The heritage of Chinese cities as seen through the gaze of zhonghua wenhua – ‘Chinese common knowledge’: Guilin as an exemplar

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe pursuit of modernization in cities all over China has at one level resulted in the disappearance of much built heritage; yet at another level, millennia-old elements of urban traditions are as visibly present in contemporary cities as they were centuries ago. This visibility, however, is not always apparent to non-Chinese observers. To reach an understanding of this phenomenon, it is suggested that the normative ‘western’ approach to heritage with its focus on physical materialities, an orientation that explores in great detail the built fabric of monuments, buildings and sites and which embeds a definition of authenticity in how close to the original the current, existing manifestations are, needs to be put to one side. In Chinese history, the fundamental importance of incorporating cosmology into the entire being of towns and cities to ensure harmony between Heaven and Earth, as defined in the selection of their location in the landscape, cardinal orientation, spatial layout and the disposition of principal buildings – has been recorded in a template known as the ‘Zhou li’ or Rites of Zhou (circa 1035 BC). It was compiled by the Duke of Zhou, who is credited with transforming an abstract concept, the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven (through which emperors ruled as ‘Sons of Heaven’ by divine right), into physical city planning and design. However, he was preceded by the ‘Three Sovereigns’ and ‘Five Sage Emperors’, including Huang-di (the Yellow Emperor, eulogized as ‘the Father of the Yellow Race’) who in Chinese historico-mythology received divine instructions that laid the basis for feng shui and Daoism and provided a context for the compilation of the Zhou li. While this template evolved over centuries, its four key tenets based around cosmology remained much the same and throughout imperial China it continued as the master guide for planning towns and cities. Despite attempts during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) to destroy the ‘Four Olds’ (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas), the essence of seeking harmony (integral to the belief system underpinning the Zhou li ) remains a predominant ideal in contemporary China, and some elements of the ancient template continue to be actively applied to the present day. Thus even though many Chinese cities may have ‘lost’ their built heritage as defined by western ‘authorities’ such as ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites, the technical body that advises United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on applications for World Heritage Site listing), their cosmological foundations remain and will often be as evident to Chinese observers today as when those cities were originally founded hundreds of years ago. The concept of ‘Chinese common knowledge’ is crucial to this comprehension. These varied historical and cultural traditions provide the setting to examine the origins of Guilin, a 2200-year-old city in Guangxi Province, which exhibits original aspects of its traditional heritage that are eminently visible in the twenty-first-century city to the Chinese gaze but are often out of sight from western observers who fail to recognize the Chinese tangibles and intangibles all around them.