of the senior dongba, all of which contributed to her status
in being able to mobilize women’s contribution to the funeral, but did not in itself
indicate ties of affection.
14. This evident division of labor is a prominent feature of the gendering of local
life. Men also worked in the fields, but much of the labor of the younger men was
given to helping out in household construction works for kin and neighbors. In turn,
some of this consisted of conspicuously driving around in small vans to pick up and
deliver materials. White described this gender division as part of a local discourse
of suffering and sacrifice claimed by Naxi women not as a sign of deficiency in line
with traditional Han gender hierarchies, but as an implicitly virtuous ethos as a mark
of recognition shared by family and other community members, as well as women
themselves (White 1997, 319).
15. “Naxi women’s prestige rests on cooperation with other women. Naxi women
gain fame from their “kindness” to the other women who are their (generally same
age-cohort) friends with whom they frequently exchange labor” (White 1997, 319).
In other instances, including the stacking of rice and wheat sheaves on high horizon-
tal beams, cooperation was similarly largely kin-based but included men as well as
women, and was doubtless conducted on a reciprocal basis. It is also possible that the
gendered contribution of assistance to a sick sister-in-law concealed a longer history
of kin-based and community reciprocity, the story of which I was not aware.
16. There are many varieties of hemp, or “dama” as it is locally known. After
lunch, Nainai’s husband mixed some ground dama leaves in the suyou (yak butter
tea) he was preparing in a long bamboo cylinder, but I do not know whether this was
from the same hemp plant Nainai had in her back garden, or whether it was obtained,
even bought, somewhere else.
17. The first time I came across Lijiang was in 1987 when one of my undergradu-
ates, Anna Johnston, then studying at Sichuan University in Chengdu, went there to
conduct research for her finals dissertation on Naxi culture. At the time, years before
it had become known as a tourist destination, Lijiang was still a sleepy small town
visited by only a handful of young backpackers.
18. For a vivid and telling account of the contemporary significance of the past
in everyday lives of Naxi people, see Peter Guangpei Ran’s documentary film, “The
Gorge is Deep.”
19. My articulation of this idea draws on Michael Jackson’s reflections on in-
tersubjectivity: “We are, therefore, not stable or set pieces, with established and
206 Harriet Evans
immutable essences, destinies, or identities; we are constantly changing, formed and

reformed, in the course of our relationships with others and our struggle for whatever
helps us sustain and find fulfilment in life” (Jackson 2013, 5).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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nese Society, edited by Arthur P. Wolf, 269–290. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1976.
Anagnost, Ann. “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi).” Public Culture 16, 2
(2004): 189–208.
Blumenfield, Tami. “Recognition and Misrecognition: The Politics of Intangible
Cultural Heritage in Southwest China.” In Chinese Heritage in the Making: Ex-
periences, Negotiations, Contestations, edited by Christina Maags and Marina
Svenson, 170–193. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
Butler, Beverley. “Heritage and the Present Past.” In Handbook of Material Culture,
edited by Christopher Tilley, 463–79. London: Sage, 2006.
Chao, Emily. Lijiang Stories: Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in
Reform-Era China. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2012.
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in China.” Chinese Science 7, (1986): 43–66.
Harrell, Stevan, ed. Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers. Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 1995.
———. Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2001.
———. “China’s Tangled Web of Heritage.” In Cultural Heritage Politics in China,
edited by Tami Blumenfield and Helaine Silverman, 1–10. New York: Springer,
2013.
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Arendt (2nd ed). Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013.
McKhann, Charles F. “Fleshing Out the Bones: Kinship and Cosmology in Naqxi
Religion.” PhD thesis. University of Chicago, 1992.
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China 17, 2 (1991): 188–226.
———. The Age of Wild Ghosts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
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mission in Southwest China.” PhD thesis, University of Westminster, 2018.
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Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
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P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, 121–37. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989.
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White, Sydney D. “Fame and Sacrifice: the Gendered Construction of Naxi Identi-
ties.” Modern China 23, 3 (1997): 298–327.
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Chapter Nine
Destruction, Devastation and

Reinvented Tradition in Heritage
Construction in Dukezong, Shangri-La
Wu Yinling
Dukezong is a small town within the county town of Shangri-La (formerly

known as Zhongdian), Diqing Prefecture, in northwestern Yunnan Province,
as seen from the air to the bottom right of figure 9.1.
There are many ethnic groups living in the area, including Tibetan, Han,
Naxi, Yi and Bai. Among them, Tibetans are the largest group, followed by
Han and Naxi. Affected by radical changes in domestic and global political
and economic conditions, since the founding of the People’s Republic of
Figure 9.1. Dukezong surrounded by the county town of Shangri-La, author’s photo
209
210 Wu Yinling
China (PRC) in 1949, the area surrounding Dukezong morphed from its
multiethnic character as Zhongdian into today’s Shangri-La, the Tibetan City
of Moonlight, as I explain below. After the buildings of the ancient city of
Dukezong were destroyed for the third time in a fire on January 11, 2014,
the old city residents found that their ethnically diverse demands for cultural
representation in the material form of the city’s reconstruction were over-
whelmed by a political and economic discourse that favored Tibetan interests.
By the time the new “old city” was completed in July 2017, its pluralist ethnic
traditions had been all but submerged under its reinvention as a Tibetan city.
In 2011, Shangri-La’s population totaled around 174,500 people, with a
population density of ten people per square kilometer, making it one of the
largest counties, but with low population density, in Yunnan Province (Diq-
ing Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee Office 2011). The center of
Dukezong was the Big Turtle Mountain, with a radial area covering nearly
thirty-seven hectares. Administratively, it consisted of three communities
(shequ), each of which had its own offices, and nine small groups (xiaozu)
of villagers. There were four principal roads running through the town and
twenty-three small alleys of various widths. Most residents lived in tradi-
tional buildings, though some lived in recently constructed buildings. Of the
total population of nearly thirteen thousand, just under two thirds were long-
term residents while the rest were migrants.
Based on twelve months’ fieldwork between 2013 and 2014, including the
period around the fire in January 2014, followed up by numerous short visits
in 2016 and 2017, this chapter draws on archival and ethnographic research
to analyze conflicting local narratives of Dukezong’s history of destruction
and reconstruction behind its recent heritage reinvention as a Tibetan city. I
trace local debates about the history of Dukezong, with particular emphasis
on the period since the 1990s, and the guiding principles of its different re-
constructions. I argue that powerful local, Tibetan elites, backed by the local
government, and expert scholars brought in from Beijing, shored up by local
civil projects to teach Tibetan language and cultural customs, effectively
silenced the voices of other ethnic groups. So while Dukezong signified a
commercially attractive reinvented tradition for its Tibetan and Han residents,
for people of other ethnic groups in the town, this reinvention emerged out of
the exclusion of their distinctive cultural presence from public representation.
DUKEZONG—A CONFLICTED HISTORY
The area where Dukezong is situated was originally called Zhongdian, pho-
netically named after the Naxi word for “grass embankment.” When its name
Destruction, Devastation and Reinvented Tradition 211
changed to Shangri-La in 2001, specialists and scholars argued that the metal
bridge in the eastern part of the town dated back to around 633 CE in the Tang
dynasty, explaining the claim that it had one thousand three hundred years of
history. However, local people disagreed, and said that Dukezong’s history
was no more than three hundred years. The temporal node of this contrast was
the famous Songzanlin Monastery, which was built in the early Qing dynasty,
between 1679 and 1681.
Before the fire destroyed around one third of the old town in January
2014, local people were accustomed to point tourists to Dukezong’s history
of one thousand three hundred years.1 However, the fire led to a prolonged
local debate about how long Dukezong’s history actually was. After all, the
destruction of a “one thousand three hundred year-old town” would have
much greater consequences than a place with a history of only three hundred
or even thirty years. Apart from a few restored architectural remains from
the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, such as the Tibetan
Scriptures Hall in figure 9.2, most buildings in Dukezong are no more than
thirty years old.
While debates circle around the duration of Dukezong’s history, there is
little dispute that its modern history since the nineteenth century has also
been one of destruction. Dukezong was destroyed by fire in the second year
of the Tongzhi reign (1863), when the Muslim Hui rebellion (1856–1873)
Figure 9.2. Tibetan Scriptures Hall, Dukezong, author’s photo

212 Wu Yinling
led by Du Wenxiu against Manchu rule entered Zhongdian. Some residual

walls from this period can still be seen on the White Chicken (Baiji) Temple
hill outside the town’s west gate. After this, the old city was not rebuilt until
the tenth year of the Republic of China (1921). Between the 1920s and the
1930s, the town was largely divided between Tibetan and Han ethnicities,
and commercial business and local residents lived side by side, with facilities
in the Tibetan dominated parts formally protected by an agreement with the
Han people. At that time, large caravans transporting goods along the tea and
horse trade route used to pass through it, attracting large numbers of bandits.
During this period the city suffered repeated episodes of partial destruction by
fire and reconstruction, in part due to arson attacks by bandits.
Then in 1940, the Communist (CCP) army arrived in the county town,
where the Nationalists (GMD), then based in Chongqing, in nearby Sichuan
Province, used to conduct local surveys and where the local elite including
the tusi and the guards used to gather.2 With such a chaotic mix of soldiers
and bandits, conflicts were frequent. After 1950, with the establishment of
control by the new CCP government, the seat of the new county and provin-
cial government was established in Dukezong. The local population gradually
shifted from commercial occupations to farming. However, between 1960
and 1980, as Dukezong became increasingly dilapidated under the effects
of the Cultural Revolution, the county government expanded outwards and
many people moved elsewhere, leaving Dukezong in a state of decay.
Dukezong only became an “old town” (gu cheng) in the 1990s. In 1991
the Provincial Planning Institute completed the land acquisition and water
drainage as part of the plan to transform the old town, formerly a township
called Jiantang Town, then Zhongxin Town (Shangri-La County Urban and
Rural Construction Bureau 2013). In 1998 the Institute prepared a research
report on the possibility of protecting the old town of Dukezong in Zhongdian
County. In 2002, in preparation for the ceremony to celebrate the renaming
of Shangri-La County, the local government sponsored the construction of an
urban sculpture called the “Victory Banner” (shengli chuang), which featured
the eight auspicious treasures of Tibetan Buddhism.3 Set on the Small Turtle
Mountain, this was the largest prayer wheel in the district. In the same year,
in Sifang Street Square, the local government erected a stone slab symboliz-
ing the eight-petal lotus,4 and overhauled the town’s water supply, sanitation
system and electricity, in preparation for the full restoration of the “old town”
of Dukezong. The “old town” that was destroyed in the 2014 fire was thus no
more than twenty years old.
With the dissemination of Shangri-La as the exotic “lost world” of James
Hilton’s novel (2012), Dukezong became a local brand like Lijiang and
Dali, and while many people continued to move out, its tourist development
brought in increasing numbers of migrant entrepreneurs from elsewhere,

shoring up Dukezong as the main tourist center of Tibetan culture.
Dukezong’s history since the late Qing demonstrates various conflicting
narratives and historical truths of the town’s regeneration, with the most re-
cent being the new round of revival and reconstruction that started after the
Cultural Revolution. Local “historical truths” and “traditions” have been re-
written many times. The most recent version since the branding of Dukezong
as a Tibetan town in many ways suggests a major reform or “revitalization”
of the local cultural system, in ways described long ago by Anthony Wallace.
He noted that a “revitalization movement is defined as a deliberate, orga-
nized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying
culture. Revitalization is thus, from a cultural standpoint, a special kind of
culture change phenomenon” (Wallace 1956, 279).
Prominent among these narratives were the critical views frequently ex-
pressed by local people about the construction of Dukezong after the 1990s,
to the extent that some thought that its destruction in the fire was a good
thing, since it fully exposed the character of the tourist commercialization
of the old town of Dukezong. A local Tibetan person told me that the old
town had experienced several fires in the past but the situation then was
very different. He explained that households used to use a system called “the
drip line” (dishui) to allocate the land outside the walls of their individual
houses.5 The amount of land was subject to guidelines but there were usually
about ten feet between two houses. In his house, the ground floor was used
for the farm animals and fertilizer. The system of “drip line” referred to how
households used to use a pole to measure the land allocated to them, and to
check that the space between the houses was equally distributed. This system
is no longer used, and according to this person, no one really cared about it
anymore, because under the management of Dukezong “old town,” not only
does the land not belong to the people who live on it, but they are not entitled
to dispose of their houses.6
The most important criticisms concerned management issues. The de-
velopment of the old town led to an appreciation of land and house prices,
and the appropriation by the homeowners and tenants of the formerly public
land.7 Every inch of this prime location was fought over. The management
committee of the old town should have taken responsibility for this, but in the
absence of any clear rules and regulations they failed to. Spurred on by the
desire for economic interest, the original architecture of Dukezong gradually
disappeared, and a number of people thought that this might be the opportu-
nity to restore its traditional style. In fact, at a meeting called to gather views
about the plans for reconstruction, an elderly person even suggested restoring
the “drip line” system and building fire tunnels.8
214 Wu Yinling
On entering Sifang Street, the first thing that used to strike the visitor was a
huge mural, the top and bottom parts of which were covered in Tibetan script.
However, after the fire, other earlier words appeared in Chinese—“welcome
to Zhongxin Town”—that had been covered by the Tibetan painting of the
“Harmonious Four.”9 This earlier mural was then taken down, and on 8 April
2014, the old town quietly held a ritual to start the work of reconstruction.
With only a few dozen officials present at the ritual, the curtains were opened
on the “ceremony to start the reconstruction of the old town of Dukezong
after November 1st.”
This reconstruction and revival of Dukezong meant rather more than
reviving former cultural characteristics. Rather, in line with Wallace’s argu-
ment, for the officials involved, it suggested a more unified “satisfactory”
and future-oriented concept of construction. The official planning documents
emphasized the cultural value of Dukezong’s long history, and claimed deep
historical roots to the Tibetan characteristics of Dukezong’s urban reconstruc-
tion. Finally, the planners attributed “cultural heritage” to the restoration of
old buildings, most of which were shops, with a history of no more than three
hundred years. In 2014, experts from Beijing’s Tsinghua Tongheng Planning
and Design Institute and Kunming University of Science and Technology
Urban and Rural Planning and Research Institute who were consulted for the
restoration of the “old town” stated that they would “respect history, respect
national culture, repair the old as the old, and build the new as the old” (Diq-
ing Prefecture Development and Reform Commission 2014).
In line with advice from the famous Beijing architect, Professor Wu
Liangyong, they claimed that their work would respect the principles of
“active protection and overall creation.” Moreover, they proposed that the
reconstruction of the fire zone should be considered alongside improvement
of the surrounding urban areas. In all, the planners’ vision was for Dukezong
to become a model of “scientific analysis and orderly progress” in Yunnan
and even the whole country (Huo and Zhang 2015).
After 2014, the people of Dukezong waited to see whether, rising from the
ashes, Dukezong would be able to restore its previously pluralistic cultural
character. However, the situation post-reconstruction did not live up to the
plurality of this vision.
“CULTURAL HERITAGE”: A HISTORY OF MULTIPLE

REVISIONS AND REVELATIONS BEFORE 2014
The main slogan—“repair the old as the old (xiu jiu ru jiu)”—describing the
reconstruction of Dukezong’s “old town” after the fire was totally consistent
with the thinking behind its earlier transformation. After 1990, the Shangri-
La government carried out a series of transformations of Dukezong, including
encouragement to represent it as a “small Tibetan town.” However, when I ar-
rived there in 2013, what I found was a commercial district that looked more
or less the same as Lijiang and Dali. The main difference was its architectural
style, in contrast to the Naxi features of Lijiang and the Bai features of Dali.
So why did it become an “old town” after 1990, particularly since de-
scription of it as an “old town” was not part of its earlier representation. An
elderly resident called Ye Dexiang, a key individual in the transformation of
Dukezong was my main interlocutor for sharing relevant information with
me.10 He told me that the term “old town” only appeared with the town’s de-
velopment since the 1990s. Originally Dukezong was indeed an “old town”
but, he noted, “when Lijiang and Dali started boasting about their status as
‘old towns,’ we had to follow suit.” He went on to explain that as the new
urban spaces of the surrounding county town of Shangri-La expanded out-
wards, “we [in Dukezong] needed to have our own historical existence, hence
the idea of the ‘old town.’ This is much bigger than the town was before.
The entire area of the former dam fields has entirely disappeared, and it’s
now become a town. Confirming it as an ‘old town’ gives its past a kind of
recognition.”
The shaping of Dukezong as an “old town” was the result of a collabora-
tion between the local government and the local elites. Oral and archival
records both reveal that this was initiated by a local Tibetan cadre and an
official association. Local Tibetans were all very favorably disposed toward
this cadre, but local Naxi and Bai people were more critical. The construction
of Dukezong’s new “old town” as a predominantly Tibetan town signified the
sidelining of the town’s former multiethnic identity, including its Naxi and
Bai characteristics. The association was originally called the Elder People’s
Association of Zhongxin Town, set up as an official organization in 1986
with a membership of sixty-three people. By 2014 it had grown to more than
one thousand two hundred members.
According to Ye Dexiang, the Elder People’s Association members repre-
sented the more elite and educated men of local society. According to him,
In their eyes, after the Cultural Revolution, the old town was in ruins and be-
came a rubbish dump. As time passed, its communications and services were in
a terrible condition. The destruction during the Cultural Revolution affected all
cultural relics in the town. So when these elderly people returned to retire there
after studying or working elsewhere, taking with them deep feelings for their old
home, they were dismayed by what they found and were extremely pained to see
the place in ruins. The first idea in organizing the association was to restore the
landscape and the cultural relics from the ruins. [We] just couldn’t bear to see
216 Wu Yinling
the ruins any more and wanted to change it, so after [we] organized [our]selves
the first work [we] wanted to take on was restoration.
However, while they were deeply affected by the destruction of Duke-

zong’s cultural artifacts and religious sites during the Cultural Revolution,
at the same time, they commented on how dilapidated Dukezong was before
the 1980s, when there was minimal sanitation, with cattle and sheep muck
everywhere, making living conditions so difficult that many people left.
The 1980s nation-wide open door reform call to “emancipate the mind,”
and the relaxation of the former strict controls on religious and other prac-
tices saw the start to the restoration of Songzanlin Monastery in Shangri-La.
The expansion and reconstruction of Dukezong was then carried out in two
stages. The first was after 1986 and was initiated by the people (minjian) and
the second was after 2000 when the work of reconstruction was undertaken
by the government and the people together.
According to Ye Dexiang, in 1986, the forerunner of the Elder People’s As-
sociation, the Self-Employees’ Association (geti xiehui) of Zhongxin Town,
was situated in the Chaoyang Tower, constructed on Turtle Mountain.11
Between 1987 and 1989, the Elder People’s Association undertook the
reconstruction of Turtle Mountain Park, the Dragon King Temple, the arch-
way, the steps and the stone wall around the bottom of Turtle Mountain. It
was named as a “park” because policy at the time did not permit the building
of a temple. Moreover, many of the members of the association were Party
members and were not allowed to participate in the construction of religious
places, so their method of avoidance was to use the “people’s park” as a sub-
stitute for the temple, and not to enshrine Buddhist statues. Following this,
Zhongxin Town transferred management and use of four places to the Elder
People’s Association: Turtle Mountain, the White Chicken Temple (situated
on the top of Western Mountain outside the western gate of the old town),
Five Phoenixes Mountain—Dukezong’s sacred mountain—one kilometer
east of the county town, and the Longtan River.12 Beginning in 1990, they
restored the White Chicken Temple with the slogan “Care for the temple by
restoring the temple, take good care of the forests.”
Most of the subsequent architectural restoration was associated with local
religious beliefs, given that it focused on the reconstruction of former temples
and religious sites. However, once these were reconstructed, the Elders’ As-
sociation, conscious of the need to avoid direct reference to their religious
meaning, as I’ve already noted, took the initiative to foreground their envi-
ronmental features by representing them as “people’s parks.”
Nevertheless, in the eyes of the authorities, Dukezong’s public spaces
needed to contain more diverse memories and traditions. Thus, encouraged
by the local government, the Elders’ Association took up the local history of
the Red Army’s Long March in the region, and proposed the construction of a
museum to the Red Army’s Long March outside the Tibetan Scriptures Hall.
The restoration project for Dukezong was planned in different stages.
Centering on Turtle Mountain Park, restoration of the Tibetan Scriptures Hall
began in 1988 and was completed in 1997. In 2005, construction work began
on a number of other sites, including the Yueguang (Moonlight) Plaza, the
Museum of the Red Army’s Long March, the Museum of the Tibetan Ethnic-
ity of Diqing Prefecture, and the Big Buddha Temple on the peak of Turtle
Mountain, all seen in figure 9.3.
Dukezong’s Moonlight Plaza is thus now a site simultaneously celebrating
religious, revolutionary history and ethnic meanings. A local writer com-
mented that,
To begin with, the older people of the old town enthusiastically offered sug-
gestions about the restoration of the Tibetan Scriptures Hall and put a lot of
energy into thinking about the appropriate site for the Red Army’s Long March
Memorial Hall . . . and the local government borrowed money [from them] to
restore the main buildings.
To this, Ye Dexiang added,
in 1997 when the Tibetan Scriptures Hall was restored, three local elders found
a few local businessmen to donate money, and asked me to manage the project.
Figure 9.3. Turtle Mountain Park, by Moonlight Plaza, Dukezong, author’s photo
218 Wu Yinling
With the establishment of the three important Buddhist figures—the Thousand

Hands Bodhisattva, the Guardian God, the Tsongkhapa13—we basically restored
the sacred halls of the past.
In the second stage, starting in 2002, the Auspicious Victory Building was
constructed on the peak of Turtle Mountain—consisting of the Prayer Wheel
to commemorate the confirmation of the name of Shangri-La, followed by the
construction of the Big Buddha Temple, the re-erection of the Bodhisattvas
in the White Chicken Temple and the Temple to the Mountain God in Five
Phoenixes Mountain. By May 2007, these projects had all been completed,
signifying that the religious elements of Tibetan Buddhism had been returned
to their former, now restored, buildings, revitalizing their religious meaning.
The “old” in the slogan “restore the old like the old” used by the local
elites, basically corresponds with the notion of the “old” in the dominant dis-
course of “cultural heritage.” The term “cultural heritage” is not commonly
used among local Tibetans living in Dukezong, but the Shangri-La Cultural
Bureau and the Diqing Cultural Bureau have set up research and preservation
departments for “intangible cultural heritage,” focusing on collecting materi-
als such as dance songs and archaeology. The Master Plan for Fire Recovery
and Reconstruction of Dukezong Ancient City in Shangri-La County (Draft
for Approval), contains a special section on “historical and cultural heritage
value.” Alongside reference to the guozhuang dance as “intangible cultural
heritage value” and to the “red cultural value” of Dukezong, this plan refers
to the “humanistic value” of the old town’s multiethnic and multireligious
settlement.14 The draft accordingly refers to the inclusion of both Han and
Tibetan old buildings in Dukezong’s restoration.
Apart from the lack of adequate funds, various problems emerged during
the work of restoration, such as the construction of the Big Buddha Temple.
The main problem was that the Big Buddha Temple was constructed under
the direct control of local cadres and did not receive the approval of the Re-
ligious Affairs Bureaus of Diqing Prefecture and Shangri-La. Ye Dexiang
described the conflict:
The root of the problem was that the construction of these temples should have
had state approval. In 2005 when we were preparing to start construction, the
Religious Affairs Bureau turned up, and said we weren’t allowed to do this.
People from the Prefecture and the County then turned up and said we weren’t
allowed to do this. The regulations stated that you could restore what had
originally been there, but not what had not been there. There was only a Turtle
Mountain Park here before, not a Buddhist temple, so we were not allowed to
construct one. I was left with the task of leafing through the historical records
to extract any powerful information [that supported our case]. So whatever was
written on a monument, any tiny detail about what was constructed, or given,
where and when, for example concerning the dimensions of a Sakyamuni Bud-
dha . . . anything relevant that was recorded, we explained to them, but they
didn’t budge.
Ye Dexiang and his companions used the Religious Affairs Bureau’s

demands for “restoration of what was originally there, but not of what was
not there” to resolve the issue. In this instance of conflict between civil and
official interests, the sensible approach of the local people was to go directly
to the top of the Religious Affairs Bureau. The construction of the Big Bud-
dha Temple, then received the approval of the top level of authority, so the
problem was resolved.
As the construction of the Big Buddha Temple and other sites got under way,
the Elder People’s Association consulted the Bengzhu Living Buddha15 from
the Songzanlin Monastery, asked the Yunda Lama from the Three Villages
to take on the responsibility for the images of the tankas and the Big Buddha,
and directly sought the advice of Tibetan artisans for advice about the murals.
These artisans were acknowledged as people who possessed the knowledge
and skills to transmit the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. The Elders’ Associa-
tion reliance on their advice in the restoration of religious sites indicates the
association’s recognition of the importance of direct links with the local prac-
tices of Tibetan Buddhism in the reconstruction of Dukezong. The Songzanlin
Monastery did not participate directly in these efforts.16 However, after the
Big Buddha Temple was built, the Songzanlin Monastery every year sent five
lamas to officiate. None of the attractions in Moonlight Plaza charged entrance
fees, so the income derived mainly from donations from tourists and followers.
Ye Dexiang calculated that in 2013, the income of the Tibetan Scriptures Hall
reached about two and a half million yuan, the equivalent of just under four
hundred thousand US dollars, from around 1.8 million yuan (two hundred and
seventy-seven plus thousand US dollars) between 2011 and 2012, and around
seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand yuan in 2007. Many visi-
tors from neighboring, dominantly Buddhist, countries went to the temple and
gave hundreds and hundreds of donations. So Ye decided that when someone
reached a hundred donations, they would be given a yellow hada, while for
ordinary donations they would be given a souvenir.17 He went on,
In my view, the Big Buddha Temple has become an [important] center. Lots of
people come here, because it’s a pure temple, unlike the Guihua Temple.18 The
Big Buddha Temple plays a hugely important role as a popular religious center.
In the old town, in Zhongxin Town, where lots of people are Buddhist, it offers
an opportunity for religious harmony and freedom. It lends weight to the idea of
Shangri-La as a place where the immortals really live. There are many devout
Buddhists here, they are good and peace-loving people and are respectful of
220 Wu Yinling
tourists. So, many things come together here in Big Buddha Temple. Without
the Turtle Mountain, the Big Buddha Temple, the prayer wheel, and the forests
on Turtle Mountain, without this wonderful environment, what would be left of
the old town?
These comments imply that the language of “cultural heritage,” even if

not used directly, offers a way of reconstructing local traditions. However,
such traditions contain many elements of “discovery” and “creation” in what
is presented as the image of the local. This local image is precisely what the
local government needs; it also explains the local government’s promotion of
Zhongdian’s name change to Shangri-La.
In order to compete for tourism resources, Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet
launched a battle for the place name of Shangri-La. Zhongdian of Diqing
Prefecture finally won the battle, for seven reasons. First, “Shangri-La” is the
transliteration of English loanwords that derive from the local Diqing Tibetan
dialect of Yunnan Province. The ancient Tibetan name of Zhongdian County
is “Niwangzong” or “Dukezong,” which means Sun and Moon City, consis-
tent with the meaning of “Shangri-La.” Diqing’s natural geographical envi-
ronment characteristics such as snow-capped mountains, canyons, meadows,
climate and products are exactly the same as the description of “Shangri-La”
in Hilton’s novel. Diqing’s social environment uniquely combines Tibetan
Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Catholicism, Christianity, Islam, Bonism
and Dongba in multiethnic and multireligious unity and where humans and
nature live in harmony. The prototype of the “Shangri-La” Lama Temple,
where monks and nuns share a temple, is in Diqing, and the architecture and
environment in the temple are very similar to those described in the novel.
Until the 1950s, Diqing always used the caravan as a means of communica-
tion with the outside world, again the same as described in the novel. Finally,
many Yunnan scholars who were contemporaries of James Hilton have
written about Diqing’s natural and social environment, in ways that are very
similar to the novel’s description.19
Among the seven reasons mentioned above, the novel The Lost Horizon
became the main reference for local search for evidence (Hilton 1933). Lo-
cal scholars claimed they proved that Zhongdian is the site of the legendary
“Shangri-La” from Tibetan language, place names, cultural customs and travel
notes. The seven reasons noted above were formally recognized by the State
Council of China, and on 17 December 2001, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs
wrote to the provincial government of Yunnan stating that the State Council
had ratified Zhongdian’s name as Shangri-La. This was a momentous event.
As I’ve noted above, the dominantly Tibetan character of Dukezong
became particularly prominent in the 1980s when the Elder People’s Asso-
ciation set about its construction projects, all of which took the architectural
form of Tibetan religious culture. Dukezong’s Tibetan features were further

strengthened by the name change, as well as by the powerful influence of lo-
cal Tibetan culture, supported by the role of leading Tibetan cadres in charge
of restoration work, weakening the cultural claims of local Naxi, Han and
Bai people. The dominance of the local Tibetan culture also inherited the
earlier affirmation of the PRC’s national identification project, when clear
boundaries between different ethnic groups were established on the basis
of “common language, common region, common economic life and com-
mon psychological quality,” and when Diqing was recognized as the Diqing
Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in 1957.
Since then, under the influence of such ethnic identification, the under-
standing of southwest China in Chinese academic circles also changed from a
“pluralistic society” to an “ethnic region.” As anthropology and ethnology in
China increasingly focused on ethnicity rather than “community,” southwest
China was increasingly regarded as representing the “local,” “minority,” and
“exotic.” These characteristics also cater to the demands of official economic
development, and local governments have made ample use of them to de-
velop regional tourism.
As the official agenda emphasized commercialization, the government
started looking for ways to promote investment by passing many new poli-
cies to encourage investors and sponsor the brand of Shangri-La. After 2002,
they constructed public spaces including Sifang Street and Moonlight Plaza,
reasserting the Tibetan character of the area.
I also came to realize that prominent scholars and experts had been in-
fluential in the reconstruction of Dukezong as an old town. For example, in
1998, the Zhongdian County government sought the advice of Professor Wu
Liangyong of Beijing’s Tsinghua University and asked him to lead a delega-
tion to carry out an urban planning survey, with particular attention to the
regulations on the protection of the old town of Dukezong.20 Ye Dexiang
reported Professor Wu’s view, as follows:
We have a romantic imagination to transform Diqing Prefecture into the ideal

city of Shangri-La. This ideal city would then combine innovative creation with
the artistic and artisan traditions that were already there. It would set up its
own Tibetan art and technical schools and would display both the fine aesthetic
products of the Tibetan ethnicity as well as tourist commodities.
These assumptions are deeply related to the reasons cited when the local
government applied to change its name to Shangri-La, demonstrating the
influence of the novel The Lost Horizon on the planners. Vernacular, official
and academic interests thus converged in aspiring to reshape Dukezong in the
image of a utopian Shangri-La.
222 Wu Yinling
The efforts by the Elder People’s Association to rebuild the traditional

appearance of the old town of Dukezong were thus carried out under the
planning instructions of the government, with the design input by specialist
scholars, as well as by local Tibetan artisans. As a result, the “Eight Petal
Lotus Street,”21 Sifang Street and the Moonlight Plaza—repeatedly described
by local essayists—all emerged, despite the repeated complaints by visitors
about the inconvenience and difficulties of walking on cobbled stone streets.
The slogan accompanying the planning and the restoration of the old town,
nevertheless, remained “restoring the old as the old.”
However, it was clear that the old referred to an explicit policy of Tibeta-
nization. The world’s largest prayer wheel was built on the top of Guishan
Mountain in the old town, and Tibetan windows were installed on all the
houses facing the street in the new part of the bigger town of Shangri-La.
The rooves of the houses in the old town had to have black tiles and wooden
boards.
The Moonlight Plaza was not harmed by the 2014 fire. However, when Ye
Dexiang and his colleagues proposed its reconstruction, it was not to restore
the temple architecture of Tibetan Buddhism but to reconstruct architecture
associated with Han culture, still in the name of “tradition.”
Ye Dexiang explained this with reference to earlier history. He claimed that
since the Yongzheng emperor’s rule in the early Qing dynasty (1678–1735)
when Han people first arrived in this part of Yunnan, mutual respect between
the Han and ethnic minorities began to replace the former disdain of ethnic
peoples, gradually eliminating ethnic estrangement. He went on:
Restoring this temple is a good idea. . . . It was all ruins before; the Guandi
Temple and the Guanyin Pavilion22 were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
So from my point of view, no restoration from those ruins had taken place.
Han culture had been around here for around three hundred years—five to six
generations—since the Yongzheng Emperor, through times of hardship and
poverty. So I think it is appropriate to rebuild them in their original site.
A further reason for emphasizing the rebuilding of Han cultural traditions

among Ye Dexiang and his colleagues was that they are descendants of mixed
marriages between Tibetans and Han people so identify with both Han and
Tibetan traditions. An even more important reason was that in wanting to
establish their own traditions, their experience of building Tibetan traditions
told them that constructing a brand not only brings economic profit, it also
contributes to cultural confidence. Hence their acknowledgment that Han
temples should also contribute to Dukezong’s special characteristics, includ-
ing the past three centuries’ history of Han involvement in the old town’s
new appearance.
TIBETAN CLASSES AND PARENT TRAINING:

NONOFFICIAL CULTURAL HERITAGE PRACTICE
Alongside “official” cultural heritage practice in the creation of the old town
of Dukezong after the fire, other nonofficial or popular/civil (minjian) prac-
tices have also contributed to reasserting the specifically Tibetan character of
the town. Before the fire, some Tibetans living around Dukezong had long
been aware of the need to protect and transmit their own cultural traditions,
and had initiated various practical activities, including a Tibetan language
class I participated in as a student.
Shortly after I settled down in the Youjia Hostel in the old town, I came
across a notice about Tibetan language classes posted at the Dukezong Book
Café diagonally opposite my hostel.23 Starting July 20, 2013, I became class-
mates with a group of primary school students in a Tibetan language class
where I learned a few basics of Tibetan pronunciation. In addition to basic
Tibetan language, some classes also set up courses on Tibetan traditional
customs and ideas about environmental protection. In time, I came to realize
that a good number of similar classes had started up in both the old town and
the new town, after 1986 when the Tenth Panchen Lama visited Shangri-La.
The classes were free of charge, and according to my Tibetan teacher, were
mainly for Tibetan youngsters to stay close to their mother tongue, because
even though it is a Tibetan autonomous prefecture, Diqing has a much lower
level of Tibetan language usage than other Tibetan prefectures.
My “classmates” were very playful. Before nine o’clock every morning,
they would come to the classroom to play and laugh, and would tell jokes
they heard on TV. Their level of Putonghua [standard dialect] far exceeded
that of their Tibetan. Nevertheless, playful as they could be and even though
they were more conversant with Han than with Tibetan culture, one of them
was not hesitant in noting my mistake in pointing my finger at the Buddha
statue while listening to a teacher explaining the “six great divisions in the
wheel of karma” illustration! Once the class began, everyone became very
serious and attentive.
This language program was sponsored by the Shangri-La Community
Protection Association (formerly known as the Shangri-La Nature Protection
Association), supported by local entrepreneurs in the old town, and taught by
Tibetan teachers from local middle schools and environmental scholars. Stu-
dents were mainly primary and secondary school students and their parents.
However, the program lasted for only one month, and covered only the very
basics of the Tibetan language.
One night about two weeks after the end of the Tibetan calendar year, I
attended another Tibetan language class held on the fourth floor of a build-
224 Wu Yinling
ing in the new town. The class was taught by a lama from the Songzanlin
Monastery and attended by mainly local officials, the majority of whom
were Tibetan. The textbooks used were mainly about Buddhist terminology.
Hence, I found the class very challenging, so I did not manage to stay for
the whole thing. However, Tibetan classes like this attracted many students.
My Tibetan teacher also gave private Tibetan classes to cadres of the Diqing
Prefecture government. The reassertion of Dukezong’s Tibetan culture was
a key influence in encouraging young Tibetans to develop their command of
their language as the essence of their cultural tradition.
Besides the language, Tibetans around Dukezong were also concerned
with protecting their environment. They were thinking about how to com-
bine the transmission of Tibetan traditional culture with the local tourism
economy. For example, Mr. Liu, a Dukezong local who was involved in a
local eco-tourism project called Hamu Valley Village, told me,
Since Hamu Valley established its own eco-cultural protection center in 2003,
the village has often held various training programs, including bird-watching
training, Tibetan language classes, English classes and guide training, and
organized study trips for young women from the village to visit hotels. More
than half of the villagers have been part of these training programs. In public
holidays, the center also organized social events for young people, staged music
and dance performances for the elderly, and carried out various cultural and
sports competitions.
Similar practices were also attempted by Larong, a lama from a particu-

lar kangcan (monk group or branch) of the monastery. Larong was born in
Ren’an, a rural community not far from Dukezong in 1975 and like many sons
of poor rural families, became a monk at the Songzanlin Monastery at the
age of thirteen. He is a lama, but is the only lama involved in the Songzanlin
Monastery Tourism Company set up by the government, acting as its deputy
general manager. He is also a member of the Songzanlin Monastery People’s
Management Committee and the manager of his own kangcan.24 At the same
time, he founded the Ren’an Community Kindergarten in Ren’an Community
in 2010, which is the only one of hundreds of private kindergartens in the
county that has been officially certified. Part of his kindergarten sponsorship
comes from his Tibetan cousin-in-law in Switzerland, and his relationship
with government departments is very beneficial. Larong told me that,
a main purpose of my kindergarten is to transmit local culture . . . In parents’

classes we mainly talk about Buddhist texts, and local culture, how to protect
culture, health and the environment . . . I told my kindergarten teachers that
our programs should be able to teach people things that are useful to them at
home and . . . things that concern them: the protection of their own culture, their
own environment, and their own locality. We can do things in our school like
chant Buddhist scriptures before meals and do morning exercises for two days
a week. These are special features of our school. But . . . the government can
be quite strict about what we can’t do. We should cooperate and fit in well with
the government . . . There are more than one hundred kindergartens like this but
mine is the only one to have an official certificate, granted last year. The rules
of politics are very strict, but I am also a monk and I get along well with those
cadres. If they have any (requirements), I always cooperate and say “fine, that’s
fine.” So when they say, look how Red Flag Primary School teaches their games
I say fine, we will teach games like that. I don’t have to tell them what I teach in
my own class. Who are my classes for? Mainly parents, especially the younger
ones. Are you Tibetan? Ah, I’m Tibetan. Then sing a Tibetan song for me. It’s
no good saying, “I can’t sing,” [but with] “Yes, I can sing” they immediately
start singing our own special songs. The same with dance, and if you talk about
our environmental protection, they will start talking about it right away. That’s
it. I’m quite happy. It’s working this year.
Larong schedules the classes in winter when local Tibetans have more
leisure time. The school often has foreign volunteers, and the villagers are
already familiar with their presence and often voluntarily pick up and drop
off volunteers in and out of villages and county towns. Larong has maintained
good relationships with the various government departments, the Songzanlin
Monastery and the tourism company. He is still working toward what he
thinks is the right direction of cultural transmission.
I also attended several Buddhist events at Larong’s kangcan. In these
events Larong invited rinpoches and lamas from other kangcans to chant the
scriptures, while his disciples helped him with other activities. He himself
seemed to be busy with various meetings and the activities in the kindergar-
ten. His school also plans to teach children and parents to chant Buddhist
scriptures, and transplant trees from their hometowns, as well as rehearse
Tibetan traditional songs and dances. Since last year, Han people in the vil-
lage have also been included in the school’s activities. Larong himself has
never been to school but received all his education in monasteries. He can-
not read Chinese text but he speaks Putonghua, even though he sometimes
makes mistakes. However, he is perfectly able to sponsor a kindergarten and
deal with all kinds of officials, volunteers and foreigners. He is indeed a very
distinctive type of lama in the Songzanlin Monastery.
These above practices of protecting cultural heritage skillfully negotiate
relationships between nonofficial (minjian) and official interests in ways that
confirm the dominance of Dukezong as a center of Tibetan culture, appealing
to the local population as well as tourists.
226 Wu Yinling
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
The recent reinvention of Dukezong as a Tibetan old town invokes a cultural

style that combines religious and popular customs within a “harmonious”
framework produced by and appealing to government officials, the local
Tibetan/Han elite, local Tibetans committed to transmitting their cultural
traditions, and outside visitors. Of course, the relationship between these dif-
ferent groups is not static, and they by no means share the same narrative of
Dukezong’s history. Yet they converge in a shared project of thinking about
how to bring the past into a commercially and aesthetically pleasing vision
of the future. Their interpretation of the temporal, spatial and material his-
tory of the past has depended on their objectives for the future. Hence, the
“old town” could combine elements from the dynastic past, the Republican
era and the Communist revolution; it could be both old and new at the same
time, incorporating histories and memories of destruction and devastation
into reinvented traditions oriented to future prosperity.
Interpreted through the language of cultural heritage, Dukezong’s re-
emergence as a “harmonious” Tibetan old town thus tells a story of destruc-
tion and reinvention, merging the past with the future, and the local with the
external, as the above description of the reconstruction of the Big Buddha
Temple reveals. Indeed, in material conditions that until recently were rela-
tively deprived, the town’s history of repeated disasters in the form of fires,
military violence and material devastation, including during the Cultural
Revolution, effectively shored up the influence of local Tibetan elites who de-
rived social and political capital from their association with Han institutions,
and were backed up by the local government to develop a heritage brand as a
key element of the tourism economy.
In the process, since the 1980s, we have seen that through the many changes
in Dukezong involving building and reconstruction, the idea of “cultural heri-
tage” has been used by both the local government and local nonofficial elites
to rebuild and re-create tradition. The emergence of Dukezong as a Tibetan
“old town” reminds us of Hobsbawm’s famous notion of “reinvented tradi-
tion” to refer to the processes and practices in which what are represented as
“traditions” from the past are established for contingent purposes (Hobsbawm
and Ranger 1983). In the process of the name change from Zhongdian to
Shangri-La, the local government was explicit in remodeling Dukezong as a
site of “Tibetan” traditions involving ordinary people and officials in building
a series of constructions as the old town of Dukezong, which was then de-
stroyed by the fire in 2014. Tibetans who lived in the old town and outside it
became involved—both enthusiastically and passively—in studying Tibetan
language and culture, effectively adding to the “reinvented” Tibetanization of

the town far beyond its civil classes in Tibetan language and literature.
The many facets of cultural heritage and preservation in Dukezong show
numerous instances of the influence of external elements on the local, as I
have demonstrated above. Moreover, Larong exemplifies how there is no
neat distinction between the official and the civil. The boundaries between
such categories merge in the conscious transmission of cultural heritage as a
process of renewed self-discovery emerging out of past destruction.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe huge thanks to Zhang Lisheng for his patient attention to translating
and editing parts of this chapter. I also want to thank Harriet Evans for her
help with the translation. Thanks too to her and Michael Rowlands for involv-
ing me in this project and for their insightful comments on different drafts of
this chapter. I also thank my PhD supervisor Professor Wang Mingming for
initially giving me the opportunity to undertake research in Dukezong. Apart
from Ye Dexiang, all the other names are pseudonyms.
NOTES
1. Tourist websites consistently mention Dukezong’s history of 1,300 years. See,

for example, https://www.topchinatravel.com/china-attractions/dukezong-ancient
-town.htm. Last visited on 30 October 2020.
2. Tusi (lit. headmen/chieftains) were hereditary tribal leaders recognized as impe-
rial officials by the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties of China. They ruled certain eth-
nic minorities in southwestern China nominally on behalf of the central government.
3. The Victory Banner is one of the Eight Auspicious Treasures in Tibetan Bud-
dhism. These eight symbols represent the offerings from the great Vedic gods to
Shakyamuni Buddha upon his enlightenment. The Victory Banner (Skt. dhvaja, Tib.
rgyal-mtshan) symbolizes the victory of Buddha’s attainment of enlightenment. It
was originally a military standard of Indian warfare and later used as the symbol of
the Buddha’s defeat of the four Maras, the demonic obstructers to spiritual progress.
Many deities, those associated with power and wealth in particular, have the Victory
Banner as their hand-held ensign, including Vaishravana, the Great Guardian King of
the north (see Beer 2003).
4. The “eight-petal lotus” is one of the Eight Auspicious Treasures of Tibetan Bud-
dhism, referring to the eight zones of the Shambhala Kingdom, translated as Shangri-
La. The spatial allocation of alleys and open spaces in the transformation of the “old
town” of Dukezong was based on this story.
228 Wu Yinling
5. In construction, the groove-shaped parts arranged around the lower part of the
structure, in order to prevent water from flowing from the vertical wall surface to the
bottom wall surface, are called the “drip line,” usually set in canopy, window, stair
step, balcony, parapet coping and the waist line of external walls.
6. According to this individual, local people had to apply to the management
committee of the Old Town for permission to undertake repairs to their houses. It was
not until October 2014 that the government issued land certificates to local residents.
7. The notion of public land here refers to how previously, households in Duke-
zong would leave space for fire exits and “drip lines” in the communal areas, but
how, driven by economic interests, homeowners or tenants took over these communal
spaces as their own. The town’s management committee, however, had no rules and
regulations to rely on, and thus neglected this issue.
8. In the history of Dukezong, there are two conventions in Tibetan that stipulate
fire prevention, namely, the Kahan Tibetan Convention of Zhongxin (Zhongxin ka
han zang gongyue) (1747) and the Convention on Military and Civilian Fire Preven-
tion (1895). One of the conventions stipulates that fire tunnels should be three feet
or chi (one chi is about one third of a meter) wide each. Private houses and terraces
needed to be reduced to avoid occupying public space. Each house should have a side
path of one or two chi wide, and the surrounding roads are compiled, so that it is three
and a half chi wide, and so on. The consensus was that there should be “drip lines”
and fire exits between homes, and the road width should be at least three chi. When
putting out a fire, the roof of the burning house would be torn off, and the drip line
would become an isolation belt. It was also stipulated that every household should
take part in firefighting.
9. The “Harmonious Four” is a popular theme in Tibetan Buddhist painting. Leg-
end has it that the elephant, the monkey, the rabbit and the chicken live peacefully and
harmoniously in one place. In the painting, the four animals are usually placed under
a big tree, the monkey on top of the elephant, the rabbit on top of the monkey and the
chicken on top of the rabbit. Paintings of the Harmonious Four are mostly found as
interior wall decoration of homes, symbolizing harmony and good fortune.
10. Ye Dexiang, a Dukezong native, was born in 1929. He is a descendant of the
Qing imperial general and a key member of the local Elder People’s Association. He
is Han and his wife is Tibetan. According to a news article in June 2020, Mr. Ye has
family members from four different ethnicities: Tibetan, Han, Hui and Naxi. I had
extensive interviews with Mr. Ye during my fieldwork, and he was an enthusiastic
participant in the reconstruction of Dukezong.
11. Nowadays the plaque of the association is displayed on the north side of the
archway to Turtle Mountain Park, but the Chaoyang Tower itself has been moved
outside the road by the western gate leading to the White Chicken Temple. The
Self-Employers’ Association was a local spontaneous nongovernmental organization
before the Elder People’s Association was founded. Its members controlled the local
economic resources, and many of them joined the Elder People’s Association after
retirement. The Self-Employers’ Association was dissolved afterwards.
12. Rolf Alfred Stein once pointed out that Tibetans regard the sacred mountains
as a local deity or local master (Stein 1972). Tibetans in Yunnan generally choose
the relatively independent mountain or the characteristic mountain near the local vil-
lage as their sacred mountain. Wherever people live, there will be sacred mountains.
Therefore, the Five Phoenixes Mountain is regarded as their sacred mountain by
Tibetans of Dukezong.
13. Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) is a well-known Tibetan religious philosopher. In
his iconic form, wearing a tall yellow hat, he features in the center of the Gelugpa sect
that was dominant in Tibet until the Chinese takeover in 1951, and whose de facto
leader is the Dalai Lama.
14. The traditional Tibetan guozhuang dance is found in ritual and popular practice
throughout Diqing Prefecture and has no specific relationship with Dukezong.
15. Eminent Tibetan monks who distinguished themselves in the practice of Bud-
dhism were referred to as “Living Buddhas” (huofo).
16. This is due to the fact that the reconstruction of the Big Buddha Temple was
led by the government, and the reason for reconstruction at first had nothing to do
with religion. Since the 1980s, the Songzanlin Temple has also been carrying out its
own restoration work.
17. In Tibetan Buddhism’s color symbolism, yellow has the highest value.
18. “Guihua” was the name given to the temple in the Qing dynasty. It implies
“submission” (guifu) and “receiving education” (shouqi jiaohua), indicating the Qing
rulers’ hopes for the Songzanlin Monastery.
19. See Document No. 115 of Yunnan Provincial People’s Government in 2001,
“Request for the Renaming of Zhongdian County to Shangri-La County” (accessed in
January 2014 at the Diqing Prefecture Archives of Yunnan Province).
20. Born in 1922, Wu Liangyong and his mentor Liang Sicheng cofounded the
Faculty of Architecture of Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 1946, focusing on urban
planning, architecture and design. Wu Liangyong is widely regarded as the most
influential architect and urban planner in the PRC. A PhD student of Wu’s, Di Hui,
also participated in the planning work of Dukezong, and drew on it to complete a
PhD thesis on “Shangri-La; Utopia and Ideal City” which discussed the plans for the
preservation of the old town of Dukezong.
21. As mentioned earlier, the eight-petal lotus is related to the legend of Tibetan
Buddhism. Many lotus patterns are inlaid on the green flag floor of Sifang Street
Square in Dukezong.
22. Of course, the Confucian Temple, Guandi Temple and Guanyin Pavilion only
appeared in the draft proposal put forward by local people, but they were not actually
repaired.
23. I learned afterwards that after 1986, similar Tibetan training classes rapidly
appeared. The year 1986 is when the 10th Panchen Lama visited Shangri-La. The
awakening of local Tibetan national culture is definitely related to this incident.
24. The kangcan is the organizational framework of eight small groups (or par-
ishes) in the Songzanlin Monastery. Even though they all come under the auspices
of the Songzanlin Monastery they effectively operate as branch temples/monasteries
( fensi).
230 Wu Yinling
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beer, Robert. A Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols. Boulder, CO: Shambhala

Press, 2003.
Dan, Zhu Angben. Tibetan Dictionary. Gansu People’s Publishing House, 2003.
Di, Hui. Shangri-La: Utopia and Ideal City. China Architecture & Building Press,
2005.
Diqing Prefecture Development and Reform Commission. 香格里拉县独克宗古
城“1·11”火灾恢复重建总体规划 (Master Plan for “1.11” Fire Recovery and Re-
construction of Dukezong, Shangri-La County). Internal publication, 2014.
Diqing Prefecture Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee Office. 香格里拉
(Shangri-La), 2011.
Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. London: Macmillan, 1933.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cam-
Huo, Xiaowei and Zhang Gong. 独克宗古城火灾恢复重建民居恢复与改造建设规
划(Planning for Restoration and Reconstruction of Residential Buildings in Duke-
zong Ancient City). Tsinghua Tongheng, 25 March 2015. Available at http://www.
thupdi.com/project/view?id=1386. Last visited February 28, 2021.
Investigation Team of the “1.11” Dukezong Fire Accident. 迪庆州香格里拉县独
克宗古城“1·11”重大火灾事故调查报告 (Investigation Report of the “1.11” Fire
Accident in Dukezong, Shangri-La County, Diqing Prefecture), Yunnan Province.
Internal publication, 2014.
Shangri-La County Urban and Rural Construction Bureau. 香格里拉县城乡建设志
(The Gazetteer of the Urban and Rural Construction of Shangri-La County Town).
Internal publication, 2013.
Stein, Rolf Alfred. Tibetan Civilization. Translated by J. E. Stapleton Driver. Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Wallace, Anthony F. C. “Acculturation: Revitalization Movements.” American An-
thropologist 58 (1956): 264–281.
Chapter Ten
From “Cultural Relics”

to “Sacred Objects”
A Case Study of Local Heritage Protection
in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery
He Beili
In 1996, the Samye Monastery, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, was
formally listed as a “key cultural relic (wenwu) under national protection.”1*
This monastery, second to none in Tibet’s history, henceforth acquired a new
identity, alongside its religious identity, as part of the nation’s cultural heri-
tage. Now, more than twenty years on, ideas and practices associated with
preservation, restoration and transformation of cultural relics have penetrated
the area around Samye, profoundly influencing local knowledge and under-
standing of the monastery. As I explain below, local people may take up the
official terminology of “cultural relic,” but they approach its application to
the Samye Monastery through their own concept of the “sacred object.” Local
conceptualizations of the “sacred object” thus have to be elucidated in order
to clarify what the people of Samye mean in using the idea of “cultural relic”
as a basis for thinking about meanings of cultural heritage in this context.
I examine this issue from two angles. The first situates it within the his-
torical context of the monastery’s original form, construction and restoration
over time up to the present. In this, I give particular attention to how the lo-
cal temporality which I describe as an “hourglass” sense of time dominates
subjective notions of history: local people emphasize the consistency between
the period of the monastery’s construction and its present situation, associat-
ing this with the original form of the monastery as defined by the schema of
Buddhist cosmology. Second, how do people understand the objects in the
monastery as “cultural relics”? Comparing the list of “cultural relics” as dis-
seminated in official discourse with a local checklist of “cultural relics,” it
becomes apparent that the latter is determined by local ideas about “sacred
objects.”
Finally, this discussion focuses on the practice of “sanctification” given
that both the monastery and its “relics” all have to go through a process of
231
232 He Beili
“sanctification” in order to become “sacred objects.” Moreover, this process

depends on a practice of consecration that is simultaneously a process of
“desanctification” in the form of pilgrimage. In other words, sanctification
and desanctification are indivisible elements of a single unified process, car-
ried out by both monks and followers. Together, these two elements can be
thought of as a “holistic sanctification.”
BRIEF RECORD OF THE SAMYE MONASTERY:

CURRENT REALITY, HISTORY, AND LEGEND
Spatial Situation and Architecture

The Samye Monastery is the first Buddhist monastery built in Tibet, probably
between 775–779 CE. As one of the most important pilgrimage destinations
in Tibet, it has a special meaning in Tibetan people’s lives. Its creation is
recorded in the key historical texts of Tibetan Buddhism.
The significance of the Samye Monastery in Buddhist history has recently
made it a focal site of local tourism. Since being recognized as a “key cultural
relic (wenwu) under national protection” it has come to be considered more
valuable than other local heritage tourism sites.
After my first visit to Samye in 2005, I returned again for a second pe-
riod of fieldwork in May 2011. A local man called Kalsang drove me in his
Land Cruiser into a town (zhen) that I could hardly recognize. The muddy
dirt roads I remembered from my first visit were now paved, and the former
adobe houses had been replaced by two-story Tibetan-style houses. Kalsang
used to be a monk in the Samye Monastery and had studied under Master
Tsering, then in his early forties, who was deputy director of the monastery’s
administrative committee, with important responsibilities in the monastery’s
management.
Kalsang had arranged for me to meet Director Tsering. As I waited for him
to arrive, I wandered down the street and came across the Samye Monastery
Hotel. The hotel used to be situated inside the monastery, providing accom-
modation for travelers and pilgrims. It had been enlarged and moved outside
and was now officially recognized by the government as the only hotel where
foreigners could stay. Right next to it stood a two-story building, the ground
floor of which was the Samye Monastery restaurant, even though it was no
longer run by the monastery. Next to the restaurant was the ticket office of
the Samye Monastery bus station. The floor above the restaurant was used
as a dormitory for the station and restaurant staff. Since the monastery’s bus
station provided the only public transportation in town, various local people
ran small transport businesses.
From “Cultural Relics” to “Sacred Objects” 233
The triangular-shaped town center on the northeastern side of the monas-

tery was less than half the size of the monastery. Local people used to describe
the monastery as “up there,” and the town center and the residential area as
“down there.” Around the monastery was a white wall separating the internal
space of the monastery from the residential buildings. The wall had four gates
in the cardinal directions: the east gate was the main gate announced by an
arch, outside of which a straight road—the town’s main road—ran further
east. Along this busy street were many shops and businesses, owned by both
the state and the monastery, as well as the police station and the post office.
At the end of the road there were two ways ahead. A stone tablet stood at
the intersection, with an inscription saying that in 2006 Samye was upgraded
to the level of small town (zhen). The tarred main road, lined with Tibetan-
style two-story buildings containing various government offices, were all
results of the town’s construction after the “upgrade.”
In the early stages of my fieldwork, I used to walk around the inside of the
monastery’s wall to learn about its architecture. The main Utse Temple was
located at the center of the monastery, and to its east, west, south and north
stood four middle-sized temples, all different in color and design. Each of
the four temples had two smaller temples of the same color on their left and
right sides.
Between the Utse Temple and the two middle-sized temples were the
Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon. During the Cultural Revolu-
tion, the Temple of the Sun was destroyed and replaced by a clinic. By 2011,
it had been rebuilt on the original site. To the southeast, southwest, northwest
and northeast of the Utse Temple were four pagodas of similar size, but of
different colors and design. These were all destroyed during the Cultural
Revolution and had been rebuilt in concrete.
The stone wall surrounding the monastery was one thousand two hundred
meters long and three and a half meters high. Inside it was a fresco with im-
ages of more than a thousand Buddhist pagodas; outside was a circumambu-
lation where all sorts of followers—women and men, young and old—used
to walk from morning to night, reciting their prayers.
The monastery complex, as shown from the air in figure 10.1, covers an area
of twenty-five thousand square meters, divided into three categories of build-
ings. The first includes the main religious buildings as recorded in the histories
of the monastery: the Utse Temple, four middle-sized temples and their eight
side temples, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, the four
pagodas and the stone boundary wall. These form the core of parts of the mon-
astery to which tourists and followers have access. The second refers to other
religious buildings including the Sutra-Viewing Terrace, a platform displaying
figures of Buddhas in front of the Utse Temple, and an enormous Buddhist
234 He Beili
academy. These buildings play as important a role in monks’ religious life in

the monastery as the first category. The third covers the functional amenities,
including dormitories, kitchens, shops, dining halls, a hostel and toilets. These
secular amenities are never “officially” introduced to outside visitors.
Construction, Restoration and Temporality

The initial construction of the monastery in the eighth century was followed
by a persecution of Buddhism. The monastery was shut down but not de-
stroyed, and its monks were all banished. But in 842, Langdarma, the em-
peror responsible for the persecution, was assassinated. The political center of
the earlier Tibetan Empire collapsed and a turbulent period of fragmentation
in Tibet’s history began. Buddhism’s development in Tibet was interrupted
for over a hundred years, and its primary site, the Samye Monastery, was
deserted. In the mid-eleventh century, another religious leader with a follow-
ing of thousands of people started the first major renovation of the Samye
Monastery. Between then and the last major renovation of the monastery in
1849, there were numerous minor renovations under different political and
religious authorities. The year 1849 was the date of the last major renovation
before the Communist government took over in the mid-twentieth century.
During the twelve centuries since its foundation, the history of the Samye
Monastery has waxed and waned between periods of restoration and destruc-
tion. Each destruction set the scene for the next restoration; every time old
buildings and figures were destroyed, so they were replaced, reestablishing
Figure 10.1. Panorama of the Samye Monastery, author’s photo

the monastery. The monastery suffered different degrees of damage at differ-

ent times, so its restoration never signified a completely new start. It is thus
impossible to draw up a clear temporal genealogy dividing the “old” from the
“new” in the physical history of the Samye Monastery. This introduced to me
the realization that what heritage practitioners might see as destruction and
rebuilding of the monastery was not locally perceived as loss and restoration.
When talking with local people in Samye about how the monastery was
built, the issue invariably produced a spirited response. However, no matter
who was talking, and despite narrative differences, their many responses were
based on the same story. For Tsering, this was completely obvious, because
all their stories came from the Biography of the Lotus Master, considered to
be the mythical founder of the monastery. According to this, the monastery
was constructed by a collaboration between human beings, ghosts and deities
under the direction of the Lotus Master.
For the monks and followers of Samye, this myth was a sacred scripture.
Under Tsering’s instruction, I came to realize that their versions of the build-
ing of the monastery were all based on the relevant texts. Whatever changes
the monastery had gone through, for the people of Samye, it had basically
remained as it was recorded in the History of the Monastery, a record derived
from two chapters describing the early construction of the monastery in The
Biography of the Lotus Master (Yeshe, Erjinling and Yargyal, 1990). For the
people of Samye, all the stories in this Tibetan record were true.
This collaboration between human beings, ghosts and deities did not recur
in the history of the monastery’s repairs. The relationship between its early
construction and later repairs had a particular indivisible significance for the
monks and people of Samye. The Biography of the Lotus Master noted that
repairs undertaken to the Samye Monastery over time constituted offerings
rather than acts of reconstruction or physical maintenance. In other words,
after its initial construction, the monastery had no further history of “repairs”
or “re-construction.” It was this sense of temporality recorded in this text
that over time imperceptibly shaped the views of its followers, that they then
shared with others, including me.
For people in Samye, units of time are not identical to one another. As we
have seen, the short period of time when the Samye Monastery was created
was prominent in their accounts, whereas the intervening centuries between
its foundation and the present were entirely overlooked. In this sense, the
“density” of time in their understanding is not evenly distributed, as it as-
sumes to be in the “objective” rendering of linear time. Rather, it is higher
at both ends, in the beginning and the present, and lower in the middle,
hence the metaphor of an “hourglass” structure. Between the beginning and
the present, no matter how long the “history” is—whether a hundred or ten
236 He Beili
thousand years—for the hourglass, it is just a narrow bottleneck through

which the fine sand of time flows from the beginning to the present. It is
this hourglass-shaped temporality that sustains local people’s accounts of
the building of the monastery, and also explains Tsering’s assertion that the
monastery’s entire history can be found in the life story of the Lotus Mas-
ter. Every repair since the monastery’s creation has been an “offering” or a
“return” to its history, rather than a contribution bringing “new things” to a
“renewed” history.
“CULTURAL RELICS” AND “SACRED OBJECTS”
Official Cultural Relics of the Samye Monastery

In 1980 an official team specifically set up for the purpose went to the Samye
Monastery to survey and record its cultural relics. The result was a volume
entitled Brief Annals of the Samye Monastery (He and Sonam 1987) which
catalogued the monastery’s objects under four main headings: stone tablets,
steles and inscriptions; bronze and copper implements; bricks and tiles; and
plaques.
The most famous stele inscription is a covenant to restore Buddhism from
the period of the Tubo Kingdom (618–842 CE), which still stands on the
south side of the main entrance to the Utse Temple. There are also about one
thousand five hundred stone statues of diverse kinds, with the earliest dating
from the Thousand Buddhas period around the fifteenth century. The semi-
reliefs of these and the human figures of this early period are not particularly
dynamic, and apart from some lotus blossom seats, have minimal ornamenta-
tion. In this they are very similar to the monastery’s Buddhist frescoes of the
same period. The high relief statues of the later period after the eighteenth
century, are much more detailed and refined, mostly of famous historical
figures, sharing the same style and dating from the same period. Apart from a
pair of stone lions on either side of the entrance to the Utse Temple and a pair
of stone elephants outside the lower Buddha Hall, there are very few traces of
these kinds of statues elsewhere.
The Brief Annals recorded that the only bronze bells that apparently sur-
vive from the Tubo period are the three in the Samye Monastery. A single
big one hangs in the corridor by the eastern entrance to the Utse Temple, and
two smaller ones are in the monastery’s treasury. There is also a bronze bottle
shaped like a gourd, hence its name the “Bronze Gourd Bottle,” reportedly
used to celebrate the restoration of the gold roof and the statues of the Buddha
in the Utse Temple. Another story is that it may have been cast by Tibetan
and Han people working together and given to the monastery when the ruling
regent was overthrown in 1940. Even though this piece is not very old, it is
classified as a cultural relic due to its rare form.
The Brief Annals note that bricks and tiles are the most numerous and earli-
est of the monastery’s cultural relics. The bricks include square, rectangular,
trapezoid and other shapes, most of which are inscribed with ancient Tibetan
script. The tiles feature big slabs and long shapes of different dimensions in
fine green and multi-colored glazes. Most of these are marked with Tibetan
script noting the names of places and Bodhisattvas. They are thus rich evi-
dence of the aesthetic and artisanal achievements of ancient Tibet.
Most of the plaques were gifts from the Qing dynasty emperors (1644–
1911) and are inscribed with Chinese characters. According to the Brief An-
nals, most were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but one wooden
plaque with the characters for “universal blessing” (da qian pu you) has been
preserved and hangs above the second door of the Utse Temple. It is framed
by golden dragons and golden characters against a blue background, but since
its seal and signature have been destroyed it is impossible to know which
emperor bestowed it.
“Cultural Relics” Recorded by the Samye Monastery Monks

The Samye Monastery monks decided to draw up a checklist of the cultural
relics respected by pilgrims, in their own Short Annals of the Auspicious Sa-
mye Monastery (Leyshe 1997). The most important “relic” was a particular
statue of the Lotus Master, called the “Like Me” statue, because legend has
it that the Lotus Master once said, “this statue looks just like me.” This, and
two other statues of Buddhas, are known as the “three respected masters” who
founded the monastery. There is also the ancient bell, the covenant to restore
Buddhism in front of the entrance to the Utse Temple, mentioned above, a
stone naturally shaped like the Sakyamuni Buddha, other statues of different
materials, and various seals, including the seal of the Lotus Master.
Apart from reference to the ancient bell and the covenant, there wasn’t
much overlap between the items listed in the Brief Annals and those on the
monks’ checklist. Those responsible for the Brief Annals identified objects
as “cultural relics” on the grounds of their historical value, while the monks
selected items because they had been valued by followers since the Tubo
period. Many of these were objects that had been passed down through the
ages from important masters—statues of the Bodhisattva or implements used
by important monks. They numbered no more than twenty-six in the official
Brief Annals.
In fact, most of the relics accumulated in the monastery through the years
were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. As recorded by the state
238 He Beili
practitioners who conducted the survey for the Brief Annals, a total of more
than forty thousand kilograms of bronze statues and objects were destroyed at
this time, plus vast quantities of brocade items embroidered in Tibetan script
with an introduction to the Samye Monastery. I was told that the worst of the
destruction was of the “Like Me” statue of the Lotus Master. This mud statue,
dating back to the Tubo period, had survived without damage for more than
one thousand years, because in the eyes of its believers, it was unimaginably
sacred and efficacious. But in the Cultural Revolution it was moved out of
the hall where it had been venerated, and after being smashed was thrown
into the pond in the courtyard. The sacred scripts stored inside the statue were
extremely precious and were also thrown into the same pond. The fragrance
from the medicines and incense burned as offering to the statue hung around
in the air for seven days and seven nights. Just as sacred were the bones of an
orthodox Mahayana teacher stored in his holy stupa which was also destroyed
during the Cultural Revolution. However, the bones were left exposed to the
elements until a child shepherd came across the skull of the teacher and hid
it in his home. Later it was sold to an entrepreneur who gifted it to another
temple where it was displayed for a while before finally being returned to the
Samye Monastery.
So these “relics” venerated by the monks and followers of the Samye Mon-
astery have all had a bumpy ride in the past half century or so: some were
“returned,” some were “restored or rebuilt,” some were lost and some found
their way into the market. Others simply disappeared into thin air.
Without a doubt, a huge number of sacred objects and treasures, such as
those seen on the front cover, accumulated by the Samye Temple over more
than a thousand years suffered devastating damage during the Cultural Revo-
lution. For a while I felt extremely guilty for being a Han person as if I were
also partly to blame for the damage of Tibetan culture caused by the event
initiated by people of my ethnicity. But the masters of the temple comforted
me by saying that local Tibetans also participated in the Cultural Revolution
destruction of sacred objects, alongside the Han Chinese from the mainland,
but those Han people were not me, so I didn’t have to feel remorse for their
actions.
In the eyes of the monks, this traumatic history is not so much caused by
“external forces” and “others” as by gongye-collective behavior and respon-
sibility shared by everyone. However, in contrast to the monks’ tolerance,
local people find it hard to forgive those who destroyed the monasteries, and
they would tell me that those “bad people” eventually had their retributive
suffering, and their descendants would also be punished for their sins. They
knew where some “bad people” lived, but in daily life, they were careful to
maintain their relationships with each other.
The “Like Me” Statue of the Lotus Master

As the central hall of the Samye Monastery, the Utse Temple is the first
place pilgrims visit on arriving at the monastery. The Temple is divided into
three levels: lower, middle and higher. The lower level is divided into the
Scriptures Hall and the Buddhas Hall. When pilgrims arrive, they prostrate
themselves three times on entering the Scriptures Hall, then walk one after
the other along the left corridor of the hall to worship in front of the statue of
the Buddha. At the end of the left side are five statues, three of which were
recorded in the Short Annals: The “Like Me” statue of the Lotus Master, and
two others. Pilgrims consider all three to be special, but the most special is
the “Like Me” statue. Many pilgrims travel from distant places just to pray in
person in front of the Lotus Master statue.
The story of the “Like Me” statue was told me by Monk Takchin, the
guardian of the Utse Temple. According to this, in the Tubo period, an artisan
master was invited to carve a likeness of the Lotus Master, and when the Lo-
tus Master saw his image he was so satisfied that he congratulated the crafts-
man saying, “It’s just like me.” So the image came to be known as the “Like
Me” statue. The story goes that when the Lotus Master passed on, the statue
was given to the Samye Monastery, and when believers saw it, it was as if
they were seeing the Lotus Master himself. Fortunately, after it was destroyed
in the Cultural Revolution, a photograph of the statue that had been taken by
a Taiwanese visitor, seen in figure 10.2, found its way to the monastery, and
was then hung in the great hall.
Nowadays, the “Like Me” statue that is displayed in the monastery was
newly created after the Cultural Revolution, but when I asked whether this
meant it was “fake,” Takchin was amazed. “How could you say it was fake?”
he asked, looking very stern. For me, the explanation was that its materials,
its techniques, its craftsmanship and ornamentation were all completely dif-
ferent to the original. Takchin responded with “But it’s still the ‘Like Me’
statue, exactly the same as the last one.” This didn’t seem to make much sense
to me. How could a recently created statue be the same as its original? Look-
ing at it from a material point of view, it was a completely different piece to
the original. The only similarity was in its name.
However, I realized that this issue was of no concern to most followers.
They did not question the historical origins and naming of the statue or the
rational logic explaining its name. For them, as long as the statue they saw
bore the name “Like Me,” it was the “Like Me” statue. Their beliefs left no
room for doubt about the statue simply because it was a reproduction.
A protective glass window was erected around the “Like Me” statue, and
a photograph of the original “Like Me” statue was displayed on the window.
Visitors who wanted a photograph were given a reprint of the original photo.
Figure 10.2. A “Like Me” statue of the Lotus Master created during the Tubo period,
author’s photo
These photos could not be sold because they were not secular objects, so
people would simply “ask” for them, rather than “buy” them. For believers,
the original and the reprinted photos were exactly the same; for them, they
were the “Like Me” statue, and possessed the same extraordinary sacred
capacity as the Lotus Master himself to ward off external harm, protect fol-
lowers and satisfy their hopes. Corresponding with this, followers’ beliefs in
the “Like Me” statue strengthened its sacred capacities, attracting more and
more followers and pilgrims.
It was because of this that the monastery’s monks were initially unwilling
to let visitors take photographs of the “Like Me” statue and other Buddhas. In
their eyes, there was no difference between these photos and the Buddha stat-
ues; they all possessed sacred qualities, so if photographers were disrespect-
ful, this could have a harmful influence on current and future life. However,
due to the increasing numbers of visitors, this outlook is no longer as impor-
tant to the monks as it used to be. Tourists can now take as many photos in
the great hall as they want for a fee of forty yuan. Believers, however, do not
need to pay, because their intention in taking photos is not for commercial or
touristic purposes but is to “ask” something of the Buddha. Nor do believers
have to buy a ticket to enter the monastery. Many tourists have noted their an-
noyance at this and use any means possible to avoid paying the entrance fee.
The increasing numbers of pilgrims and the increasing commercialization
of the monastery are like two distinct channels flowing in parallel down the
same river. However, in practice, there are endless conflicts between the two
due to differences in purpose. What seems to be the same activity belongs
either to the world of the sacred or to the world of the secular.
For tourists, the monastery is a place to visit, and its shop sells souvenirs
such as small statues and Buddhist trinkets such as khadas and protective
talismans.2 The exchange of money for these objects is a commercial transac-
tion. In contrast, for believers, exactly the same activity has a totally different
meaning: far from being a commercial exchange, like buying some product,
it is “asking” the Buddha for a protective talisman that they can take home
to benefit from its sacred power. Hence, the money paid by the believer is a
kind of offering.
From the perspective of the heritage practitioners who wrote the Brief An-
nals, the damage done by believers to the statues and frescoes is irreversible.
For the believers, in contrast, as long as the statue is in its original place and
the fresco resembles the original version, the original will be restored. For
them, what this means is that the efficacy of their “object” of worship can be
sustained, and the temporal rupture between the old and new can be repaired,
without restoring the old version to exactly its original form.
242 He Beili
Hence when confronted with damage to the frescoes, buildings and stat-
ues, the monks and believers do not share the same concerns as the heritage
practitioners. While the former would be hurt by the damage done to the
monastery, they are reassured by knowing that it can be restored. From the
perspective of the interactions between the “Like Me” statue and its fol-
lowers, the sacred capacity of the statue and the followers’ beliefs mutually
constitute each other; the material object of the statue is simply the carrier of
this relationship, and as a material object, it can be remade or repaired. In the
Tubo period, followers’ beliefs in the “Like Me” statue originated from its
original creation and then grew over time like small streams becoming a big
river. During the Cultural Revolution, the destruction of the material fabric
of the statue did not destroy people’s belief in it. Rather, it became the origin
of the restoration of the “Like Me” statue. Once the new statue was remade it
became the carrier of this belief, inheriting and adding to the statue’s original
sacred power. Its power can also be transported with the aid of new technolo-
gies, such as photographs and video film, creating reproductions of the statue
that carry and transmit its sacred power.
The Lost Treasures

The treasured objects in the Samye Monastery were kept in a small “treasury”
at the northeast corner of the Utse Temple. Iron railings divided this into two
parts. Behind the railings there were three altars. The central one displayed
the three respected masters, mentioned above, and on each side was a cabinet
containing treasures donated by the monastery’s followers. An elderly monk
told me that before Liberation the vast numbers of treasures displayed in the
monastery were not categorized as they are today. He recalled that before
Liberation the skull of the orthodox Mahayana teacher hung on a pillar in the
Utse Temple and believers worshipped it when they passed by it. He further
recalled that a brown mask made of lacquered fabric was also displayed. But
because of the damage during the Cultural Revolution and continuous looting
and unexpected fires, the monastery had to change its method of display and
gathered its treasures into one place under more strict management.
During my fieldwork I once went behind the railings to see these trea-
sures up close. There were several groups of people in front of the cabinet
on the east side. The guardian monk of the treasury asked the people to bow
to show their respect. A Han woman, who had become a nun, and her son,
along with a few local Tibetan shepherds knelt down at once. The guardian
opened the glass door of the cabinet and carefully took out the treasures and
showed them to us one by one, introducing each one in turn. In fact, all these
treasures were named in the monks’ Short Annals. The guardian then placed
the treasures on top of each person’s head for a short moment in an empow-
erment ritual. As he did this, people crowded forward for their turn, anxious
that they might be left out.
Just as the guardian was finishing, Tsering arrived at the treasury, and I
asked him why the treasures from the other cabinet were not included in
this ritual. In response, Tsering told me that even he didn’t know the origins
of those treasures. Some were discovered when the monastery was rebuilt,
some were donated by local villagers, but no one knew where they came
from, where they were made or how they were used. In other words, these
were treasures that had no known lineage. Even though they possessed strong
sacred power, the loss of their lineage meant that they could not be displayed.
Moreover, objects without a lineage could not be used until their lineage was
restored, and there was no certainty that this would happen. So until then,
Tsering asserted, the best approach was to carefully store them away to pre-
vent any unforeseeable consequences their display might bring.
Each and every treasure that the monks and believers worshipped thus
consisted of a material object and its lineage. Moreover, it is only when an
object’s lineage is known that it can be displayed as a sacred object. Without
its lineage the object can only exist as an old thing without the capacity to
interact with believers. In other words, people dare not use such an object
as a source of sacred power, however old or valuable or perfectly preserved
it might be, because without its lineage it does not have much spiritual
meaning. On the other hand, an object with a lineage, even if damaged or
destroyed, can be restored and re-created to preserve the same sacred power
as its original.
WHERE DOES SANCTITY COME FROM

AND WHERE DOES IT GO?
Consecration: The Return of Sacred Power

In the third month of the Tibetan calendar, or May in the Gregorian calendar,
the monks began to prepare for the annual Consecration Ceremony. With
countless pilgrims and tourists coming to the monastery every year, their
“bad karma” would constantly defile the monastery and weaken its sacred
power. Therefore a grand consecration ceremony is held every year in order
to restore the sanctity of the monastery and the sacred objects.
A thin rope woven with strands of five different colors (red, yellow, blue,
green, white) was used to connect all the statues in the monastery together.
At one end of the rope was a small figure of the Gautama Buddha, which
was only present on this specific occasion, while at the other was a vajra—a
244 He Beili
ritual club—used only by the monk who presided over the ceremony. The
Gautama figure was placed on the middle of the altar. On its left side was a
large brass plate, filled with barley of five colors, on top of which was a piece
of fabric. Underneath the brass plate were seven bottles. To the right of the
Gautama figure was another of the Lotus Master. In front of this were seven
water bowls and behind it were five dolmas, or written prayers. The Gautama
figure stood on a stand, beneath which was a pair of vajra. A brass mirror was
placed in front of the Gautama figure. On one side of the mirror was an old
twig and on the other three small brass bowls, with saffron crocus juice, yak
butter and yak milk respectively. The Gautama figure, the brass mirror, twig
and fabric were all sacred objects handed down across time, which could be
used only at the consecration ceremony.
During the ceremony monks chanted the consecration script for three days.
On the fourth day of the ceremony, monks dressed in yellow robes who were
dedicated to Buddhist rules walked around the monastery, holding ritual ob-
jects and sacred texts to consecrate every statue and sacred object, as seen in
figure 10.3.
Some worshipers crowded round the monks and others prepared smoke
by burning pine twigs at the thresholds of the temples to await the monks.
In thick smoke with a guard of honor playing Buddhist music, the monks
Figure 10.3. Monks performing the purifying rite during the consecration ceremony,
author’s photo
performed their consecration ritual following a set route, starting from the
Utse Temple and ending at the kitchen. Women were not allowed to enter
the kitchen, because this was where the offerings to the spirits guarding the
drink and food were made. Whatever the weather, this part of the consecra-
tion ceremony always lasted for one whole day.
This ritual of consecration could endow a secular object with religious
power and meaning. No building, object or statue could be sanctified without
being consecrated. When the Samye Monastery was built, the Lotus Master
presided over its first consecration ceremony. Since then, every major repair
to the monastery was followed by a consecration ceremony, until the event
began to be undertaken annually.
The premise of the repetitive character of the ceremony was that the
sanctity of objects was not universal or everlasting. Rather it could increase,
diminish, and also be removed. The relationship between sanctity and secu-
larity of an object was one of exchange, involving the transformation from
quantitative to qualitative change. The practice of consecration was thus for
the purpose of re-empowering sacred objects. One explanation about the
decrease of an object’s sanctity is that it is caused by the contamination of
human breath, mostly during worship and pilgrimage. Women are also said
to be able to contaminate sacred objects, hence they are excluded from some
religious places. Yet in reality, these risks of contamination are almost im-
possible to avoid as they always happen with the undertaking of pilgrimages.
Pilgrimage
The annual Dodey Ceremony is the most important celebration in the Samye
Monastery. Thousands of pilgrims come for the ceremony. They worship the
Buddha during the day and walk around the monastery in the evening after the
monastery is closed to visitors. Many go hiking in the holy mountain or walk
around the six pagodas nearby. On the last day of the ceremony, pilgrims rise
very early and take a bus to visit the sacred sites. After that, they do not return
to Samye but continue their pilgrimage elsewhere. In sum, the pilgrimage in
Samye consists of four parts: worshiping at the ceremony, walking around the
monastery, hiking in the holy mountain and visiting the sacred sites.
A pilgrimage in Tibet is a physical endeavor to integrate the person, the
monastery and the sacred landscape. It is an essential part of Buddhist activi-
ties in Tibet, and involves pilgrims’ participation in a ceremony and walk-
ing and prostrating themselves outside the monastery. It also involves the
powerful popular belief in the Three Ways of Liberation—seeing, hearing
and touching. Visiting sacred sites is the first level of pilgrimage, which al-
lows Buddhist followers to see and hear for themselves. Touching the sacred
246 He Beili
objects takes the pilgrimage to a higher level. Pilgrims rub the statues with
their prayer beads, spread butter on the altar and eat the plaster dust fallen
from the frescoes. For fear of the “damage” caused by such conduct, heritage
preservers installed wired wooden handrails to “protect” the frescoes. Pil-
grims then had to make contact with them by rubbing the handrail.
Making an offering is also an important practice in pilgrimage. A couple
of plastic boxes to collect money are placed at the threshold of the Utse
Temple. Pilgrims put their offerings into the box and take out any change
they need. They can also ask for a khada as an offering. They take a khada at
the threshold and place it on the altar, leaving some money in the box. At the
end of the day, khadas on the altar are collected and returned to the threshold
to be invited again. In a word, the meaning of pilgrimage lies in the physical
interaction between worshipers and sacred objects, fulfilled by their seeing,
touching and offering-making.
Monastery, Economy and the Building of a Community

One late afternoon toward the end of my fieldwork, I came across the town’s
deputy mayor on the street. Over the six months I had already stayed there, I
had not been in contact with the local authorities, and they had not intervened
in my research. The deputy mayor was slightly drunk but he recognized me
and invited me to join him for tea. When tea was served he changed his cup
for a bottle of beer.
“How long are you going to stay in Samye?” he asked me. “Probably an-
other couple of months,” I said. “You find it OK living here?” “Very good.”
“Really?” “Of course,” I said. “Don’t you miss your family? You have a
child, don’t you?” he asked. “I do, but I don’t have time to think about my
family.” “Then you don’t miss them,” claimed the deputy mayor, “but I do
miss mine.” “They are not here?” “I sent them to Lhasa, so the kids can go
to school there and learn Putonghua.” I nodded. “You think I speak pretty
good Putonghua?” he asked me proudly. “Yes,” I echoed. “Good Putong-
hua can make you a cadre,” he lowered his voice as if telling me a secret.
“You live alone in Samye?” I asked. “Yes, I’m alone . . . It’s really not that
exciting!” “How come? People say it’s a real blessing to be able to live in
Samye,” I said. “But there’s really not much for me to do here. The mon-
astery runs the biggest hotel, the only bus station, the best restaurant, and
it owns shops, and engineering trucks for construction work. It donates
money to the primary school every year. The monastery has so much
money, way more than the government! . . . The apartment buildings we
built a few years ago were all purchased by the monastery and then let out.
We finished the construction but they will profit from it for decades.” “The
monastery earns more money than the government?” I asked. “Certainly it

does! It is the biggest economic entity in this place,” said the deputy mayor.
The notion that the monastery was the most important economic entity in
town was reasserted by Yangzom who ran the monastery restaurant. The idea
of the monastery being financially powerful was firmly entrenched in local
people’s minds, while perfectly compatible with its sanctity. The monastery
played a major role in constructing and managing the community by running
profitable enterprises that benefited people’s daily lives. The local stores,
transportation, and medical service owned and run by the monastery were
more trusted than private and state-owned businesses.
The entrepreneurial role of the monastery developed in conjunction with
its sacred and religious power. Its economic activities were not driven by a
desire for profit and its involvement in community development was not for
political motives. They were the outcome of the combined effort of the monks
and local people to keep the monastery alive and prosperous.
Landscaping the Monastery

In June 2013 I returned to Samye for a follow-up visit and found that the
monastery had undergone many changes since I left the year before. A new
seven-floor building had been built in it for “exhibiting the Buddha.” On
its south side, the monastery hotel and restaurant had been replaced by an
administration building for the Samye Monastery work group, displaying the
national flag and portraits of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and
Hu Jintao at its front entrance.3
The plants and animals that used to be everywhere in the monastery had
all been removed and replaced with fenced lawns and saplings, and concrete-
paved walkways had been constructed to protect the newly created landscape.
People could no longer walk freely around the monastery but had to follow
the paths. The refurbishment and construction work were still going on inside
the monastery.
Since the monastery “work group” started recruiting new employees in
2012, the number of administrative staff had increased to almost the same
number as the monks. According to new regulations, the main management
positions in the monastery could only be taken by members of the work
group, and no longer by monks.
The staff accommodation buildings were under construction, and so were
the new dormitory buildings for monks. But Tsering told me that he would
prefer the dorm he was living in with his brother and his disciples. I was wor-
ried that these new buildings would bring major transformations to the spatial
layout of the monastery. Yangzom, the manager of the monastery restaurant,
248 He Beili
did not seem content with the recent changes either. She complained that
the monastery had been stealing customers from local restaurants, making
it more and more difficult for private businesses to survive. Under normal
circumstances Tibetan people would rarely say negative things about monks
or the monastery, for it was regarded as extremely disrespectful. However,
during this two-month visit in 2013 I heard quite a few such complaints. I
have to admit that as some of these comments suggested, the landscaping of
Samye Monastery made it more like a “scenic spot” than a “sacred place,”
and this may also have had a subtle negative influence on the monks and
locals of Samye.
Holistic Sanctification
Over the Samye Monastery’s long existence, it is not only that the landscape
of the monastery that has changed, but also its identity and physical position-
ing. Initially, during the Tubo dynasty, the Samye Monastery was a Buddhist
temple belonging to the Zamp, the ruler of Tibet. Then the major denomina-
tions of Tibetan Buddhism that arose after the collapse of the Tubo dynasty
made the Samye Monastery both the ancestral home of the Nyingma sect
of Tibetan Buddhism and the ancestral temple jointly worshipped by all the
major denominations. Now, with the process of China’s economic reform, the
Samye Monastery has been given a new cultural identity as a nationally pro-
tected “key cultural relic” and a national tourist heritage site of exceptional
importance.
Maybe because of this, the first question I had during my fieldwork in the
Samye Monastery was to clarify its “multiple” identities or positionings and
the relationship between them. In fact, it didn’t take long before I realized that
the memories and accounts of the people of Samye, including the monks and
local residents outside the temple, were extremely selective. People attached
great importance to the period when the monastery was created, as the source
of its sanctity, and to life in the present, seen as the real life of everyone inside
and outside the monastery. In contrast, local people were not at all concerned
with the long millennial history of the monastery between its creation and
the present.
As I’ve noted above, this attitude gradually took shape in a unique tem-
porality or sense of time: like the two ends of an hourglass, the initial period
when the monastery was created was at the upper end, and the later period
of real life at the lower end. People’s accounts of the construction of the
monastery passed through the narrow bottleneck—representing more than a
thousand years—directly spilling into present-day life and shaping the experi-
ence and outlook of local people.
This hourglass-like temporality is obviously not homogeneous. In zooming

in on a notion of compressed time linking a beginning and an end without
accounting for anything in between, local people create or imagine a “direct
connection” between the creation of the monastery and real life in the present.
The sanctification of material objects emerges from the understanding and
perception of things that this “direct docking” gives rise to.
Local people repeatedly emphasized that the monastery is the iconic repre-
sentation of Buddhism’s universalistic cosmology of the “one world.” In its
long history, no matter what kind of damage and reconstruction it suffered,
in their view, it never deviated from this original form. In this process, time
has also been given a sacred quality. This is the origin of the monastery’s
construction and its “holistic sanctification.”
In Buddhist belief there are four main sources of or paths to this “sancti-
fication”: the sanctity of the origin, the owner, the builder, and the user. Just
one of these is sufficient to grant “sanctification.” For example, the figure
of the Lotus Master is sanctified because of its originary sanctity, the skull
of an orthodox Mahayana teacher is sanctified because of its owner, and the
Lotus Master’s seal and cane are sanctified because of their user. The Samye
Monastery is sanctified because of all four categories: the monastery’s con-
struction to resemble Buddhism’s cosmological schema gives it its originary
sanctity; it was built by the Lotus Master and his students, hence the monas-
tery’s sanctification by its builders. After the monastery was built, its opening
consecration ceremony carried out by the Lotus Master signified the monas-
tery’s status as the “owner” of its sanctity. Since the monastery was guarded
and used by monks, these then bestowed the sanctity of the users.
In short, what is “sanctified,” including the space where it is located, is a
sacred object. As such, it has no essential relationship with the material qual-
ity of the item, or its production date, its craftsmanship, its design, its ethnic
attributes or its cultural region. But curiously, believers invariably offer valu-
able things to these “sacred objects.” Brushing gold is to apply a layer of gold
powder on the surface of the object. Over time, the true image of the sacred
object will be hidden under thick layers of gold powder, as seen in the cover
image. They also offer treasures such as turquoise, pearls, corals, and amber,
to decorate the sacred objects, including the Buddha statues, the pagodas, and
even the floors of the monastery buildings. As a result, the sacred objects gain
commercial value, hence a value as “cultural relics.” They may even acquire
an exceptional market value because of the priceless gems offered to them.
“Sanctification” is not a static or linear process, because it is also defined
by “de-sanctification” (or “contamination”). In fact, most of the rituals
of the monastery are closely related to the parallel practical processes of
“sanctification” and “de-sanctification.” Believers are blessed by conducting
250 He Beili
pilgrimages to the monastery. On the other hand, their “bad karma” defiles
the monastery over time. So it holds an annual grand consecration ceremony
to decontaminate and re-sanctify itself and its sacred objects.
The sacred object is thus a link between believers and monks. Both must
cooperate to complete the practices and processes of “de-sanctification” and
“sanctification.” Just as “death” and “birth” are elements of each individual’s
reincarnation, so “de-sanctification” and “sanctification” are the reincarna-
tion of sacred objects.
It is thus not difficult to realize that the “sacred object” in the minds of the
people of Samye is totally different to the state’s definition of this monastery
and its important objects as “cultural relics.” In literal terms, cultural relics
are cultural and historical things; they may be ritual objects passed down and
preserved from generation to generation. A basic characteristic of this kind of
protection central to heritage practice is the prohibition against its use.
However, in the Samye Monastery, the vitality of the “sacred objects”
is sustained through their use. They need to interact with people. General
practice in Buddhist monasteries was for only those items of unknown lin-
eage to be physically isolated, because they were neither “contaminated” nor
“sacred,” but were of uncertain nature and could thus be dangerous. Now,
however, with the impact of commercialization and the high price of cultural
relics, monks have to put some ancient and precious sacred objects away into
cabinets to guard against theft, where they are left just for display. Only those
sacred things that are not so precious in material terms are left to circulate
in practice and be transmitted across time. What other choice do the monks
have in real terms?
Traditionally, monks in monasteries would not “prevent theft” of sacred
objects because of an understanding of taboos shared by monks and believers.
Buddhist sacred objects cannot be casually or “illegally” used; inappropri-
ately using sacred objects or even smuggling them for profit will definitely
bring disaster to those involved, such as premature death and hell after death,
bringing disaster to future generations. To this day, various stories still circu-
late in the town of Samye about the punishment of the people involved in the
destruction of the monastery’s Buddha statues.
The “holistic sanctification” of the Samye Monastery also includes its
bricks and tiles, grasses and livestock, all of which are “sanctified” in the
eyes of local people. Obviously, the designers who did the landscaping did
not understand it this way. They eradicated the native plants in the courtyards
and replaced them with lawns and pine trees. They got rid of the cattle and
sheep, and built roads and fences. They tried to make the Samye Monastery a
modern tourist attraction, only focusing on the ancient buildings and cultural
relics they marked out for preservation. For the people of Samye, as long as
the monastery’s main buildings symbolizing its original form were not de-
molished, they did not show much anxiety. Sometimes the monks would even
admire the convenience brought by these landscaping constructions.
I finally realized that this calm tolerance was supported by a belief that
no matter how things change in the Samye Monastery, as long as they have
undergone the consecration ceremony, everything will be “sanctified” and
absorbed for eternity into the life history of the monastery’s sacred objects.
The lawn will thus be sanctified, the fences will be sanctified, the streetlamps
will be sanctified, and the roads will also be sanctified. “Holistic sanctifica-
tion” does not depend on whether the object is sacred or secular but, on the
processes, and practitioners, of sanctification.
Because of this, the monks in the Samye Monastery were not too upset
about the material transformation of “things.” No matter how they change in
appearance or name, they cannot obscure the spiritual core of the monastery.
CONCLUSION
We now return to the initial question of this chapter: When we exercise re-
sponsibility for protecting key cultural relics of national importance, what
are we protecting? “Protection,” in the modern context, is often based on the
premise of limiting the interaction between people and things. However, in
the view of the people of Samye, the true meaning of “protection” is not only
to preserve cultural relics, but also to ensure that they have a lasting sacred
power. The interaction between people and people, people and objects, is an
absolutely indispensable aspect of the holistic sanctification. The deliberate
“protection” imposed from outside may, to a certain extent, have the opposite
effect, since its emphasis on preserving the substance of the material sub-
stance of cultural relics constantly challenges the experience and understand-
ing of “holistic sanctification.”
The monks of the Samye Monastery may also be aware of this. While the
state and local governments invest in the landscaping of the monastery, the
monks are actively applying for “intangible cultural heritage,” trying to in-
clude the ritual ceremonies into the items of “official protection,” with some
initial success.4 But whether this strategy can really “work” is a topic for
future exploration.
Heritage in the Western sense has come to mean the conditions in which
preservation is prioritized as the “value” that acts as a buffer, not only against
conditions of conflict and destruction, but also the desire for locality in con-
ditions of increasing homogenization and commodification. Heritage value
is symptomatic of this concern to demonstrate that it can be converted into
252 He Beili
economic value or a more general sense of social value, by which is meant

that, as Butler argues in this volume and elsewhere, heritage does some-
thing—in terms of maintaining identity against conditions of erosion (But-
ler 2016). Moreover, heritage is a commodified value that, materialized in
tourism and development, can be a condition of environmental threat, as in
climate change or general conditions of threat. In this sense, Butler describes
heritage as a psychological-emotional-physical bulwark against erosion and
as such has an immediate valence in all sorts of development and future ori-
ented programs.
In the case of Samye Monastery, all the above is possible as an external
imposition but in itself does not erode the essential efficacy of the monastery
itself and the “treasures” it contains. Worshipped as possessing a material lin-
eage traceable to the origin of the monastery, even if damaged or destroyed,
“treasures” can restore or re-create the same sacred power of the original.
Butler describes such a paradox as tracing the efficacies of heritage in Pales-
tine. Here, heritage that is left in the limbo of an exclusionary politics, does
not erode the actual vitality of sacred objects sustained in situations where
attachment to place and things, and displacement from them, evoke the stron-
gest sense of belonging and sanctification (Butler 2016). As such, the protec-
tion of heritage in Samye traces an ambivalent pathway oscillating between
sanctification and desanctification as long as its “treasures” are kept apart
from forms of external contamination. Once this happens, the same “things”
become cultural relics, possibly even commodities and socially alienated.
*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Harriet Evans and Zhang Lisheng for their help in translating this
chapter. Thanks also to my supervisor Wang Mingming and Michael Row-
lands for involving me in this project.
NOTES
1. “Cultural relic” (wenwu)—which literally means “cultural object”—is the term

that is commonly used in the context of discussions about “cultural heritage” in China.
2. The khada is a type of silk scarf that Tibetan people use ceremonially to express
purity, sincerity, loyalty and respect to others.
3. All China’s major political leaders since 1949. Hu Jintao was Communist Party
leader of Tibet between 1988 and 1992, and was responsible for suppressing an upris-
ing of Tibetans against Chinese rule in 1989.
4. In November 2014, the traditional dance “Samye Monastery Cham” declared by

Zhanang County, Tibet Autonomous Region, was approved by the State Council to
be included in the fourth batch of National Intangible Cultural Heritage Representa-
tive Projects.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Beverley. “The Efficacies of Heritage: Synchronies, Magics and Possessional

Acts.” Public Archaeology 1, 2–3 (2016): 113–135.
He, Zhoude and Sonam Wangdul. Brief Annals of the Samye Monastery. Lhasa: Ti-
betan People Press, 1987.
Leyshe Thomek, ed. Short Annals of the Auspicious Samye Monastery. Samye: The
Samye Monastery, 1997.
Yeshe Tsogyal (Concealed the Terma), Erjinling and Yargyal (Discovered the
Terma), The Jataka of Padmasambhava (The Biography of the Lotus Master).
Translated by Lordru Gyatso and Erdung Vara. Xining: Qinghai Renmin Press,
1990.
Afterword
Wang Mingming
In this volume, Evans and Rowlands gather an elaborate set of ethnographic

studies on heritage conducted in China over the past decade. The fieldwork
sites are a variety of localities including urban neighborhood, town, vil-
lage, museum, and monastery. They are distributed broadly in several major
regions—northern, eastern, southeastern, and southwestern. While the se-
quence of chapters is not specifically designed in accordance with geography,
they nevertheless are here presented in a certain order of regions according to
which readers can go on a “long march,” departing from Beijing, moving to
the metropolitan centers of Huangshan and Chengdu along the middle line,
then turning to the southeast, and then to the southwest, and finally arriving
in the great monastery of Samye in Tibet.
All the studies focus upon things “grassroots.” In modern Chinese lan-
guage, the term “grassroots” (caogen) usually refers to “jiceng,” the bottom
level of the administrative hierarchy. However, to the authors of this book,
it is no such thing. It is of course “local,” as differentiated from the supra-
local—the national and global—and “nonofficial,” defined mainly in terms
of discourse. But the local has its own system and should not be mistaken as
incomplete or short of integrity. As the editors put forward in the Introduc-
tion, this is something as complete as a “lifeworld,” being “a social, material,
spatial and emotional arena of everyday life and relationships where cultural
beliefs seen as essential to the livability and sustainability of life are articu-
lated by the people who hold them.”
With such a concept of “grassroots” in mind, the authors set out to approach
heritage from the perspective of local knowledge, very different from that of
the official heritage discourse, whose uniform tendency is de-localizing.
Years before the authors departed for their fieldwork destinations, the
party-state had already incorporated global capitalism in its “socialism with
255
256 Wang Mingming
Chinese characteristics,” and subsequently adopted UNESCO’s Heritage

Convention. To date, global capitalism and the UNESCO heritage discourse
have been deployed as strategies to make China a powerful nation-state
wealthy in everything, including heritage. In pursuing Belt-Road kind of
“worldism” or “China Dream” sort of national revitalization, the regime has
recently further strengthened its de-localizing functionaries.1 Meanwhile, to
ornament the nation with “blossoms of tradition,” and to expand its sphere of
influence, it has incorporated more and more “local cultural elements.”
A major paradox in the official heritage discourse has been that it has
sought to derive its social potency from the “confusion” of local and trans-
local as well as transcultural. However, to prolong the life of its historical
teleology, it has continued to reject this “confusion,” by insistently distin-
guishing the local and segmented from the supra-local and integrating it in
terms of the backward (luohou) and the progressive ( jinbu).
The volume has a vast regional scope. The studies it includes are explora-
tions of heritage practices and values in specific localities during the period
in which the “empire of heritage” has increasingly “colonialized” the local
worlds. The authors mobilize the bottom-up approach to work for the detail-
ing of the specific aspects and elements of everyday life and relationships in
local settings. Nonetheless, in the belief that such an approach—an ethno-
graphic one, “conventional” in a good way—is also more effective than its
rival—the top-down approach—in facilitating the intellectual work of uncov-
ering the “reality” of the official heritage discourse, they have also adopted
it to cast light on the shadow of the “colonializing.” In endeavoring to eman-
cipate heritage and heritage studies from top-down power, they have dwelt
heavily upon “facts on the ground.” However, to liberate our minds from
the ruling dichotomy of local and supra-local, they have treated localities as
complexes of relations—those of gender/age, local/translocal, past/present,
official/nonofficial, real/living, inside/outside, ethnic multiplicity/singularity,
relics/sacred objects, and so on—from the perspective of which they have
also associated various residual translocal and transcultural dynamics—e.g.,
those of the “melting pot” of the “multiethnic community” in Dashalar, of the
maritime connections with the overseas in Quanzhou, and of the tea-horse
trade routes within the China–Southeast Asia–India continuum—with the
emergent interactions between traditions.
In short, the volume treats locality in a holistic manner; but it does not, by
means of so doing, separate the local from the extra-local—on the contrary,
it forms a critique of that “official” bifurcation.
The first two chapters by Evans and Butler on Beijing form a pair exempli-
fying a kind of double-tasked work. From what they experienced in local
Afterword 257
daily life and conversation, they derive vivid images of local scenarios of
“heritage fever.” Starting from the bottom-up, they follow the processes
through which the name of “heritage protection” (yichan baohu) has come to
justify many projects of destruction, and how an old neighborhood in central
Beijing, Dashalar, has undergone change from a small old place where “Old
Beijingers” live and die, via recent demolition (chaiqian), to a mixed assem-
blage of gentrified sites of leisure and pleasure, havens for excluded heritage
perspectives, and rooms for local and translocal quests for “heritage justice”
and “things that matter.”
Evans argues that official heritage projects can be aggressive impositions
of government and capital which in Dashalar function as “a form of epis-
temic violence done to locals’ ontological ‘ownership’ of everyday cultural
practices.” She also argues that such projects have added more translocal
forces and forms to Dashalar, which have not been entirely strange to local
residents—they have lived among different ethnic others for centuries. How-
ever, as Evans stresses, such externally imposed projects have not reached the
local world of Dashalar without encountering trouble in varied grassroots re-
sponses. Many long-term residents of the neighborhood, excluded materially
and socially from the heritage invention of “Old Beijing,” have on the one
hand tactfully reacted in different ways to the inconsistencies and ill-effects
of the official discourse, but have also turned the term “Old Beijing” into an
implicit demand for recognition of their status as the true “owners” of their
place.
The “heritage invention” that Evans describes may also be thought of as
stemming from certain powerful cravings for the old, “authentic” or not.
This is a “psycho-mental complex,” that corresponds with post-Mao official
ideological tendencies. In contrast, in Mao’s time, the dominant feature of
the official discourse was “novelty fetishism,” in which the new was largely
equated with the good, and the old was denounced as “bad.” This was what
fired off the “Cultural Revolution.” As is widely known, in early June 1966,
Mao called for “doing away with the four olds and cultivating the four news
(po si jiu, li si xin)”—namely, replacing the old thoughts, old customs, old
habits, and old traditions with new ones.
Since the early 1980s, history has made a U-turn. The “four olds” have
been promoted under different names. For more than three decades, the old
thoughts have been partly valued as Oriental philosophies alternative to their
Occidental counterparts. Since the beginning of the new century, some of the
old customs and habits have been officially selected as “intangible heritage,”
and old traditions have been redesigned to correspond with modernization’s
targeted—the revitalization of the “great Chinese nation.”
258 Wang Mingming
In the new official “religion,” so to speak, the cult of the olds has become
core. Thus many of the old streets, neighborhoods, temples, and villages
which had survived the “doing away with the four olds” campaigns and the
demolition movement of the “socialist market system” around the new mil-
lennium, have in the past decade been “conserved,” refurbished, or recon-
structed. They do not look all the same, but together they remind us of the
reinvented Dashalar of “Old Beijing.”
In Dashalar, as Butler observes, the contradictions, paradoxes, and am-
bivalences found in all heritages have come to be “all too prevalent.” There,
the officially designated “olds” are “crucially taking the form of dual forces
provoking sustained intensive and traumatic episodes of displacement and
dispossession of the ‘local’—the pre-existing communities.” The “conserva-
tion” of the neighborhood of Dashalar has been treated as an important part
of official “heritagification” aimed at revitalizing “Old Beijing.” However,
core to the “conservation” of this old site has been the intense officially
programmed “Californianization of the high street epitomized by the shin-
ing newness of US-style shopping malls.” In the alleyways behind some
high streets in “Old Beijing,” some old style architectural buildings which
survived the destruction of the demolition movement have recently been
“conserved.” But they have become sites for leisure and commerce—nicely
decorated cafes, bars, night clubs, restaurants, and shops, attracting “roaming
customers (youke).” These are perceived as characteristically local, but they
are in fact “efficacious” as what transmits a certain transculturalism—almost
a hedonist version of Occidentalism.
A part of this has been bound up with the quests for rooms for better life
between east and west, for instance, between the images Chinese artists pro-
jected in local settings and the floating icons of the Bloomsbury Group, it has
thus not all been insensibly official; but the majority of it has “evolved” into
a new official path of “novelty fetishism.” Paradoxically, as Butler notes, this
path has been paved through the top-down civilizing process of “heritagifica-
tion,” which has, by means of laying “claim to efficacious ‘cosmologies of
the center,’” “transforming and projecting what might be seen as ‘otherwise/
elsewhere’ or ‘provincial/local’ onto ‘universal’ pathways.”
The irony is thus: the so-called “olds” are in effect not old, but, at best, “old
bottles containing new wine.”
Heritage invention, but not heritage, has come to be characteristic of the
overall outlook of the condition created by the present official discourse. Said
to be aimed at the nation’s re-enlivening of the olds, the official discourse has
ironically encouraged all sorts of renewal, whose consequence has not been
so different from—if not more serious than—the Cultural Revolution.
Afterword 259
A core mission in heritage invention, has been turning the old and local
into the new and supra-local. As Luo Pan indicates in her chapter, a sort
of campaign-like development was initiated prior to China’s ratification
of UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention in 1985. In the area where the
old sacred mountain of Huangshan is situated, the provincial government’s
endeavor to invent heritage had been made as early as immediately after
Deng’s visit to the mountain in 1979. It is well known that Huangshan has
been inscribed in the UNESCO listing of “dual” (natural and cultural) heri-
tage since 1990. It is less known that in the processes of competing for such
recognition and during its subsequent development, the surrounding region
has undergone drastic and destructive reorganization. While legends and
histories of the flourishing of religious, scholarly, and artistic installments as
well as reclusive and rebellious activities between the seventh and nineteenth
centuries have been recorded as evidence qualifying Huangshan’s status as a
heritage site, most of the old “sacred architectural” sites have been turned into
spots for the blossoming of tourist economy.
To turn Huangshan into a powerful motor of regional tourist economic
expansion, the provincial government even established a brand new town
nearby the mountain and renamed the old prefecture Huizhou “Huangshan
Prefecture.” As Luo Pan sharply critiques, the change in the hierarchy of
administrative centers, driven by heritage invention, “destroyed the cultural
ecology of Huizhou completely.”
In the past two or three decades, some local villagers have continued to
go to the graveyards on the hillsides and the foot of Huangshan mountain
to make offerings to their ancestors. Meanwhile, the “ghost” of the old
prefecture of Huizhou has carried on haunting the new city of Huangshan.
However, neither has popular religious activity prevented villages from dis-
appearing, nor has the haunting spirit of the old town reduced the speed of
Huizhou’s losing its past glory.
If one may say that both Dashalar and Huangshan are old bottles—fake
or not—containing new wine, then, along with the museum boom, there are
more and more contrasting “utensils”—new bottles containing old wine.
Among them, the Jianchuan Museum Complex as examined by Zhang Lish-
eng proves to be a fine model.
The Jianchuan Museum Complex consists of four sections: the Resistance
War against Japan (1931–1945), the Red Age (1966–1976), the Wenchuan
earthquake (2008), and Chinese folk culture. While the last section is pre-
sented as if the “folkloric” has remained unchanged, the other three sec-
tions involve exhibitions of three major historical events which profoundly
changed modernizing China.
260 Wang Mingming
Due to their limited resources, the founders and curators of many other non-
state or “private” museums may have been easily satisfied with collecting and
exhibiting small numbers of “cultural relics” or with showing photographic
images of such. Fan Jianchuan, the creator of the enormous museum complex
in the Chengdu Plain has not had to face such limitations. As a combination
of an ex-official, a self-made multi-millionaire, and collector-curator, Fan’s
huge museum has the capacity for housing eight million objects and archival
items. The museum complex consists of more than thirty newly built mu-
seums and memorials, all designed to look extremely modern. Yet as “new
bottles,” they have been designed to contain “old wine”—historical traces
directly from China’s politically contentious history of the twentieth century.
From 2003, in consideration of the fact that the Guomindang’s (Nationalist
Party) important role in the War against Japan (1931–1945) and the “real”
on-site scenes of Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) were missing in the of-
ficial historical narratives, Fan spent years collecting exhibits related to these
events. “Enslaving” himself to the enterprise of the museum, he assumed the
“responsibility” of conscientiously endeavoring to uphold his own righteous
and moral heritage project. He made his museum a container of “historical
facts.”
Fan’s story is that of a “slave to a great museum.” It may impress many
as legendary. It is about a hero from the “vernacular” who has made a “self-
sacrifice” to bring heritage back from its ruins. What he has done thus seems
to be opposite of heritage invention—rather than inventing heritage for
“practical reasons,” Fan let the olds be what they were, in his quest to rescue
history from official forgetfulness.
As Zhang outlines later, Fan has unfortunately failed to prevent his heritage
enterprise from becoming “a sobering example” of bad fortune. In recent
years, the top-down imposition of central policies of museum-building, cura-
torship and heritage meaning has become an increasingly apparent tendency
in his management of the museum. Along with the expansion of socialist bu-
reaucracy and marketization, Fan’s museum has lost much of its “vernacular”
spirit of charismatic organization and moral superiority.
The authors of these first chapters all pay attention, directly or indirectly, to
the voices of the grass roots—those responding to rupture in Dashalar and in
the communities in Huangshan, and to the alienation among the low-waged
museum employees. They avoid simply extending the usual dominance/resis-
tance model to the cases examined, but in so doing do not blind themselves
to the gap between the social forces of heritage inventors, urban planners,
and museum owners and those more or less excluded from the projects of
heritage invention.
Afterword 261
To a great extent, the term “grassroots” refers to ordinary lives and ethics
that are constantly excluded—in the gendered and generational social life
of Dashalar, in ancestral worship in the villages of Huangshan, and in the
livelihoods of Fan’s museum workers. As the editors point out, these are all
bound up with the social ontological values of being (and becoming), and are
deeply ethical.
In Beijing, Huangshan, and Chengdu, the exclusion of the local has been
severe and, perhaps, quite effective. However, when we move southward,
perhaps to go on the journey of what Butler has called “the intellectual voy-
age out,” we find the situation to be rather different.
In the city of Quanzhou, for instance, the grassroots values of heritage are
still pervasive, in spite of the presence of all the “official fixities.” In Jubao
Jie, an old neighborhood situated in the south of the old town of Licheng, in
spite of all the shifts and historical turns they have experienced, locals have
continued to lead their lives as persons “confused” with nonhuman essences
(material and spiritual powers). As Rowlands argues, a kind of ontology of
life forms a grassroots perspective from which the locals define the values
of the olds in the places where they live, age, die, and worship. If heritage is
a useful concept in our understanding of this kind of ontology, it is not the
same as the officially conceptualized one, but can be called “living heritage.”
Since the early twentieth century, this has often been called “superstition”
(mixin) by intellectuals and officials—the majority of whom have mod-
eled themselves, one way or the other, on a kind of strict puritanism and
striven to eradicate the mentalities, sacraments, and symbols of “magic.”
By re-translating “superstition” into “living heritage,” Rowlands brings to
our attention a view of life from which one sees the deceased persons—
ancestors, ghosts, and gods—and things—ruins of old houses and temples—
as dynamic, powerful, and thus “efficacious” (ling) beings.
Living heritage has continued to be missing in the official lists of tangible
or intangible heritage. These lists only include the “real,” construed as such
by applying the cosmology of modern historiographic science. This can be
said to be founded upon the absolute “scientific” dualism of life and death
which allows no possibility of life after death. In Quanzhou, this approach has
restricted heritage to the historically “real,” the relics related to the municipal-
ity’s past status as a center of the old Maritime Silk Road, or to the operatic,
musical, and industrial art sub-traditions of the Chinese nation.
By means of studying local elites’ attitudes, Rowlands also shows that,
be they professional historians, museum curators, or bureaucrats, living in a
locality like Quanzhou, local elites heavily depend upon a “confusion.” They
can be described as gatekeepers of the storehouse of “historical facts,” but
some of them “understand” the meanings of living heritage very well and
262 Wang Mingming
adopt the same perspective when dealing with extraordinary happenings in

their own and others’ “private lives”—so much so that “the hierarchy of intel-
lectuals and officials is thus challenged by their own need to refuse, obscure
or participate in the fundamentals of living heritage.”
We can detect a couple of differences between Quanzhou’s local elites
and Fan Jianchuan. While the former possess the Neo-Confucian feelings
of family-country, the latter’s are oriented much more strongly toward the
state-nation. While the former are more open and more closely related to
living heritage, the latter restricts his sights to real heritage. There are also
major differences between Quanzhou and the “models” implied by Evans’s
and Butler’s Dashalar and Luo’s Huangshan: in the Dashalar model, heritage
invention is overwhelmingly exclusive, in the Huangshan model, the secular-
ization of the divine mountain seems to be core, while in Quanzhou, heritage
invention and secularization are constantly avoided or critiqued by local elites
in favor of living heritage.
For sure, the above regional comparison is only relative. As Feuchtwang
shows in his chapter, everywhere in China, different perspectives on heritage
transmission and preservation find their equivalents and they are all engaged
in the making of heritage in the same place. These consist in three categories:
the “official one,” which makes heritage in a pedagogic mode of commemo-
ration to honor “national civilization”; the second, held mainly by local elites,
makes heritage out of their home places to preserve a distinct sense of local-
ity; and the third, grounded in local residents, makes heritage by means of re-
vitalizing “folk religion” to transmit ancestry and neighborhood as a common
good. Feuchtwang argues that the difference represented by Quanzhou seems
to be that the work of heritage making there has been done more “through
mediation between perspectives from very different conceptions of history
and morality.” In Quanzhou, apart from those Rowlands encountered, there
are other local elites like tea planter Mr. Huang of Anxi County, a wealthy
businessman with the ideal of becoming a good literatus, who has enthusi-
astically supported the preservation of local temples, festivals, and ancestral
halls in his home village. There are also remarkable persons like Ms. Zheng,
an art college graduate and businesswoman actively engaged in her own
heritage making, who has remade old houses into tasteful tea-coffee shops,
wine bars, and B&Bs for tourists, but perceives her commercial projects from
the perspective of living heritage, seeing her business as what fits the overall
geomantic ( fengshui) order of the city. These local elites—some of whom
are somewhat like the admirers of Virginia Woolf whom Butler encountered
in the old alleyways of Beijing—have, in their actions, blurred the boundary
between different formations of moral persona and heritage and, by means
Afterword 263
of mediation, have eased the tension between conflicting cosmologies of

“superstition” and naturalism.
Local elites’ “mediating practices” most often develop in the intermediar-
ies between inside and outside. They are perceived as not only typical of
“good literati” but are also characteristic of “locality.”
A locality is communal, but it is not a communal isolate, sealed off from

the outside. Rather, it incorporates external elements in developing its own
characteristics. Thus locality can also convey something cosmopolitan—
cosmopolitan both in the sense of cosmological imaginativeness found in the
animism or animatism of “superstition” and in the sense of “real” geography
found in social life—in marriage, migration, commerce, promotion, and so
on—for example, in the sense of the modality of attitude. This cosmopolitan
character is true of all “communities.”
Even in the “remote” mountains of Yunnan where people have often been
described in the official “real” ethnographies as those living in their isolated
villages in ethnic minority groups, sealed off from the outside world, the
same open world-scapes are in the remaking.
In Zheba, a mountainous area in northern Yunnan where Naxi people
reside, Ran Guangpei contends that the expressions of grassroots values are
mixed and ambivalent and cannot be said to be localistic, since they intersect
in people’s identification with their home place in relation to the outside. In
these expressions, external forces are efficacious, both violently and potently
so. On the one hand, they induce fragmenting effects, experienced as a dis-
tinct sense of loss. On the other hand, as sources of life-giving powers, the
external render opportunities for bringing back in from afar the past whereby
the outside is kept internally available.
The sociologics of inside-outside relation finds its origin in the legend of
Aming, a Zheba legendary spiritual master, and founder of dongba ritual
practices who achieved his spiritual accomplishment by “stealing” from a
Tibetan Buddhist master sacred knowledge, skills and objects for dongba, his
native religion. Aming became a sage, rivalling the celestial king of Lijiang,
and was eventually poisoned to death by the latter. In Aming’s time, Zheba
was a spiritual center. After his death, it lost this position.
As Ran indicates, in today’s Zheba, the mythologic still plays the role of a
reference framework the Naxi draw on to cope with external influences. Heri-
tage invention, centered in the famous tourist town of Lijiang, has fractured
Zheba’s local cultural practices and deepened local people’s feeling of loss.
However, in responding to this situation, the locals have not become more
localistic. Setting out with their traditionally open mind, they have made
efforts to rediscover the external sources of their own moral superiority by
264 Wang Mingming
physically travelling to more remote areas, following the spiritual route of

the ancestors, and engaging in the worship of the shu spirit for the purpose
of channeling extra local forces. On the basis of his observation of pilgrim-
age and incense-burning practices, Ran argues that one should not assume
that “local people uncritically submit to some default place identity in essen-
tializing and localist terms,” because, at the grassroots level, “the interplay
between local values and outside sources of influence continually shapes
people’s cultural lives, the imposition of cultural heritage and the question of
authenticity being only one of such processes.”
Ran admits that the local self-identification of Zheba as a spiritual center
has been subsequently challenged by the life-threatening powers of the celes-
tial kingdom of the Mu (a “native chiefdom” in Chinese ethnology), the Mao-
ist regime, and, more recently, the market economy. He also finds that similar
kinds of moral contrast between the inside and the shifting external forms of
fatal violence and devastation to that which Evans has found in Dashalar are
observable in the mountains of Yunnan. Nonetheless, he refuses to treat the
transmission of dongba heritage, for example, producing paper for dongba
script, copying and spreading the ritual texts, as a passive reaction against the
assault of the market economy of heritage. For him, what has been sustained
in the local practices is indeed the moral and spiritual integrity of the local
world, but this can only be achieved through continuously interacting with
the outside.
In the chapter following Ran’s, Evans probes into the subtle level of inside/
outside relation in the same area through exploring the mutual constitution of
space, bodily activities and gender within kin and social groups. “Tradition-
ally,” the interplay between these elements produced gendered meanings es-
sential to local cultural value and its transmission. This is still observed today
in such rituals as funerals. As Evans emphasizes, such meanings are at once
divisive and fluid, integral to the functioning of relatedness and reciprocity.
They are unstable, bound up with the shifting interplay between different ele-
ments across historical time. Recent years have seen frequent demographic
movements between the village and the places with more opportunities.
Along with such changes, “traditional” gendered activities such as mothers’
preparing food and weaving, have continued to be practiced, and against the
backdrop of the increase of young villagers’ mobility, have highlighted the
domestic status of older women as key guardians of the inside’s social soli-
darity against the external forces of fragmentation and separation. Nonethe-
less, one should not see these “guardians” as resisting change. Surely, they
have continued spinning and weaving, binding, with the threads, the fabric of
kinship as they used to do. But they also accept the changing distinction be-
Afterword 265
tween the sexes and the younger generation’s adaptation to new knowledge,
new skills, and new things.
However, since the 1980s, the outside has proven to be more dangerously
violent, along with the increasing reach of the state’s incorporation of dongba
culture. In Mao’s time, religious and cultural practices such as dongba rituals
were forbidden, and the ritual texts written in pictograms were labelled as
monsters and demons. By contrast, since the market reforms, the state has de-
veloped various projects—including safeguarding intangible cultural heritage
projects related to UNESCO’s Heritage Convention, which China adopted in
2004—to incorporate elements of what used to be condemned as the “four
olds.” While enjoying a “spontaneous” resurgence in the countryside, dongba
culture is also promoted as cultural heritage. Now, just like the heritage project
in Dashalar, the promotion of local Naxi “ethnic culture” has, by means of in-
clusion into the state’s heritage project, exerted the effect of exclusion. In some
Zheba villages, the spaces of state and commercial displays of dongba culture
implicitly emphasize such divisive aspects of gendered meanings as male/fe-
male distinctions, and the fluid aspect of relatedness and reciprocity has been
downplayed. In the sphere of cultural heritage, dongba culture is represented
as if it were almost a type of “culture,” symbolized by dongba paper and script
making skills of male “transmitters of intangible heritage.” Consequentially,
the heritage invention of dongba culture, as the appropriation of men’s arti-
sanal activities, has produced a rigid notion of gender, akin to the patriarchy of
the Han, and alien to the traditionally flexible and fluid notions and practices
of the Naxi. Such appropriation for dominant commercial and heritage pur-
poses effectively excludes women’s role as “weavers in the sustainability of
men’s public ritual position as representatives of ‘dongba culture.’” In this, it
radically transforms Zheba’s local traditions of gendered reciprocity.
Zheba, the area in which both Ran and Evans conducted their fieldwork,
is situated in the contact zone between the civilizing centers of the Naxi and
Tibetan autonomous regions of Lijiang and Shangri-La. The intriguing myth
of Aming perhaps can show that in the southwest “ethnic groups” like the
Naxi of Zheba are culturally more mixed than is generally imagined. Having
derived the core part of their tradition from others’ civilization, Zheba people
have developed their local worlds into complexes. They have also come to
terms with the expansion of neighboring powers, such as the kingdom of the
Mu, whose urban elites, in the late Qing dynasty and early twentieth century,
promoted Han culture as a more superior way of civilization. In spite of the
fact that people in Zheba see their home place as a spiritual center rivaling
the material center of Lijiang, the capital of the Mu kings, since the late Qing
they have not avoided becoming “included” by the Naxi and post-imperial
Han “civilizing projects.”
266 Wang Mingming
We may thus translate Evans’s contrast between the complexes of grass-

roots gendered meanings of differentiation and fluidity (reciprocity and
relatedness)—and the “masculinization” of the official version of “dongba
culture” into a contest between grassroots histories and histories of imperial
and post-imperial civilizing projects. As such, we may define these as two
different perspectives, one truer to the in-between quality of the local, the
other much less so.
The related and contesting perspectives are “real,” not merely historically,
but also in the present, as Evans has shown. Wu Yinling, in her historical
chapter, adds more rich evidence to such elucidation.
Wu focuses on a small town some one hundred miles north of Zheba and
documents the modern fate of an old site of intercultural relatedness. The
town is Dukezong, and is the core part of the county seat now officially re-
named “Shangri-La” (formerly Zhongdian). Dukezong is situated in Diqing
Prefecture in northwestern Yunnan. Unlike Zheba, Dukezong has no legend
celebrating cultural heroes who borrowed wisdom from the other. But it is
likewise a locality of “in-betweenness.” Even though the historical age of the
town has remained a heated controversy, it was one of the three most impor-
tant nexus points along the tea-horse trade route—the other two being Batang
and Litang in Sichuan—in China’s late imperial times. As a place where
many different groups—Tibetan, Han, Naxi, Yi, and Bai—co-inhabited,
exchanged, and competed over resources and dominance, it is a matrix of
inter-cultural interaction.
However, the town’s fortunes in recent periods have not been good. As
Wu puts it, the town’s modern history since the nineteenth century “has also
been one of destruction.” In 1863, Dukezong was destroyed by fire during
the Muslim Hui rebellion against Manchu rule. After several long decades of
lying in a state of ruin, the town was rebuilt in 1921, and over a couple of de-
cades, revitalized its past glory as a prosperous place. But prosperity attracted
many bandits who frequently raided the town and brought partial destruction
to it. Left again in a state of decay for many decades, including during the
Mao era, Dukezong gradually became “older and older.”
Nonetheless, during the 1990s, the state of decay turned out to be not such
a bad thing for Dukezong. During this period, tourist development started to
boom in China’s ethnic regions. Because Dukezong had become so “old,” it
attracted many tourists, and benefiting from this new development, Duke-
zong enjoyed some years of good fortune. However, such development then
brought disaster. On January 11, 2014, the town was burned down by fire,
possibly induced by poor urban planning and security management bound up
with over-commercialization.
Afterword 267
The buildings in the town were mostly destroyed, confronting Dukezong

with the urgent mission of reconstruction. Many dwellers of the former old
town demanded the restoration of its previously pluralist cultural form and
contents. In the end, however, the demand for multiethnic cultural representa-
tion in the material form of the town’s reconstruction was overwhelmed by
a more forceful policy discourse favoring a single ethnic group’s interests—
the Tibetans. To re-plan the city “for the future,” the officials excluded the
other ethnic cultural elements from Dukezong and, borrowing a term from
the English novel Lost Horizon, renamed the town as a Tibetan center. They
redesigned the urban inner geo-comic structure of the town, and included new
buildings with their own imaginaries of “Tibetan style.” The reconstruction
of Shangri-La was completed in 2017. By this time, Dukezong had become
entirely “Tibetanized,” losing all its pluralist characteristics.
Having visited the explorations in the southwest, we now return to the edi-
tors’ theoretical starting point—that the “the livability and sustainability of
life,” is tied to “cultural beliefs” articulated and held by local people, con-
cerning their relationship with their living heritage. As we have seen in the
chapters by Luo, Rowlands, and Feuchtwang in the “eastern parts” (dongbu),
these beliefs and their linked practices, are mostly sacrificial in nature, and
can be understood as ways of associating human life with the “sacred.” In
the Han contexts—south or north, east or west—sacrifice can be seen as the
exchange of humans’ material loss, resulting from giving offerings, for good
fortune, social security, and moral ascension.
This is a very different kind of activity from what is projected in official
heritage discourse. A museum exhibit or a heritage site also attracts “atten-
tion” and “care,” but it gains cultural value in its status as a piece of histori-
cal evidence. Apart from elaborating the splendor of national civilization, it
is also valued because it yields material gains. Such gains, when calculated
as contributions to the national GDP, can be interpreted as offerings to the
“national spirit.” But they are “naked gains,” not dressed like offerings to di-
vinities. A piece of historical evidence also involves a kind of subject-object
relationship. However, in official discourse, subject and object are separate
and devoid of any “sacred” content, so the relationship between persons
and heritage “objects” is not an active one. Rather, it is one that depends
on passive reception by tourists, passersby, or museum audiences for whom
historical truth is “hidden” in “real heritage.” In the one-way-traffic kind of
transmission, heritage gains both historical signification and material mean-
ing in a “rational” manner, opposite to that of “wasteful feudal superstitious
practices,” or the “irrational” exchanges between humans and the “mythical”
268 Wang Mingming
or “unreal” powers, such as the deities, gods, and ancestors “diffused” in lo-
cal social life.
Between the living and the “real” or “not living” heritage, there is another
difference, that of temporality, or a sense of time. Essential to heritage mean-
ings defined in official heritage discourse has been the linear notion of time.
This has been applied to shape plans and practices of preservation into what
could effectively make, in the present, part of the remembered past as that
which inspires the future. By contrast, as He Beili reveals in the last chapter
of the book, from a “view from afar,” from Tibet, time is not simply ap-
proached as a cumulative sequence of events.
He Beili conducted her fieldwork in the famous Samye Monastery, in Shan-
nan, an agricultural municipality of Tibet. A legend goes that this, the first
Buddhist monastery in Tibet was long ago constructed under the direction of
the Lotus Master through a collaboration between humans, animals, ghosts
and deities. In the twelve centuries of its existence, Samye Monastery has
undergone a huge number of man-made disasters and has several times been
restored and renovated. But its followers, omitting all the radical changes, per-
ceive the present monastery as precisely the same as it was first constructed.
Like the Jianchuan Museum, Samye Monastery is a vast complex com-
posed of a set of buildings, but planned in a very different way to any mu-
seum. In contrast to the JMC’s reconstruction of historical events in spatial
forms, Samye Monastery was entirely envisioned as a microcosm of the
universe, and is still seen and experienced by its followers as a Buddhist
rendering of the whole world. This seems to follow the model of Mandala, a
square containing circles and sections organized around a center.
In the mid-1980s, an official team surveyed the main relics in the temple
and completed a report which clearly demonstrated that the values officially
accorded to the monastery were mostly about the material character of the
sacred objects treasured, including stone, bronze and copper, bricks and tiles,
and plaques. In mid-1990s, the whole of Samye Monastery was then offi-
cially listed as a “key cultural relic under national protection.” Since then, the
monastery as a whole has gained increasing recognition as a heritage site and
its history has been seriously recorded in official gazetteers.
In official discourse, the monastery’s heritage value is as a collection of
material objects and historical data. By contrast, in the monastery, traces of
historical events or, in effect, “historical relics,” are not treated as valuable
as objects per se. Local and non-local followers have continued to treat the
monastery as a world to which worship adds life forms and forces. To them,
the site is highly sacred.
A keen visitor can find that the inner spatial design of the monastery re-
sembles that of a museum. For instance, in the main Utse Temple located
Afterword 269
in the center of the extensive monastery, statues of Buddhas and the local
Tibetan mountain and lake deities legendarily subdued by the Lotus Master
to serve Buddhism; utensils containing clear water and butter; images of
mandala, animals and plants shaped with butter; Tangkas, sacred scriptures,
chairs and musical instruments are displayed in a way that is not very differ-
ent to any good museum. Yet, all these are arranged in an order materialized
as an expression of the sociologics of hierarchical differentiation and related-
ness between humans and the divine others. The objects are sacred, and they
have led their lives with their values determined by their “lineages.” They are
efficacious treasures when connected to each other in the interplay between
divinities and humans in the rituals of worship.
Deep in the idea of sacred objects here, there is a pervasive sense of “dense
time.” This is radically different from the modern cumulative-linear model of
historicity which seems like a thin thread linking the past, present, and future.
Rather than being a chronology of the “irreversible change” associated both
with the monastery’s historical and commercial values, this sense of time is
like an hourglass, allowing us to see time in the light of fine sands flowing
directly from the past into the present. From this perspective, neither is the
distinction between old and new of any truth or value, nor is the distinction
between “fake” and “authentic.” Rather, what is full of meaning is the con-
stant return to the past through the repetitive actions of ritual sacralization,
temple rebuilding, and artistic work of painting, crafting and casting. The
sacred objects or treasures in particular, as He emphasizes, are full of mean-
ing because they are worshiped as possessing a material lineage traceable to
the origin of the monastery, and they “can restore or re-create the same sacred
power of the original.”
However, the emphasis on “reversing change” or “return” in the hourglass
kind of temporality should not be said to be exceptionally Tibetan. China be-
gan to adopt linear temporality as late as in the late nineteenth century during
which some Han thinkers and political reformers, not unlike Aming, the sage
of ancient Zheba, invented such new ways of time as the Confucian Calendar
by “stealing” from Europe Christian cumulative chronology. Before this, im-
perial history was written in accordance with dynastic cycles and reign years,
featured in various cosmic, ethical, and ideological terms including those of
alternating order (zhi) and chaos (luan). While this historicity was not the
same as the Tibetan temporal perception, it was more akin to the Tibetan
idea of “return” than to linear temporality with which the post-imperial-
Republican and People’s Republican regimes have successively imposed
“irreversible change” upon China.
Living under “post-traditional” conditions, no “locals” can do without
the new calendar and the new historicity. While the new calendar has been
270 Wang Mingming
a “synthetical text,” partly inherited from the ancestors and partly borrowed
from foreigners, their cycles of hours, days, weeks, months, and seasons as
well as old solar terms and new holidays have been designated as parts of the
wholes of the years which have in turn been officially conceptualized in terms
of the progressive accumulation of time, the whole underlain by a historical
goal. To do things practical for life, the “locals” cannot escape from such a
“new way of time,” and, in some sense, cannot avoid, in forming a relation-
ship with it, adding more efficacy to it. Nonetheless, nowadays, in and around
the great monasteries and small temples in the Han areas of China—for in-
stance, in Quanzhou, where the “religious revival” of the past four decades
has been most eye-catching—the dynastic cycles and reign years have con-
tinued to be applied in the scheduling of ritual activities, and the temporality
of alternating order and chaos, having survived all the campaigns against the
olds, have remained essential to “grassroots meanings” of living heritage.
Officially speaking, the temporality of this kind has been out of date. But
in some sense, it has, better than the official “real history,” expressed the
vicissitude of human life and its relationship with “objects” and “divinities”
whose vitalities decline after growing, and grow after decline. Although like
the hourglass type of temporality this is “unbelievable” to those over-accus-
tomed to the dichotomy of old and new, it says a lot about the truth of life, and
about the limit and fate of the efficacy of officially prescribed “new order.”
As such, it is still integral to the lifeworlds where history remains a series of
oscillating occurrences; but it charms not just the “superstitious minds” of the
places explored in the book, not just the “empathetic anthropologists,” but
also many of the “roaming customers” in the “Californianized high streets”
of “Old Beijing” and Huangshan, the “slaves” to the museum in Chengdu, the
cultural elites of Quanzhou, the consumers of European style cafes and bars
as well as exhibitions in numerous “cultural and creative parks,” and even
the “sensible” officials. Apart from all the efficacies and enchantments, the
“grassroots” notion of time has also a great potential of contributing a major
inspiration to our annotation of “heritage heat”: the temperature of the “heat”
can be said to have been given impetus to rise by the “invisibly intrinsic”
dynamics of “return”—in particular, from novelty fetishism to the “cult of
the olds,” and back.
NOTE
1. In recent years, these functionaries have become “integrated” in such state-

owned companies as “culture and tourism corporations” (wenlu jituan), attached
to the government’s culture bureaus (whose activities are supervised by the party’s
propaganda departments) at all administrative geographic levels.
Index
Ahern, Emily, 204–5 22, 25, 29, 31–32, 34; Old Mrs. Gao,
ancestors, 10–11, 85, 136, 147–50, 22, 28, 33–34, 61–62; Qian, 28,
153–56, 161, 173–74 31; Wang Wenli (“Old Professor”),
ancestral hall, 119, 125, 130 17–19, 33–34; Young Gao, 28,
Anagnost, Ann, 196 30–31, 34; Zhang Huiming, 17–19,
Anren (Sichuan), 91, 140 25, 28–29; Zhao Yong, 28, 30–31,
anti-Rightist Movement, 93 34–35
Appadurai, Arjun, 3 Bell, Julian, 50, 53
artisan practices, 7, 9, 26, 122, 219, Bloomsbury Circle/Group, 5, 13, 50–54,
221–22, 237, 239, 265 63–65
authenticity, 6–11, 14, 23, 42, 61, 123, Blumenfield, Tami, 195–96, 200
130, 134, 144, 159–60, 168, 172–73, Buddhism, 72–73, 127–130, 147–150,
177–78, 195, 197, 200, 202, 257, 218–19, 224–25; Bodhisattvas,
264, 269 218, 237; cosmology, 231, 249;
festivals, 127, 129–30; Gautama
Baihuaping (Zheba, Yunnan): as sacred Buddha, 243–44; Sakyamuni
place, 174–76; touristic development Buddha, 219, 237; Tibetan
of, 176; Buddhism, 163–165, 218–19, 231–
basic subsistence allowance. See dibao 34, 244–45, 248–50
Beijing, 256–58; Beijing Cultural Butler, Beverley, 133, 146, 149, 157,
Protection NGO, 25; Beijing 197, 206, 252, 253
Design Week, 5, 33, 56; ‘Ten
Great Buildings’, 24; South City
(nancheng), 24; Tian’anmen Square, caogen. See grassroots
17, 24, 37; Xuanwu district, 24–26. chaiqian (demolition and relocation),
See also Dashalar, “Old Beijing,” 18, 24, 146, 257
Qianmen Chao, Emily, 159, 162, 196, 198–200
Beijing from Below, 26, 33, 35, 61; Hua Chen Ke, 37, 54–57
Meiling, 31, 61–62; Jia Yong, 19–20, Chen Jianying, 143
271
272 Index
Chengdu (Sichuan), 91, 97, 102, 110, 224, 227, 231–32, 250–52, 257,
205, 260 262, 268; top-down policies and
China Dream, 8, 256 practices, 1, 6
Cohen, Abner, 139, 141 cultural protection area, 25
Communist Party of China (CCP), 27, Cultural Revolution, 25, 92, 94, 96,
92–93, 112–13, 117, 120–21, 212 101–2, 112, 140, 143, 150, 168, 170,
corruption, 93, 106 173, 198, 212, 213, 215–16, 222,
cosmology, 115, 118, 123–24, 129–30, 226, 233, 237–39, 342, 357–58, 360,
175, 249; tianxia as metonym for 365
China, 6. See also Buddhism cultural transmission, 47, 60, 92, 160,
courtyards. See siheyuan 197, 225; and civilization, 160; and
crafts, 26, 57, 197, 239, 249 fragmentation 160–61; and local
Crescent Moon Society, 13, 42, 50–51, conceptualization of authenticity,
54, 63 172–73; and the stranger king
Cultural Asset Protection Law of 1980, paradigm, 170
25
cultural beliefs and sustainability of Dali (Yunnan), 215
local life, 1, 255, 267 danwei (work unit), 28
cultural elites: external experts, 13, 87, Daoism, 72–73, 88, 126, 130, 149–50
135, 138, 176, 210 214, 221; local, Dashalar (area in Beijing), 3–5, 13
133, 210; trickster qualities, 10 24–30, 256–258; Commercial Street
cultural heritage: absorption of (shangye jie), 25–26, 30; West Street
language of, 6, 18, 30, 197, 220; (Guanyin (Bodhisattva) Temple
definitions of, 1–3; dominant/official Street (Guanyinsi jie), 17, 23, 25–26
discourse of wenhua yichan, 3, 5, dazayuan (“big cluttered courtyards”):
6, 13–14, 218, 255–56, 267–68; 17, 26, 29–30, 33, 35
efficacies of, 5, 7, 11, 38–41, 47, death: conviviality, 185, 188; cremation,
60, 64, 252; heritage boom/fever, 187; gendered expectations, 185–88;
4, 34 83, 91, 111, 270; heritage polluting effect of that of a family
performance, 12, 84–85; heritage member, 150; polluting power of
quest, 38–39, 56, 61–63; heritage women’s yinqi, 187; unjust, 141–43,
studies, 3, 22, 256; heritage tourism, 151–53; women wailing, 187, 199.
3, 7, 11–12, 196, 232; intangible See also funerals
cultural heritage, 4, 7, 12, 50, 69, deep past: loss of connection with, 173;
83–85, 87, 91, 115, 128, 143, 162, commitment to, 161, 173–74, 177–78
166, 178, 183, 195–96, 199, 218, de-Maoification, 94
251, 253, 257, 261, 265; local demonic power, 139
initiatives and meanings, 6, 201; Deng Xiaoping, 9, 13, 71, 75–79, 84,
living heritage, 10, 34–35, 133, 88, 112, 247
134, 155, 261–62, 267, 270; official dibao, (basic subsistence allowance), 28
heritage projects, 1, 257; protection, didactic culture and heritage, 129–30.
preservation, conservation of, 3, See also pedagogical orthodoxy
8–11, 21–23, 25 76, 80, 87, 115, Dirlik, Arif, 3
120–21, 123, 126, 130, 133–34, disability, 17–18, 28
138–39, 141, 144, 192, 197, 221, discrimination, 22
Index 273
divination, 126, 129, 149, 198 ethnicity: boundaries and categories,

dongba: Aming, legendary founder of 12–13, 160, 166, 212, 221;
dongba ritual practices, 9, 161–74, condemnation of ethnic minority
177–78, 263; dongba culture, 8, 162, practices, 10, 268, 198; diversity,
183–85, 198–200, 203, 265–66; 4, 24, 184, 196, 209–10, 215, 221,
Dongba Culture Research Institute 266; minority nationalities (shaoshu
in Lijiang (Yunnan), 198; Dongba minzu), 12; use of ethnic culture
Culture Village (Gerdu), 199–200; and diversity for the promotion of
ritual specialists (“dongbas”), 161– tourism, 8, 12, 84, 159–60, 162,
65, 172–74, 176, 184–85, 187, 199, 196–97; Yi people, 12
203; ritual and writing, 8, 165–68, ethnographic fieldwork, 2, 26, 39, 69,
173, 177, 198 92, 94–96, 98, 161, 171, 173, 183,
Dukezong (Yunnan), 3, 9, 11, 14, 210, 232–33, 242, 246, 248, 255,
266–67; Dukezong Book Café, Evans, Harriet. See Beijing from Below
223; Dragon King Temple 216;
Eight Petal Lotus Street, 222; fires, Fan Jianchuan, 13, 91–95, 98, 100–105,
14, 210, 211, 213; Five Phoenixes 107, 110, 260, 262
Mountain, 216, 218; new “old city,” Faro Convention, 133, 138
“old town,” 212; Hamu Valley fengjian mixin (“feudal superstition,”
Village, 224; Moonlight (Yueguang) derogatory term for religious
Plaza, 217, 219; reconstruction of, practices), 75, 140, 267
214; Turtle Mountain, 210, 212, 216, fengshui (geomancy), 71, 124, 130, 262
217; Sifang Street Square, 212, 214, festivals. See ghost festivals. See also
221–22, 229; Songzanlin Monastery, Buddhism, guardian deities/protector
211, 216, 219, 224–25; Victory gods, and Naxi
Banner, 212, 227; White Chicken Feuchtwang, Stephan, 5, 7, 11, 33–34
Temple hill, 212, 218; Zhongxin filial responsibility, 31
Town, 212, 214–216, 219 funerals, 107, 150, 156, 173, 185–89,
duo kuai hao sheng (faster, better 198–99, 264; preparation of food,
and more economical, Great Leap 186–87; pig-killing, 186; gender
Forward slogan), 109 distinctions, 187–88
Furth, Charlotte, 204n11
elderly people’s centre and association,
127–30 Gable, Eric, 95
elites. See cultural elites and local elites gaige kaifang (Reform and Opening
embroidery, 192–194 Up), 75
encompassment, 7, 11, 160, 165, 177 gender, 11, 30–32, 183, 200–203, 264–
ethics: and awareness of China’s 66; division of labor, 188–89, 191,
modern history, 93–94; ethical 205; expectations, 188; gendered
imaginaries, 10–12; and heritage worlds, 4, 11, 34; men ploughing,
work in Southwest China, 197; moral 189; segregation, 200–201; and
communities, 10–12; museum work, space, 184–89. See also patriarchy
95–96; ordinary, 95; recognition, gentrification, 24–25, 146, 257
11, 30–31, 35; and temples, 153–54; Gerdu (Yunnan). See dongba
well-being, 142 ghost festivals, 122, 145–46
274 Index
globalization, 23, 76; global brands, 22, Huangshan Mountain (Anhui), 3, 13;
33; global capital, 20–22, 25 Ciguang Temple, 73; comparison
Graeber, David, 102 with Mounts Jiuhua and Qiyun, 71,
grassroots: definitions, 1–2, 255, 261; 73; comparison with Mount Wutai,
Fan Jianchuan’s characterization 76; cultural significance and history
of himself as belonging to, 110; of, 70–76; Hongcun village, 82; visit
practices and values, 5–6, 14, 156, by Deng Xiaoping, 75; Xidi village,
160, 197, 261, 263–64 82; World Heritage Site, 76–77,
Great Leap Forward, 93, 109 79–80
Grainge, Paul, 19 Huangshan School of Painting, 74–76,
guanxi, 107 84
guardian deities/protector gods, 115–16, huiguan (provincial association lodge)
123, 125, 129–130, 176, 218; 17, 116
festivals for, 118–20, 123, 130, Huizhou (traditional region in Anhui
151–152 province), 69–70, 77–87, 259
Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Hu Jintao, 247
Party), 92, 212, 260 Hutchison Whampoa, 97
hutong (lanes and alleys), 19, 37, 56, 62
Han Chinese: identification with
dominant culture of, 13, 162, 170, intangible cultural heritage. See cultural
222; state interventions, 197–98. See heritage
also ethnicity
Handler, Richard, 95 Jackson, Michael, 171
hanjian (traitors to China), 93 jiaguo qinghuai (“feelings for home-
Harrell, Stevan, 12, 198 family-nation”), 139–145, 155
Harrison, Rodney, 3 Jianchuan Industrial Group, 96
hemp: garments, 192–93; shrouds, Jianchuan Museum Complex, 11, 13,
194 91–114, 140, 259–60
heritage. See cultural heritage Jiang Zemin, 247
Hillenbrand, Margaret, 19 juweihui (residents’/neighborhood
Hilton, James, 212, 220 committee), 27, 125–129
history: family, 147; official, 4;
unofficial, 92–94 kangcan (group of monks), 224–25
Hobsbawm, Eric, 3, 226 Karma, 243, 250
holistic sanctification, 231–32, 248–51 Kendall, Paul, 9, 12, 14, 159
Hou Song, 4 KMT. See Guomindang
houses, 11, 149–50, 159, 185, 262
homes, 17–18, 29–30, 33, 37–38, 62, Lambek, Michael, 95
147 Lhasa (Tibet), 138, 246
Huangshan City (Anhui): Liyang Town, Liang Yongjia, 7–8
69, 83–85; renaming from Huizhou, Li Ka-Shing, 97
69, 76–79, 259; Tunxi District, 69, Lijiang (Yunnan), 8, 11, 161, 169–71,
73, 80–84 173, 176, 188; Chinese occupation
Huangshan Cultural Heritage of (1723), 200; earthquake, 197;
Management Model, 80–82, 86–87 material success of, 159, 172;
Index 275
rebuilding as Lijiang “old town” 197; mozhe shitou guohe (“crossing the river
rivalry with Zheba, 9, 159, 161, 166, by feeling the stones”), 99
168, 172, 177, 200; reinvention of Mu Chiefs: Mu Gao 169; Mu Zeng
Dongba script, 172 169–70; tianwang (the celestial
Lineage (patrilineal descent group), 117, king), 168–69
119–20, 144, 147, 150, 153–55 Mueggler, Erik, 11–12, 175, 188, 191,
Ling Shuhua, 42, 47, 50–51; and 204–205
Crescent Moon Group, 42 mulefang (type of housing), 159, 178,
lishi zeren (historical responsibility), 94 185
local elites, 6–14, 130, 134, 139, 155, Muli (area in Southern Sichuan),
212, 215, 218, 261–52; definitions 169–70
of, 139 museum boom, 91, 259
locality (difang), 4–7, 263; local cultural museum employment: dagong de
knowledge, 1, 6 (museum workers), 110; gongzuo
Lugu Lake (Yunnan), 195–96 renyuan (members of staff),
103; guanli renyuan (members
Maags, Christina, 3 of management), 103; linshi
Macdonald, Sharon, 95 yuangong (temporary employees),
market reform: consequences of, 27–28, 103; zhengshi yuangong (regular
173, 176 employees), 103
Maritime Silk Route/Road, 117, 120, Museum of Red Age (Anren): Everyday
133–136, 261 Objects, 102; Porcelain Artworks,
Massey, Doreen, 5, 7, 21 102; Stamps, Clocks, and Badges,
Mauss, Marcel, 5, 24 102
McKahnn, Charles F., 188 Museum of the Red Army’s Long
mediators, 115, 129–30, 262–63. See March, 217
also temple management committees Muslim (hui) rebellion (1856–1873),
Mei Lanfeng, 36n8 211, 266
migrant workers, 19, 26
minban (nonofficial): feiqiye (non- National Day 2009, 23, 26
enterprise unit), 96; museums, 92 Naxi: ancestral road, 161, 173–74;
Ministry of Civil Affairs, 220 basin Naxi, 188, 200; costume,
Minnan culture, 6, 117, 120–21, 134 192, 194–95; celebrations and
Minnan Cultural Ecology Zone, 134, festivals, 175, 192, 194; houses,
144 185, 188; matrilineal traditions, 200;
minjian (popular) practices, 110, 184, Mɯts’ydʐy (n., sky support), 162,
199, 216, 223 164; relations with the Tibetans, 161,
minying qiye (private for-profit 164–65, 184
enterprise), 96 nepotism, 106–107
mobility, 4, 7, 33, 134, 150, 264 nostalgia, 19–20, 34, 118–20, 142, 145
Mosuo villages (Yunnan), 195
mother-daughter relationship, 194, Oakes, Timothy, 196
201–202; importance of daughters’ “‘Old Beijing”: as part of residents’
return, 194 identity, 5, 13, 18, 21, 25, 28–30,
276 Index
35, 60–61, 257–58; reinvention of, Quanzhou (Fujian), 6, 116–17, 120–23,

18–19, 21–23, 26, 34, 39, 257 134–38, 256, 261–62; Baohai temple,
Olympics 2008, 19, 22, 25–26, 29 147–48; Da Ge Gong Temple,
One Belt One Road Policy (OBOR), 1, 128–29; Fumei Temple, 125, 136,
14, 134 142–43, 146, 148, 151–54, 157;
orphan souls, 122, 128 Jiadi Gong Temple, 126–27; Jubao
Ou Ning, 36 Chengnan, 134–38, 146–54; recent
Oxbridge syndrome, 44 history of local temples in, 125–26;
songwang chuan (sending boats
painting, 184–85, 195, 199, 203 ritual), 142, 152
papermaking, 166, 184–85, 195, 199,
203 Ran, Peter Guangpei, 11, 188, 194–95,
patriarchy, 30–32, 41–43, 51, 53, 61, 197
63, 189, 265; “big things” (da shi), Rancière, Jacques, 134, 140, 156–57
30; “old master” (yemen) culture, Ranger, Terence, 3
30, 32, 34–36; wives’ deference to “Red Age,” 91, 102, 108
husbands, 31, 34; zhongnan qingnü Red Guards, 94, 112, 168, 179
(phrase expressing the privileging Religious Affairs Bureau, 218–19
of men over women), 184, 189, rencai (talent), 109
200–201, 203 residents’ committees. See juweihui
pedagogical orthodoxy, 120 Resistance War against Japan, 91–92,
pedicab cyclists, 17, 26–33 94, 106; Battle of Teng County,
People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 94, 96 104–106
people’s parks, 216 Taierzhuang Battle, 106. See also
photography, 19, 25, 29, 34–35, 99, hanjian (traitor to China).
241–42 Rowlands, Michael, 7, 11
pilgrimage, 43, 71, 73, 162, 164, 171,
232, 237, 239, 241, 243, 245–46, Samye Monastery, 231–252, 268–69;
249–50, 264 “Like Me” statue of the Lotus
place: attachment to, 6, 22, 30, 35, 72, Master, 239–42; Sutra-viewing
149, 252; center of belonging, 5, Terrace, 233; Utse Temple, 233–34,
35; dislocation, 7, 25, 34, 39, 70, 236–37, 239
125, 149–50, 252; place-making, Sang Ye, 75
120, 171 sent-down youth, 94, 99, 112
political campaigns, 7–8, 197. See Schein, Louisa, 12, 196
also Cultural Revolution, Great Shakespeare’s sister, 42, 47–50, 64–60,
Leap Forward and Anti-Rightist 63. See also Woolf, Virginia
Movement Shangri-La/Zhongdian County
protective talismans, 241 (Yunnan), 162, 164, 173, 209–30,
Putonghua (standard spoken Chinese), renaming of latter to former, 210–11,
172, 223, 225, 246 220, 266
self-criticism, 106–107
Qianmen: Qianmen da jie (Qianmen self-enslavement, 94, 96, 111
Avenue), 22–23, 25–26, 33; separation: women’s role in preventing,
Republican-style architecture, 22 183
Index 277
shehui diceng (social underclass). See The Lost Horizon (novel), 220–21
subaltern Tibetan culture and language, 210, 213,
shu spirit, 161, 174–77 221; strengthening through language
siheyuan (courtyards), 19, 26, 29 classes and “parent training,”
Siu, Helen, 198 223–225; Tibetan Scriptures Hall
Smith, Laura Jane, 3 (Dukezong), 217, 219. See also
Sontag, Susan, 19 Buddhism
spinning. See weaving Tibetan Empire, 234
Stafford, Charles, 95, 183, 194–195, 201 tourism. See cultural heritage and
state (Chinese): access to, 141; ethnicity
commercial and political interests tradition: attachment to, 139–40,
of, 6; heritage projects of, 2–4, 10, 160; living, 145–46, 156; (re-)
115, 265; historical narratives of, invention of, 3, 12–14, 82–85,
93, 112n1; “ideological mainstream” 87, 172, 213, 220, 222, 226, 257;
of, 92, 265; imposition of rules and revival of, 3; transmission of, 125,
values by, 9–10; involvement in 144, 226
local affairs, 6; multiethnic character translocal and transcultural forces, 2, 5,
of, 12; perspective on heritage 7, 9, 13, 24, 33, 38, 51, 61, 63–65,
transmission and preservation, 115; 138, 171, 256
promotion of guoxue, 118. See also tusi (headmen, chieftains), 212
pedagogical orthodoxy and political
campaigns UNESCO, 43, 45, 50, 63, 91; China’s
State Administration for Cultural Ratification of World Heritage
Heritage, 96 Convention in 1985, 69, 259;
Stein, Rolf Alfred, 229 competition for recognition by,
storytelling, 171 4, 75–6, 133–34, 144; heritage
street vendors, 26–28 discourse and values of, 8–9, 77,
subaltern, 21–22, 27–28 133, 138, 156, 256; Intangible
Svensson, Marina, 3 Heritage Convention of 2003, 4;
Convention for the Safeguarding
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 73, 75 of Intangible Cultural Heritage of
tea entrepreneur, 117–20 2004, 87, 162, 265; recognition
tea plantation, 117–20 by, 69, 79–80, 143, 184, 202, 259
temple management committees, 125–29
temples. See Dukezong, Huangshan virtue 11, 13, 31, 98, 142, 145, 149
Mountain, Quanzhou and Samye
Monastery Walker, Alice, 60–61, 63
temporality, 7–10; density of time, 8, Wallace, Anthony, 213–14
235, 269; “hourglass” temporality in Wang Lianmao, 142
Tibetan Buddhism, 8, 231, 235–36, Wang Mingming, 12, 120–121, 134
248–49, 269–70; relationship Wangye deities, 143
between past, present and future, 1, weaving, 185–95; lap loom, 193;
8, 48, 269 status as official transmitter of
278 Index
tradition of, 195, 201; symbolic Xi Jinping, 8, 14, 143

significance of, 202; wooden looms, xiu jiu ru jiu (restore the old like the
190–93 old), 214–15, 218
Wenchuan earthquake, 91, 103 Xuanzong Emperor, 72
Weng Naiqun, 9 Xu Zhimo, 52
White, Sydney D., 188, 205n14–15
Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Yongzheng emperor, 222
Own, 37, 39–41; in Dashilar,
37–38, 56–57; as symptomatologist- Zhao Mengfu, 74
diagnostician, 41. See also Zheba (Yunnan), 14, 160, 263–65;
Shakespeare’s sister as spiritual center, 159, 161–62,
work unit. See danwei 170, 174, 177; rivalry with Lijiang,
Wu Liangyong, 214, 221 9, 159, 161, 166, 168, 172, 177,
Wu Youxiong, 141–146 200
Wu Zongjie, 4 Zhu Yujie, 8–9, 12, 196
About the Contributors
Beverley Butler is reader in cultural heritage studies, Institute of Archaeol-

ogy, University College London, and is the heritage and well-being lead at
the UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies. Among her main publications
is Return to Alexandria—an Ethnography of Cultural Heritage Revivalism
and Museum Memory (2007).
Harriet Evans is professor emerita, Chinese cultural studies, University of

Westminster and visiting professor in anthropology, London School of Eco-
nomics. She has published extensively on women, gender and sexuality in
China, and most recently Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in
the Capital’s Center (2020).
Stephan Feuchtwang is professor of anthropology at the London School of

Economics and Political Science. He is author and coauthor of several books
on temples, festivals and life passage rituals in China and Taiwan, among
which is The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Religion in China (reissued 2021).
He Beili is assistant professor, Central Academy of Arts, Beijing. She ob-

tained her PhD in anthropology at Beijing University (PKU) in 2013. She is
author of Wu shi wu zhong—zhuan shan: animaliao (No Beginning No End:
Pilgrimage to A-myes rma-chen, the Holy Mountain) (2020).
Luo Pan is associate professor, Department of Research, The Chinese Na-

tional Museum of Ethnology. Her research covers cultural heritage, museum
studies and political anthropology. She recently curated the exhibition,
“China Craft: The Protection, Inheritance and Innovation of Ethnic Handi-
crafts,” commissioned by the National Ethnic Affairs Commission of China.
279
280 About the Contributors
Peter Guangpei Ran is assistant research fellow, Institute for Social An-
thropology, Nanjing University, where he teaches visual anthropology. He
completed his PhD at the University of Westminster, London, in 2018. His
research interests include ritual, senses of place, ordinary ethics and phenom-
enological anthropology. His latest film, about Naxi cultural transmission, is
The Gorge Is Deep (2018).
Michael Rowlands is emeritus professor of anthropology and material cul-

ture, University College London. Over many years, he has been conducting
research on material culture and cultural heritage in West Africa, and since
1976, in China. Among his many publications is Civilisation Recast, cowrit-
ten with Stephan Feuchtwang (2019).
Wang Mingming is professor and director of anthropology, Peking Univer-

sity. Among his many works on anthropology and history are The West as
the Other: A Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism (2014) and The Living
Environments: Life, Civilization, and Cosmology (forthcoming).
Wu Yinling is assistant professor in sociology and anthropology, Hebei

University, Baoding. She received her PhD in anthropology at PKU in 2015.
Zhang Lisheng is post-doctoral fellow, Institute of Anthropology, PKU. He

obtained his PhD in anthropology and heritage studies, University College
London, in 2020.

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Grassroots Values

and Local Cultural

Edited by Harriet Evans

86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

List of Figures vii

7  ommitments to the Past: Cultural Transmission in

Figure 0.1.  map of the locations and respective chapter

Figure 6.1 Map

What is cultural heritage in China today? Is it a discourse, a domain of social,

community interests in an economic, political and cultural context in which,

building and world heritage recognition, a dominant discourse of “cultural

The transcultural connections to locality are formed as multiplicities of fluid

for promoting cultural heritage projects, as a site of negotiation between dif-

TEMPORALITY, HISTORY AND AUTHENTICITY

Time, as Doreen Massey reminds us, is remembered through spatialized

2014; Liang 2013). The heritagization of local practices, mediated through

economic returns, the evocation of “authentic traditions” may be absorbed

MORAL COMMUNITIES, ETHICAL IMAGINARIES

Attributions of authenticity carry with them implications of moral value and

ETHNIC BOUNDARIES: WHOSE AND WHERE?

Significant attention in this volume goes to the experience of ethnic com-

local life experiences, the preservation of which continues to be the subject

1. OBOR, “the brainchild of Chinese President Xi Jinping, is an ambitious eco-

Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.”

Butler, Beverley. “The Efficacies of Heritage: Syndromes, Magics, and Possessional

What and Whose is Local Heritage?

NOSTALGIC HYPE AND HERITAGE MEANINGS

Huiming’s and her husband’s attachment to the courtyard of Huiming’s child-

Figure 1.1. Entering a “big cluttered courtyard,” courtesy of Jia Yong

been caught in the cross-fire of global capitalist competition, political power,

PLACE AND PEOPLE IN DASHALAR

The place in question is Dashalar, a small neighborhood of Beijing’s popular

prevent demolition of his dazayuan because he managed to unearth a legal

Figure 1.2. Inside a big cluttered courtyard, 2009, author’s photo

from the possibilities of access to commercial success under market reform

GENDERED VERSIONS OF “OLD BEIJING” IN DASHALAR

One version of the self-description as “Old Beijingers” that I came to un-

celebrated a similar mode of masculinity in a much more grandiloquent and

as dependable “head of the family.” In this, it would have signified an assault

In thinking about heritage, I have been inspired by many conversations with

3. I am aware that my use of the term “subaltern” to refer to this disadvantaged

Butler, Beverley. “The Efficacies of Heritage: Syndrome, Magics, and Possessional

Encountering Virginia Woolf

This sudden discovery of Virginia Woolf in Dashalar had a particularly

HERITAGE QUESTS, LOCAL EFFICACIES

In what follows I invite the reader to join me on a critical “heritage quest” to

HERITAGE INDUSTRY, BANALIZATIONS

Crucially, our visit to Dashalar coincided with its unprecedented transforma-

THE VOYAGE OUT­­—A ROOM AS “QUEST-TEXT”

Dashalar” as “explanation,” to keep a critical fluidity of definitions—notably

HERITAGE EFFICACIES, EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITIES

Woolf’s A Room as “quest text,” alongside other actors and interventions

This in turn reiterates the “pharmakonic” or “poison-cure” signature of

able to identify the “insider-outsider” heritages at play and their accompany-

PATHWAYS OF POWER AND PRIVILEGE:

privileged loci—the idealized “ancestor-archive”—“Western” forces intensify

As “heritage syndrome,” Oxbridge becomes loci for insiders to ritually

THE BRITISH MUSEUM, OIL OF TRUTH

The scene then moves to a more dynamic, contemporary vision of London

7 ommitments to the Past: Cultural Transmission in

Figure 0.1. map of the locations and respective chapter

THE VOYAGE OUT—A ROOM AS “QUEST-TEXT”