China’s heritage through history: reconfigured pasts, by Yujie Zhu. London: Routledge, 2024. ISBN 9781032395661
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: The definition of cultural heritage has intrigued, challenged, and frustrated architects, designers, governments from the local to the national level, international organisations, and theorists since the later decades of the 20th century.How to preserve the physical past, however, has a much longer history.In China as in Europe, and more recently in the Americas, reconstruction and rebuilding occurred after natural disaster such as earthquake or flood, warfare, and, in wooden construction, which dominates the Chinese building tradition, as a result of the passage of time.More than in other places, in China, local and sometimes even national records inform us of reconstruction.Those writings do not tell us if the bracket sets of a 12th-century structure rebuilt in the 19th century used contemporary style or sought to imitate the original appearance, nor if books, pictures, or local memory guided the restorers.This kind of information is best for an entity like the Forbidden City, but still does not address the questions we ask today. 1 (Liu 2012) Yujie Zhu's book, China's Cultural Heritage through History, tackles these issues from the Chinese and the Western perspectives, and through well-selected questions and buildings or larger architectural settings shows how China has answered them.The book also seeks to empower the reader to take seriously the responsibility to address questions of cultural heritage in the future.The introduction lays out fundamental questions one should consider when decisions are made about architectural heritage, what is at stake in addressing them, and
Source: Built Heritage
Author: Nancy S. Steinhardt
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4415140568
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