Notes on Heritage and History in Modern China

Abstract

The explosion of heritage sites, museums, and what might be called “heritage consciousness” since the beginnings of the Reform Era in the 1980s should be incorporated into historical understandings of modern China. Historians have tended to neglect the story of heritage in China, while anthropologists, geographers, and scholars of other disciplines, in spite of rich research, seldom treat heritagization in its full historical context. The study of the history of Chinese heritage adds an important dimension to our knowledge of how the concept of “China” was formed and re-formed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is also a global story shaped by the circulation of persons, ideas, institutions, and objects. Chinese heritage was long driven by the state, but the state was also shaped by cultural heritage. Increasingly in the twenty-first century, Chinese heritage is also driven by local forces.