Understanding the living heritage of Yangmeizhou Island, Xiangtan City, Hunan province, China

Abstract

A large area of the author’s hometown in Xiangtan City is being demolished and redeveloped into a “fake heritage” tourist town known as Yaowan Historic District (窑湾历史文化街区). Apparently, this is the direction of the local government effort in development, using heritage as packaging for commercial development (not dissimilar to Hong Kong’s 1881 Heritage, but on a much larger scale), and in the process destroyed original communities that embody the original tangible and intangible cultural heritage that could have been conserved and integrated into a better form of cultural tourism. The issue is that there seems to be no local understanding of the concept of “place identity” through identifying the key tangible and intangible cultural heritage elements of local communities, and using these elements as cultural assets for more sustainable forms of development. While it is too late to save the communities that have been replaced by the Yaowan Historic District redevelopment, there is a nearby island on the river that is dear to the author, who has regularly visited the small village community on the island when she was growing up. This emotional attachment to the island’s community is the motivation for this dissertation – to understand the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the place as the first step for future proposal for the island’s sustainable development. The focus of this dissertation is the village community on the island of Yangmeizhou, a traditional village that is expected to be impacted by the local government’s redevelopment plan involving this area. The scope of the research is to identify the tangible and intangible elements of Yangmeizhou community and carry out a cultural mapping of them, in order to understand the cultural value of this community.