Peking Duck as a museum spectacle: staging local heritage for Olympic tourism

Abstract

In 1991, Beijing began a campaign of urban renewal that culminated in the opportunity to host the 2008 Olympic Summer Games. From 2001 to 2008, the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee engaged in initiatives to showcase to a worldwide audience ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’ (xin Beijing, xin aoyun). Dovetailing with New Beijing's modernizing plans was another discourse of preserving ‘Old Beijing’ (lao Beijing) that made international headlines as centuries-old buildings were demolished or hastily remade into tourist attractions before 2008. However, one point of common ground for both the Olympic organizers and the Old City advocates was a provision in the Olympic cultural program that called for a network of new museums to cooperate with the municipal government and contribute to an Olympic legacy of sustainable economic development focused on heritage tourism. Over the next seven years, the city's Cultural Heritage Administration received enormous support from the national government, and funding for museum work in Beijing quadrupled. Regulations drafted in 2001 allowed private and corporate museums to contribute to the city's museum network in unprecedented ways. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Beijing 2007–2009, I describe how the Beijing Olympics served as a catalyst at two of the city's restaurants for developing corporate-sponsored ‘small-scale, special-purpose’ museums to showcase Beijing's best known culinary dish, Peking Duck. Both Quanjude and Bianyifang Roast Duck restaurants claim primacy in serving authentic roast duck, and the rivalry of these two ‘well-known brand names’ (laozihao) came to a head as both competed for a place on the 2008 National List of Intangible Heritage. The research highlights the current dynamics of state–society relations in China, the changing nature of Chinese museum practices, and general political questions in defining and preserving authentic national cultural heritage for tourist consumption.