China News Service, Fuzhou, January 30th: How can China and the West learn from each other in cultural heritage protection?
——Exclusive interview with Zhao Yanjing, Vice Chairman of China Urban Planning Society and Professor of Xiamen University
China News Service reporter Long Min
Cultural heritage is a national treasure, a witness to history, and the crystallization of people’s wisdom. Currently, countries around the world are actively exploring how to better protect and inherit cultural heritage.
As a country with a long history and rich cultural heritage, China has always attached great importance to the protection and inheritance of cultural heritage. What wisdom has China’s cultural heritage protection contributed to the world? How can China and the West learn from each other in cultural heritage protection? Zhao Yanjing, vice chairman of the China Urban Planning Society and professor of Xiamen University, recently accepted an exclusive interview with China News Service's "East-West Question" and gave an explanation.
The interview transcript is summarized as follows:
Reporter from China News Service: Why are cultural heritages increasingly valued by various countries?
Zhao Yanjing:
If a civilization is compared to a person, cultural heritage is the carrier of that person’s memory. Everyone's existence is shaped by their past survival experiences, and current behavior is a continuation of past behavior. If you don't know where you come from, it will be difficult to make the right choice about where you are going. The same is true for civilization. The longer a civilization develops, the more experiences it can draw on, and the more certain the consequences of actions can be predicted. Losing memory is very terrible for a person, and also for a civilization. Many civilizations have completely disappeared in the long river of history due to being reshaped by external forces.
In a competitive world, some civilizations hope to shape the world in their own style. Especially in the era of globalization, powerful capital has penetrated pervasively into classical civilization and reconstructed its narrative. It poses new challenges to the diversity of civilizations, and some civilizations are disappearing. The disappearance of every civilization means that part of human memory has been deleted or even formatted.
Therefore, it is urgent to preserve the original carrier of civilization. Only by protecting the authenticity of these carriers to the greatest extent possible can we leave real genes for us to interpret our own past. The code of civilization is hidden in cultural heritage.
Data map: Audiences admire the original "Silk Road Landscape Map". Photo by China News Service reporter Zhang Wei
Reporter from China News Service: What is unique about China in the protection and inheritance of cultural heritage?
Zhao Yanjing:
China is one of the few nations in the history of the world with a sense of history. Concern about their own historical status has made the Chinese people pay long-term and continuous attention to recording and interpreting history. Among the major classical civilizations in the world, China’s preservation of original cultural relics and classics is unparalleled. The history of some countries is even recorded through Chinese classics. Without interaction with Chinese civilization and being recorded in Chinese classics, pieces of the history of some countries would not even exist. The unique sense of history of Chinese civilization is also reflected in the tradition of collecting and inheriting antiques, calligraphy, paintings, and classics, which has almost continued throughout the entire history of China.
Cultural heritage is a non-renewable and precious resource, but war and turmoil inevitably lead to the damage and loss of cultural heritage. Especially in modern times, Chinese people's understanding of their own civilization has been constantly shaped, rewritten and even plagiarized by foreign cultures. China's cultural confidence once fell to an unprecedented low. What followed was a serious distortion of the understanding of one's own civilization. The desire for modernization has overwhelmed the appreciation of history, and a large number of historical heritages have been submerged and destroyed by the huge waves set off by modernization. Take architecture as an example. In just a few decades, people no longer use traditional methods to build houses. The ancient city walls that were almost everywhere in the past have also been largely destroyed in the process of modernization.
It is particularly necessary to protect these cultural heritages, re-examine China's modernity from a civilizational perspective, and continue China's civilization in practice.
Data map: A bird's-eye view of the Bixia Temple from the top of Mount Tai. Photo by An Ge Source: CTPphoto
China News Service reporter: What excellent cases of cultural heritage protection has China provided to the world? What good practices have you learned from the West?
Zhao Yanjing:
While other civilizations in the world were still relying on pre-modern methods such as myths, stories, religions, epics, and minstrelsy to record history, China already had a systematic written history. This is one of China's greatest contributions to world civilization.
Related heritage, such as bamboo slips, ancient tablets, tablets, inscriptions, paintings, buildings, sculptures and other physical objects, provide the most authentic carrier of Chinese history. For example, the cliff stone carvings of "Yanran Mountain Inscription" (also known as "Feng Yanran Mountain Inscription") discovered in Hangai Mountain in Mongolia in 1990 completely confirmed the authenticity of Chinese historical records.
Texts not only record the authentic historical information of China, but also some historical fragments of neighboring countries can be restored through Chinese documents. In 1861, the British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham (also translated as Alexander Cunningham) discovered a Buddhist site. It was through checking with the "Datang Western Regions" written in 646 AD that he proved that it was India. The former site of Nalanda Temple.
Among the texts left in Dunhuang, Gansu, there are not only a large number of Buddhist classics, but also daily records such as wine accounts, allowing future generations to have a glimpse of the bottom of ancient society. People even found Foguang Temple, an architectural relic from the Tang Dynasty in Wutai Mountain, Shanxi, based on pictures from murals dating back thousands of years. The Song Dynasty's masterpiece "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" uses a realistic approach to delicately depict urban life at the peak of ancient China more than 900 years ago, leaving the world with the most vivid urban visual information before photography. As for Qin Shihuang's Terracotta Warriors and Horses, they almost holographically display the ancient military culture of 2,200 years ago.
Data map: In 2015, tourists viewed "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" at the special exhibition of Shiqu Baoji at the Palace Museum in Beijing. Photo by Zhang Hao
China's long historical record is not only reflected in its authenticity but also in its continuity, which is very rare in world civilization. Compared with phonetic writing, which is almost undecipherable, ideographic writing provides a unique carrier for the unification of multilingual civilizations. In fact, some civilizations around China were recorded and passed down through ideograms.
In the past thirty years, China has experienced urbanization on an unprecedented scale in history, which has had a huge impact on the protection of historical and cultural heritage, especially the protection of historic districts and buildings. However, many cities have also developed a set of planning methods for heritage protection, which has won valuable opportunities for the realization of heritage value. One of them is the adoption of the "Two-City Model" that bypasses the old city and develops the new city, spatially separating the high-value core area of the new city from the location of historical and cultural heritage, forming a coordinated development of the old and new cities, which not only satisfies the urban needs The need for rapid expansion avoids systematic destruction of traditional historic districts.
This important contribution of China to modern urban planning theory and practice was first proposed by famous planning experts Liang Sicheng and Chen Zhanxiang for the protection of the ancient city of Beijing. A typical case is the construction of Qingdao New City. Since the center of the city was moved from the Badaguan area with rich historical relics to the current May Fourth Square from the beginning, the architecture and texture of the old city were preserved intact. Cities that adopt similar planning include Xiamen, Shanghai, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Chengdu, etc. Most of the historical districts in these cities have been systematically preserved in this way.
Currently, Beijing has been alleviating non-capital functions and reducing the population density in the main urban area. The Beijing Municipal Government has also moved from the old city to the sub-center Tongzhou, which is of great significance in reducing the pressure on the protection and development of Beijing's ancient city.
China has not only made its own contribution to the protection of world cultural heritage, but also borrowed many good ideas from the West. In particular, the "Venice Charter" and "Machu Picchu Charter", which summarized the experiences and lessons of heritage protection in Western developed countries during the industrialization process, played a very important role in the formation of China's cultural heritage protection ideological system. For example, it emphasizes the protection concept of “authenticity” and the protection principle of minimal intervention.
In recent years, many places in China have applied for world cultural heritage to UNESCO. Through the application, many advanced protection concepts, protection methods, and evaluation standards from around the world were introduced to China, which played a huge role in the formation of China's cultural heritage protection system. Through interactions with counterparts from around the world, China has been able to reflect on the world value of China's historical heritage from the perspective of all mankind, which has greatly deepened China's understanding of its own cultural heritage. It can be said that the protection of historical heritage in China has become an important part of the protection of global human historical heritage.
Data map: Audiences admire various abacus in the Shanxi Merchant Museum in Taiyuan, Shanxi. Photo by Wei Liang
Reporter from China News Service: From the perspective of China and the world, what are the current pain points and difficulties in the protection of cultural heritage? How should we solve this dilemma so that cultural heritage can be protected and passed down from generation to generation?
Zhao Yanjing:
The current pain point in cultural heritage protection is how to interpret cultural heritage, and the difficulty is how to use cultural heritage.
Let’s talk about the pain points first. In the final analysis, cultural heritage is the "memory" of civilization, but what exactly does this "memory" tell people? What can humans learn from their own “memories”? This determines what kind of trajectory today's civilization will leave for future civilizations. From a global perspective, cultural heritage is now mainly used as a powerful narrative tool, with the result that "all history is nothing but modern history."
Let’s talk about the difficulty. It is not easy to protect cultural heritage, and even more difficult to maintain it. An important reason is that excellent culture is alive and heritage is historical. Protecting culture by protecting heritage will only “preserve” culture. Specifically, it is the question of how cultural heritage should be used. If it is absolutely not used, as the times change, cultural heritage will soon withdraw from its natural evolution and fall into a rigid state; if it is overused, the true code carried by cultural heritage may disappear during use. How to preserve the "genes" of cultural heritage during the replacement process of its "cells" is a difficult problem faced by all cultural heritage protection.
To solve the pain points and difficulties, first of all, protection theories and concepts need to be updated. To identify what genetic information is contained in cultural heritage. Only when biology moves from the cellular level to the genetic level can we identify the DNA of different organisms. The protection of historical heritage also requires theoretical breakthroughs and upgrades.
Secondly, we need to keep pace with the times and innovate protection methods. "Evolution" itself should be regarded as part of cultural heritage. Modern technology provides an unprecedented "minimum intervention" utilization model and provides unprecedented technical possibilities for higher-dimensional and more efficient utilization of cultural heritage. These will provide solutions with great potential to solve the pain points and difficulties of cultural heritage protection. .
Data map: Cave 257 of Mogao Grottoes (Northern Wei Dynasty). Photo courtesy of Dunhuang Academy
China News Service reporter: What are the similarities and differences between China’s concepts and practices of cultural heritage protection and those in the West? How to effectively play the role of cultural heritage in exchanges and mutual learning between Chinese and Western civilizations?
Zhao Yanjing:
The similarities and differences between Western cultural heritage protection and Chinese cultural heritage protection stem from the different needs of cultural conquest and counter-conquest. With the global expansion of the Western economy and military, interpreting the world from the perspective of Western civilization provided the initial need for the protection of Western cultural heritage. Although today’s cultural heritage protection in the West has long moved away from this need, its underlying code is still hidden in the rules, methods and practices of Western cultural heritage protection. China’s cultural heritage protection concepts and practices stem from responses to Western interpretations of Chinese civilization. To this end, China is also trying to reinterpret cultural heritage from the perspective of Chinese civilization. This approach is also a common reaction of most non-Western civilizations.
If we want to turn cultural heritage into the heritage of all mankind and make it a bridge for exchanges and mutual learning between Chinese and Western civilizations and even world civilizations, we must first build a high-dimensional framework for cultural heritage that transcends China and the West. In this framework, we can start from the first A bird's-eye view of Chinese civilization and Western civilization from a tripartite perspective. This requires the West to give up the impulse to transform and digest other civilizations with its own civilization narrative; China must also examine the historical position of its own civilization from the perspective of all mankind. The formation of this structure depends on the rise of the entire non-Western economy represented by China. Only in an equal economic environment can non-Western civilizations become more confident and have equal rights to speak. Only then can the third-party perspective of all mankind replace different From the perspective of each civilization, cultural heritage can serve as a bridge for exchanges and mutual learning among all human civilizations. (over)
Interviewee profile:
Zhao Yanjing, professor at the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering/School of Economics of Xiamen University, Vice Chairman of the China Urban Planning Society, expert of the Xiongan Planning Expert Advisory Group, expert of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee Decision-making Advisory Committee, member of the Land and Space Planning Expert Group of the Ministry of Natural Resources, Cardiff, UK PhD from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning of the University. He once served as director of the Xiamen Municipal Planning Bureau, director of the Xiamen Municipal Planning Committee, and deputy chief planner of the China Urban Planning and Design Institute. He has long been committed to studying the development laws of urban space from the perspective of institutional economics. Based on urban planning preparation and management experience, he has formed his own unique interpretation system of urban space, which has had a significant impact on China's urban space strategy and policy.