The Great Tea Road and the Belt and Road Initiative: cultural policy, mobility narratives and route heritage in contemporary China

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Great Tea Road (Wanli chadao) is a 13,000 km trade route that for two centuries connected Qing China and Tsarist Russia. It has been identified in recent years as an important category of China’s route heritage. The rediscovery of the Great Tea Road, and other Chinese route heritage, is being framed in a ‘mobility narrative’, that is, a narrative that describes how mobility and exchange over space and time contribute to the formation of the Chinese nation or Zhonghua minzu. Since 2013 the Great Tea Road has been incorporated into the ‘authorised mobility narrative’ of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and in particular to the BRI agreement linking China, Mongolia and Russia. In 2019 the Great Tea Road was placed on the China list for World Heritage application. This paper examines the rise of the Great Tea Road in contemporary China and describes the various actors that play a formative role in developing the narratives and policies associated with such route heritage. It finds that the Chinese combination of ‘mobility narrative’ and ‘heritage bureaucracy’ provides a discursive and institutional frame that is able to mobilise significant resources in the pursuit of cultural policy and heritage diplomacy.