Community Planning in Heritage Conservation

I recently became Chair of the Senior Advisory Board of the Global Heritage Fund, an organization I have been involved with for almost four years. GHF has patented a Preservation by Design® approach to saving World Heritage in developing countries. The approach follows to some extent the disciplinary boundaries we regularly bridge in teaching historic preservation: Design, Planning, Conservation and History. For GHF’s Preservation by Design®, the four are Planning, Conservation, Community Development and Partnerships. The emphasis on Community Development and Partnerships is key to the modern practice of heritage conservation.

One of the things my international practice in heritage conservation has taught me is that many other nations draw a sharper line between heritage conservation and community development. If conserving historic buildings is seen as a form of development, it is usually only conceived in terms of tourism development. Rarely do you find the understanding we have developed in North America that saving historic buildings is a vital community development and empowerment tool. A case in point is our new Preservation 10X plan of the National Trust for Historic Preservation which makes “Sustainable Communities” the first of four thematic foci for the Trust going forward.

Five years ago I was asked by the State Department to consult with preservationists in Tustan, a fascinating archaeological site in the western Ukraine. My primary (and primal) suggestion was to do a community planning workshop with local residents to determine how they might appreciate the site, how they might benefit from the site, and how the interpretation and potential development of the site could impact the community in a positive way. The suggestion was well received, but it was entirely foreign to the concept of the “heritage conservation” sector.

Even many western European nations define heritage conservation as a distinct sector; distinct from planning, distinct from architecture, distinct from economic development. In our current work in Lima, Peru, we are attempting to introduce urban agriculture to the Cercado, the World Heritage Center of Lima. In so doing, we toured the area with the lead urban agriculture planner and the architect responsible for the Cercado’s historic fabric. It quickly became apparent that these two officials didn’t speak the same “language” when it came to the built environment. Our added value, as outsiders, is to bridge their bureaucratic and cultural boundaries and find new synergies.

Our culture values innovation and cross-boundary thinking, but many societies – I would hazard most societies – take a more defensive approach, safeguarding various disciplines. Even the term “heritage conservation sector” sort of freaked me out at an international conference in Sweden in 2007. Why would the sector define itself – and in this case its financial metrics – in contrast to other sectors? Isn’t that ghettoization? I have always seen the choice to conserve the historic built environment not as a luxury or specialty, but an essential component of community development.

There is a peculiarly American approach to problem-solving that more easily shrugs off cultural norms and categories. It is why we have Silicon Valley (where the GHF is located, perhaps not coincidentally). Perhaps it is the relative thinness of our cultural history; it is certainly an American pride in ‘thinking outside the box.”

At the same time, building conservation as a community development tool dates back to at least the advent of “the new preservation” in the 1960s in terms of historic neighborhoods and the 1970s advent of the National Trust’s Main Street program for commercial districts. In the United States, tax advantages for preservation have been around a full 35 years, so the recognition of this aspect of heritage conservation is deep here.

My most direct experience with Global Heritage Fund’s Preservation by Design® approach has been in Pingyao, which I have written about extensively before here and here. In remote archaeological sites like Chauvin de Huantar in Peru and Ciudad Perdida in Colombia, the opportunities for community development are more limited, but no more so than Tustan. Santiago Giraldo of GHF has worked with the community on the hiking trail that takes you to Ciudad Perdida and hosts a variety of businesses that cater to tourists. The challenge, of course, is to insure that the development of the community is not solely dependent on tourism.

My work in Weishan, China with the Center for US-China Arts Exchange and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is emblematic of this. The goal there is to conserve historic buildings and landscapes and intangible heritage to serve BOTH tourism development AND the local community. So far, as I reported to International ICOMOS conferences in 2007 and 2011, the goal is being met. The North Gate, a 1390 national landmark in the heart of Weishan Old City, is now being used for community events and music as well as serving as a tourist destination. Thus heritage conservation serves both transient and permanent communities.

Ultimately, what we are doing when we preserve buildings is preserve community. One of the great mischiefs of High Modernist architecture and planning (which led to the modern preservation movement) was that it believed you could design a community from scratch and that it would function better than an existing one. One of the great strengths of heritage conservation is that it recognizes that communities can only be sustainable when they preserve and make functional those elements of their heritage which they value.

One day a 27-year old preservation planner pulled his yellow Nova over in Humboldt Park, Chicago, and wrote this down:

“Landmarks serve a community by providing a point of reference, an element of identity, and a source of pride. The community serves landmarks by providing for their protection, interpretation and enhancement. Our built environment is a vital reference for our past, and a foundation for future growth.”

Kid was right.

Weishan 2011

This is Dao, written on the side of a temple on Weibaoshan, the “quietest mountain in China” deep in Yunnan. Dao means the way, which can be as simple as a road or path or as complex as all of the doubts and triumphs within the human psyche. As one of the two 2,500 year old Chinese traditions, Daoism is the one that looks inward at the self, both in an attempt to follow right action (to borrow a Buddhist phrase) and to seek contemplative truths.

This temple on Weibaoshan was built without a permit – hence no one visits it – violation of karma/social contract

The other tradition is of course Confucianism, which is directed outward, at human behavior in groups, at families and the extension of the family that is society. It is about ethics and moral behavior and in many ways quite different to its inward-looking contemporary. Both influenced the adoption of Buddhism by the Chinese almost a millenia later, and both can be worshipped in the 22 temples of Weibaoshan, a place I returned to yesterday after an absence of two years.

Chang Chuen Cave (temple), a national landmark on Weibaoshan

The Way is clearer than it was two years ago, and not only because of the new signs that tell you the history of sites like the Nanzhao Yi temple, where I ran into some new friends, a stem-cell biologist and a historian and banker and geologist celebrating a 30-year class reunion,

or the amazing Wen Chung palace with its mural of the Yi people dancing under the pines and smoking tobacco, a mural sitting in a pool that I have watched slowly fade and delaminate for the last eight years,

as has the story of the Fairy of the Luo River on the other side

or the Yong Lingquan temple with its 400-year old camelia

or the Jade Emperor Temple

This year I was thanking the Jade Emperor more than pleading with him as I did in 2009 when on this cloud-shrouded mountain I got a phone call from Felicity because cell phones are part of the Way in China, and easily reach the most mystical places. That is the way, though it may not conform to the aesthetics of difference central to the lingering colonialism in our own consumer culture. But as anyone will tell you, I am not skilled at difference.

quick test: do you see contrast or harmony?

The mystical is not merely the otherworldly but also the simple pleasures that can escape you when you lose the Way, like the unfettered pleasure of crossing the bridge beef noodles for breakfast on Saturday or watching the man on the food street pulling the noodles for breakfast on Sunday and Monday.

Deputy Mayor Bi quoted the Buddha as he opened our conference on the restoration of the Dong Yue Temple complex (including the Tai Bao and Shi Wang Palaces) on the edge of town, historic places my students and I and SAIC and the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University have been working to save since 2004.

Here is the delegation with our hosts in Weishan, near a reflecting wall.

Here we were again, Jingjing Gao and I, with SAIC Historic Preservation Director Anne Sullivan and Facilities VP Tom Buechele surveying the temple walls as we plan a permanent studio and student center here in the pristine depths of Yunnan, completely antipodal from our home but I place I have called home some seven times over eight years.

Dong Yue temple

Here is the view of Weibaoshan, from room 3004 where I always stay, where I have spent some five or six weeks of my life, although there is a new floor and new furniture and I have internet access because that is the Way.

My students often “complain” that I am constantly running into people I know when I tour them around Chicago, and it happens in China too – I ran into my June tour guide friend Jiajia Huo in the busiest airport in the world and of course the monk Xiao, and of course I visit with my Global Heritage friends in Beijing and doubtless I will run into someone in Dali.

I love the food here – nothing is refrigerated because it is picked and cooked within a few hours and there are dozens of wonderful mushrooms and vegetables and meats and no cheese thank god

There is a lot of eating and drinking in Chinese culture, which is why it is the civilized culture and all of the rest of us are barbarians. Indeed, they call me the Uighur which at least brings me into the geographic orbit of historic China without civilizing me completely, but I can drink and sing with the best of them and thus our negotiations proceed with mutual sincerity and propitious signs of success. Tom and Anne are doing pretty well at this too. The toast is “Gombei” which means “empty glass” and believe me, they check.

The town has improved as well, with new signage and more shops and more prosperity, but as I told the international ICOMOS conference in May (as I had in 2007) Weishan is still authentic and it is still a real place with real people, which means it has not lost its soul: it has not lost the Way. We walked through the market, a narrow alley of mushrooms and tea in big sacks and umbrellas and light bulbs and underwear and fake Crocs and then emerge into a vast market of raw meat and giant squash and vegetables they don’t even recognize in Beijing and Shanghai.

The new road opened and more tourists are coming but what they are coming to see is real history: continuous history that is not frozen or unmalleable but constantly changing. Change is not good or bad but it is inevitable and it is history and it forces us to constantly readjust our prejudices and even our aesthetics. Managing change is keeping the best of the past and repurposing it, giving room to grow creatively, staying in the flow of history. You cannot dictate change and you cannot fully anticipate it, hence the virtue of the heritage conservation field is its individuated process, which manages change by incorporating the deep character of a place into its future.

Creativity. That is our plan for the restoration of the Tai Bao and Shi Wang palaces -a studio space for students from SAIC and wherever else. What we do in heritage conservation is creative re-use, because we try as hard as we can to avoid the dumb solution, the simple-minded solution that works in dichotomies rather than the reality of the Dao, which is both-and.

Moon gate and part of Tai Bao palace courtyard

Shi Wang (Ten Generals) Palace

For years I have felt that the only breakfast is beef noodles, but there is room for other breakfasts just as there is always room for exoticism as long as you realize in can be found as easily in your own everyday as in the everyday of Weishan. And there is room for the cell phone on the sacred mountain as we learned in 2006 when the monk Xiao completed his mesmerizing tai chi chuan demonstration only to have his cell phone ring and we laughed at the contrast between technologies, but you must remember that all civilized behavior is a form of technology and technology is not a thing but a relationship (see next blog). You do not plan the future like you design an object because it is never that simple, but if you maintain the relationship the future will emerge in the appropriate way.

again: contrast or harmony?

this one is in Dali, but you get the idea

I feel at home here because it is familiar but also because the culture is so deep. Not old, not unchanging, but deep as in having reserves of understanding that allow you to stay in the flow of history. Sometimes you will fight it and people will die and sometimes you will push it and elements of culture we thought were permanent will be exposed as historical.

Managing change is staying on the path, the Way, the Dao and I am not – I insist – being mystical but simply trying to describe efficiently that living and contributing requires that you hold your beliefs and your culture as Jane Addams did, loosely in your hand.

the recently improved tie dye factory in Weishan – stencilling

Clinging tightly to anything – past or future or any other false dichotomy – can not lead to success or enlightenment or prosperity or even a relaxing Sunday afternoon.

North Gate, Weishan, a national landmark. 1390. 2011.

6 years. 348 posts. Thank you for reading!

2012 UPDATE: We are going again! Stanley Murashige and I will be leading a Study Trip to Weishan starting May 20, joined by the incomparable Han Li of the Global Heritage Fund. For more info, email me at vmicha@saic.edu.

Shanghai Art Deco

So we are in Chengdu, scheduled to leave on an 11:30 flight to Shanghai. It is cancelled, stranding our group of 21. I have a lecture in the Peace Hotel in Shanghai at 7:45 PM, so China Advocates gets me on the 3:50 PM flight and then books a later flight (which will require at least two fight/negotiations by Huo Yujia (Nancy) our tour guide) for the other 20. I arrive in Shanghai at 6:25, get my bag at 6:35 and get in the waiting car, which delivers me to the Peace Hotel at 7:25. I check into the most FABULOUS 6-room suite I have ever seen, change my clothes and run up to the 11th floor Ninth Heaven room for the lecture.

My friends Professors Yang Li and Mei Qing, whom I met in Amherst at the ICOMOS conference in May, are already there, and the organizers are amazed at my composure, but this is hardly my first time for this sort of minor adventure. In the audience is Peter Hibbard, who literally wrote the book on the Bund and knows ten thousand things more about it than I do, and gives me a signed copy of his book.

The view right outside my lecture, in what was Sir Victor Sassoon’s private suite atop the Peace Hotel.
I talked about the similarities/connections between the Bund and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, two landmark collections of buildings on one-sided streets facing parks and water, and built in basically the same materials and range of styles over a similar stretch of time, starting in the late 19th century and ending in the early 20th.

Peace Hotel, 1926-29, Bank of China, 1935-40, on the Bund
I later met with Global Heritage Fund’s Han Li and Will Shaw again, and got a chance to meet Professor Nancy Shao from Tongji University who did the excellent planning work with her students in Pingyao (see post before last). Professor Mei Qing suggested we collaborate on an article on Shanghai Art Deco which I think is a great idea, because there is TONS of it, especially in the old British and French Concessions, which are sort of preserved (unlike the American concession) and along the shopping street, Nanjing Lu.

Shanghai No. 1 Department Store
I of course was well aware of the Deco buildings on the Bund, and one of the fascinating things about Deco in Shanghai is that it continues well into the 1930s, long after the Depression has killed new construction in the States.

Bank of Communications, the Bund, 1937. Photo copyright Felicity Rich, 2006.
The more I looked around, the more Deco buildings I saw, not just along the Bund, which has more than its share of Neo-Renaissance, Neo-Classical and even Victorian buildings, but on side streets, and I recalled that on three of my trips to Shanghai I stayed in 1930s Deco hotels, Broadway Mansions just north of the Bund and Hengshan (1936) in the French Concession.

North end of the Bund – Broadway Mansions at far right
Deco buildings line the Bund, Nanjing Lu, Peoples Park and even the side streets, despite the rapid pace of redevelopment that has added HUNDREDS of buildings to the skyline on both sides of the Huangpu since I first visited seven years ago…


The challenge of course is to relate these buildings to their contemporaries and forbears in America and Europe. Just like today, international architects practiced in Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s, although many specialized there, like George Leopold “Tug” Wilson, responsible for six of the nine Palmer and Turner buildings on the Bund. He practiced in Shanghai for decades, and interestingly visited America and Europe in 1931 and declared that “there is not a great deal which Shanghai today can learn from elsewhere” (Source: The Bund, Shanghai by Peter Hibbard)

Tug Wilson’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building, 1923

Tug Wilson’s Cathay (Peace) Hotel, 1929

Tug Wilson’s Bank of China Building, 1937, with Lu Quanshou
I am looking forward to learning more about Shanghai Art Deco and am at least a little convinced that it is one of our great Art Deco cities, along with Miami and Mumbai and Tel Aviv. Will learn more soon….

I also got to go up in the “Bottle Opener”, the tallest building in China, officially the Shanghai World Financial Center, where I took this photo in an obvious but fun attempt to emulate that famous image of Le Corbusier’s godlike hand over the Plan Voisson model.

There is a scale to China that is overwhelming. Where we build a building, as a residence or an office or a hotel, they build 20, and they are taller, denser and more multiple. Shanghai especially has leapt into the modern world in architecture. When I was first there in 2004 we toured Adrian Smith’s excellent Jin Mao tower, the tallest building in Shanghai. This time we looked down on it.

Finally a view of the Bund and its counterpart, Michigan Avenue on Grant Park:


Back home – Fourth of July. Where are my beef noodles??

China 2011

Another beautiful day in Beijing – this much clear weather is rare…

“Tour packages to red tourism spots have become increasingly popular this year. The whole market has been stimulated by the enthusiasm to commemorate the Party’s birthday.”

Guo Yi, China Comfort Travel

“The promotion of red tourism will become more of a market role than a government role.”

Song Ziqian, senior policy researcher, China Tourism Academy

These are quotes from two articles in the China Daily this morning, part of the continuing coverage of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Community Party. They are striking in two ways: first, they conflate and confound the old distinction between communism and capitalism as the difference between a planned economy and a free market economy. Both quotes note how “red tourism” – tourists seeking out important sites in the 20th century history of the Communist Party – has become an important and growing segment of the free market economy.

The first article discusses how cultural heritage tourism is a growing phenomenon in many countries, which means that tourism to sites associated with pivotal CCP events like the Long March of 1934-36 is a type of heritage tourism, just as Americans would visit Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon or Gettysburg or other places central to the founding of the nation. A tourist is shown wearing a mock Red Army uniform posing next to a weaver’s loom in Yan’an in Shaanxi. How is that different from dressing up as a cowboy in Tombstone or Ben Franklin in Philadelphia? From a national tourism point of view, they are parallel activities. From an economic point of view, they are identical activities.

So, I was first struck by the marvelous mixing up of capitalism and communism implicit in “red tourism”. The second thing that struck me was the history and its timing, because I met again last night with my Global Heritage Fund friends Han Li, Firth Griffith and Will Shaw. We were talking about the history of the Community Party and how this could provide opportunities to promote certain heritage sites that GHF may want to get involved in. My instinctive response was very positive, not simply because the Party has power and influence and it would be good to choose sites associated with their history. That fact has the same importance as the idea of getting banks to connect to the Chinese banking history in Pingyao detailed in my last blog.

No, the reason I instinctively saw the promotion of Party history as a positive was exactly the same point made in the quotes in this morning’s paper: I saw this history as trending; hitting a point of popularity because it was far enough in the past to become nostalgic. Nostalgia is a distortion of history, often a kind of cleansing of history that sieves out the unpleasant memories in favor of the warm and fuzzy. Nostalgia was active when Williamsburg opened in the 1930s and is still active today. Just as certain architectural styles only become popular after a certain amount of time has elapsed – witness the slow adoption of Victorian by the preservation movement in the 1960s and 70s – historical periods only become nostalgic and subject to tourism appropriation after their elements of active agency have ended. Old-style Chinese communism ended in the late 1970s, and the majority of Chinese have no personal memory of it. Hence, it can be nostalgic.

As I have noted in a whole bunch of blog entries about Mid-Century Modernism, there is a generational aspect to what become heritage, whether it is historical or architectural. The impulse to preserve is often attendant with obsolescence: when a technology, building style, or historical period loses active agency, it becomes a potential subject for preservation.

we swam in the water cube (above), ran along the Great Wall, and bicycled down from the wall area – sort of a Beijing Ironman!

All of the pictures you see in this blog were taken with the same camera, which Felicity and I bought in 2004 and is the only digital camera I have ever owned. I was slow to adopt digital, just as I was slow to adopt cell phones and digital music. Some of this Luddite tendency is actually visible in blog entries from four or five years ago. I recall my cousin Andy saying about digital cameras “That train has left the station.” And he was right. But two years ago I had an 18-year old freshman student at SAIC who started collecting film cameras – he has at least two dozen. As soon as the technology became obsolete, there was a huge desire – especially on the part of those who did not live through it – to preserve it.

The generational challenge is exacerbated by the accumulation of capital by an older generation, especially if that capital is not directed to the exploitation of the growing market segments. That is, in fine, the point of the quotes above and the point of my discussions with my Global Heritage Fund friends. We can recognize the emerging market segments and trends in heritage conservation and heritage tourism. Can we find the capital needed to catalyze those emerging markets? Or will the Chinese beat us to it?

Pingyao 2011

My Pingyao visit for Global Heritage Fund was excellent, thanks to the extremely talented Han Li, who runs the China program for GHF, Board member Firth Griffith (and family!) and consultant Will Shaw. There has been significant progress in our work in Pingyao, the most notable example of which is the restoration of 12 Mijia Xiang, a courtyard that is now home to GHF offices and a community auditorium.


Every Friday this room hosts a presentation on local Pingyao culture, including the local dialect, which like many indigenous cultural expressions, is in danger of being lost. The building thus preserves both tangible and intangible cultural heritage, making it a model of contemporary heritage conservation. 12 Mijie Xiang had been converted to a school at one point, and Han has preserved a section of the schoolyard mural to capture that history as a palimpsest.

The restoration removed an intrusive modern 2-story cement structure and replaced it with a yaodong, the traditional parabolic arched vault structure that serves as the innermost courtyard structure, providing natural heating and cooling. The yaodong was well documented and thus follows appropriate standards for reconstruction of missing elements, but the ease with which it could be achieved is testament to the survival of these construction techniques within the Pingyao community.


In addition to this physical conservation project, GHF has partnered with Tongji University, which completed a very detailed conservation plan for the city, that incorporates not only conservation of important buildings and streetscapes but also deals with the essential issues of waste and water management, transportation and other elements essential to the success of heritage conservation as a development modality. Preserving historic buildings is not a challenge to development: it is a kind of development, and it is inherently a more sustainable development model because it incorporates those aspects of a community’s history which the community has determined are central to its identity.

That is not to say that Pingyao does not have challenges. It was full of domestic tourists during my visit, as well as a fair amount of international tourists, although the infrastructure is like Dali, sort of designed for a backpacker tourist and lacking some of the niceties that even such touristic sites as Lijiang have procured, like ATMs.

Pingyao is actually exquisitely poised to take advantage of new tourism: it lies halfway between Beijing and Xi’an, popular sites that my Art Institute tours always include. Moreover, a new high-speed rail line is opening up, so it will only be a couple hours from either city. The city boasts several good temples, and the Shuanglin Temple 6km out of town has some of the best surviving sculpture – dating back to Ming and earlier – of any temple in China.

gotta love the thousand-armed Guanyin

The wall itself is fantastic, circumscribing the entire old town with dozens of gate houses and six major gates. Pingyao had a wall dating back more than two thousand years, although the current one is largely Ming, but it has another heritage that offers a unique way to combine the past and the future into a development scheme. Pingyao was the center of the financial industry in China beginning in the early 19th century as local merchants, tired of the hassle of lugging tons of precious metals from place to place in their commercial networks, developed a draft transfer system that allowed their distant offices to secure funds without worrying about banditry and other losses. In a sense, it is the foundation of banking, and it would be great if some of China’s great banks saw the opportunity to restore some buildings and recapture their history here. You can visit the Rishengchang museum, one of the bigger houses. Here are some pictures of it from my visit three years ago.

I also toured the next physical conservation project GHF has planned, also with the assistance of Tongji, which provided incredibly detailed research on the history, current occupants, ownership, condition and historic significance of Fanjia Jie, a street where the extended Fan clan lived in a series of courtyard houses. Two houses, which have survived as Class I historic buildings, are to be rehabilitated for the families which live there. The larger plan envisions restoring the entire street. But it won’t be a museum, because that ISN’T what preservation and conservation is about. It will be a living place that will be attractive to tourists because it is authentic, because it is historic and because it is contemporary. Here is one of the courtyards we are going to restore, and then some views of the street and architectural details.




The plan also includes new green space and a community crafts center. Pingyao is known for elaborate paper cutting known as jianzi and GHF has also done wood block printing workshops, along with building conservation workshops for the locals. In fact, the plan reminds me of our brief in Lima, Peru (see last five blogs) to incorporate gardens (the productive type) into courtyard houses there. Hopefully the project will inspire others (like banks) to rehabilitate other portions of the city in a similar way, using the best 21st century heritage conservation planning, which is not limited to tangible heritage and is not about the past, but the future. In fact, the motto above 12 Mijie Xiang is Yi Li Ming, a merchants motto which signifies that business and profit must be done for the greater good. That is a definition of sustainable development: development that provides equally for current and future generations in economic, social and environmental terms. It is a great model for conservation in China.

Yunnan Study Trip 2011

We are preparing for our fourth Study Trip to the Weishan Heritage Valley in Yunnan, China, this summer. Each trip has focused on preserving the historic resources of this unique city, which dates to the founding of the Nanzhao Empire in the 7th century, and which includes numerous landmarks from the last several hundred years, including the stunning North Gate, the second largest gate in China after Tien An Men. And it is older. Here is Felicity Rich’s 2006 photo of this national landmark.

The trip begins in Beijing, with visits to the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Great Wall at Mutianyu.

We then fly to Xi’an to see the famous terra cotta army of Qinshihuangdi…

That amazing 1980s discovery is contained in 3 buildings and an expansive museum, but everyone forgets that Xi’an was the capital for several empires, including the golden age empire of the Han (roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire) and the T’ang (7-9th centuries when Europe was NADA). The city has a fabulous city wall, a stunning mosque

Xi’an city wall

this is a minaret

and two of the oldest pagodas in China, dating from the 8th century, known as the Da Y’an Ta (Great Wild Goose Pagoda) and Xiao Y’an Ta (Small Wild Goose Pagoda) and an excellent museum adjacent to the latter.

Da Yan Ta

Xiao Yan Ta

and then there are the famous dumplings, which tourists go nutty for, but to be honest, the food gets MUCH better down in Yunnan, where we head next, first to Dali, home city of the Bai people

Yunnan is unusual in that the minorities (Bai, Hui, Yi, Lisu, Miao, Dai, etc.) are actually a majority in comparison to the Han, a very rare situation in a Chinese province. Dali also has a nice architectural connection to Xi’an in the Three Pagodas, the oldest of which is probably by the same architect as the Xiao Yan Ta in Xi’an (I mean look at it, come on!) and is contemporaneous, roughly 9th century:

We then proceed to Weishan, that lovely town on the Southern Silk Road and the Tea Horse route (the one that brought the good Pu’er tea up from south Yunnan to Tinbet). Unlike Dali, which has gone all touristic in the center, or Lijiang, which did the same, Weishan has not been overrun by tourists. But it has been preserved.

The coffin makers and noodle makers and tailors and food shops still serve the local people from the valley. Tourists are very few and far between. The food is plucked off the mountainside in the morning and you eat it for lunch. No refrigerators to spoil the taste.

The other amazing thing about this trip – unlike most Study Trips – is that we spent a week to 10 days in Weishan and work with the local officials and people to actually do a project in the historic town. My colleague on all of the trips to Weishan (with students and without as consultants) has been Yunxia “Jingjing” Gao, and she has proved amazing at securing access to inaccessible sites as well as getting us INCREDIBLE value for money on every trip.

In 2004 we planned a restoration of the Dong Yue temple complex. in 2008 it was restored, largely according to our plan. In addition to our partners at the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University, we have had support from SAIC’s Barry Maclean, who made the temple restoration possible.

Over 8 years, we have developed strong relationships with the local officials and a level of trust and cooperation that is unprecedented in other (more expensive) study trips. In 2006, we documented 16 buildings (12 courtyard houses and 4 temples) in Weishan with large format and digital photography. In 2009 we developed plans for modernizing courtyard houses because in cities like Lijiang, courtyard houses are preserved and empty, because they don’t have basic amenities like plumbing.

image by Racquel Davey

The project for 2011 is really exciting. We are going back to the Dong Yue temple and the adjacent Tai Bao palace, a century-old structure of pavilions and moon gates that we want to convert to a residential arts/scholarship center.

The government of Weishan has agreed to give SAIC the site and we are assembling support and partners to help make it happen. This type of project is not found in other student study trips.

We will present our project work and findings to the local officials, and then we will proceed to Shanghai, where I will do my famous tour of the Bund (it looks just like Michigan Avenue in Chicago) and we can marvel at the incomparable treasures of the Shanghai Museum.

The trip will leave Chicago May 31 and finish in Shanghai on June 21.

Curious? Email me at vmicha@saic.edu or visit the study trip webpage. My colleague and faculty expert on China, Yunxia “Jingjing” Gao is also available for consultation. Weishan has been one of the culminations and highlights of my preservation career, and I would be happy to share it with you.

More on Yunnan 2009

The rice replanting was in full swing throughout Yunnan when we were there in May and June, and you could watch this millenia-old agricultural ritual as we traveled north from Weishan to visit Jianchuan, to see the famous grottos and also the restored temples in Shaxi town. The Swiss had been involved in the efforts to restore these temples, which have some very excellent early Ming duogong, something you rarely see. Anyway, here are the temples at Shaxi in Jianchuan, Yunnan

But you have to see the duogong – see, basically as the Ming became Qing the duogong became less functional and more decorative and they got smaller and more elaborate.

These are robust duogong, to be sure. One of the challenges in China is that each dynasty – except the Qing (17th-early 20th centuries) – destroyed most of the stuff from the previous dynasty. The Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s was sort of a modern version of the iconoclasm that cycles regularly throughout Chinese history. Thus Foguangsi on Wu Tai shan in Shanxi is one of the oldest temples left in the whole country, dating from the late 9th century and it was just named a World Heritage Site thanks to my friends at the Global Heritage Fund. But for Yunnan, the temples at Shaxi are pretty impressive, as is the restored theatre and central square, sideng.

The town also has a series of gate, picturesque narrow lanes and a lovely old stone bridge over the river.



The only GHB in this cultural cocktail is the fact that the lovingly restored town square was so empty, much emptier than the picture of it John Stubbs included in his new world conservation book Time Honored (I especially recommend Chapter 2 to all aspiring preservationists). This is the nagging problem with so much cultural tourism – they decide that tourism is the answer so they throw out the other options. Sideng had maybe two or three open shops and less than four other tourists while we were there. It was more of a stage set than a place.

Which is too bad, because the temple interpretation was good, including models and detailed panels describing every level of conservation from the region down to the individual monuments. And the museum of the tea-horse route in the theater building was small but worthwhile. Our work in Weishan involves the same horse-tea route caravan, which through history brought tea up from its sweet spot in southern Yunnan to Tibet and points east and west. (I did the English labeling here so there is a possibility of error.)

In Weishan we saw the restored courtyard used by the planning department which was also a significant site on the tea-horse route.

And we had tea there, which is cool. We also had tea in Dong Lian Hua (East Lotus Village) one of two Muslim towns we visited in the Weishan valley, and one I had seen before in 2007 (in fact they still had a picture of me up on the wall) and which was recently named a landmark. The highlight are three tower houses from which merchants could survey the caravans along the route, stable a large number of horses, and conduct the trade that made the valley.


Like Weishan, Dong Lian Hua is a place where conservation has preserved the best of the past as a service to the people who live there, not simply as a sop to tourists. This is the best way – the only sustainable way – to plan for the future. Because real planning relies not on knowing everything that can happen in the future – that was the great fallacy of modernism in planning and architecture – but on creating enough utility and flexibility that a place or a building will continue to serve people in their full range of motion and time.

I said it in my ICOMOS paper two years ago and It bears repeating: Weishan is a model of developing historic resources for tourism without sacrificing the utility those resources have for the local population. Indeed, local use is primary, because tourism comes and goes. I do not promise that Weishan has avoided the temptations of catastrophic tourism, only that they have avoided them so far. The work we do at SAIC, at the Center for US-China Arts Exchange, in Yunnan is focused on this goal.

Our role is to encourage making historic buildings as useful as they can be for those that live there and those that visit. And I think that describes all of my preservation practice over the last 26 years: we promote people’ better impulses toward their environment and discourage the baser ones, the ones that ignore the future for immediate gain.

(Above: traditional carved doors at the tea horse institute building, Weishan.)

You see, preservation isn’t about the past at all. It is about the future and how you would like that future to be.

China Again – Yunnan 2009

There we are, all of us in Dali at the Three Pagodas, which is a classic Chinese preservation site. REALLY significant pagodas – the center one dates from the T’ang Dynasty – about 1200 years ago, and is quite similar to the Xiao Yan Ta (Lesser Wild Goose Pagoda) in Xi’an, which is visible in a post from last year. The flanking two pagodas are only a few hundred years old, but these things have survived the earthquakes that visit Yunnan and they are pilgrimage sites for not just tourists and architecture enthusiasts, but Buddhists as well.

So, in 2006 they opened a completely rebuilt Changsheng temple, replicating perhaps the temple that was situated behind the 3 pagodas 1200 years ago. They spent a few hundred million dollars, so think Millenium Park or Soldier Field, but unlike government projects in the U.S. they included a thousand or more 10-18 foot high gold religious icons. The place is endless and endlessly amazing, and it is of course not preservation but a recreation – largely conjectural.

There’s your 1000-armed Avalokiteshvara (Guanyin) and they have every other boddhisatva you could want as well as more arhats than you can count. It is a real Buddhist place now too, replete with attendant monks, but it is also a big tourist project, which, contrary to what I was saying at ICOMOS two years ago, is considered a bit of a financial letdown since tourism has not responded with the uptick they predicted.

I have noticed this tendency to create “fake antiques” not only in China and Vietnam but in the Ukraine. It was characteristic of our own preservation practice in the past, and still occurs at certain sites. The idea is straightforward – people want to see the thing – not a ruin, not a partial thing, not whatever the thing evolved into – so you build the thing, whether it exists or not. Whether you know what it looks like or not. This is straight out of P.T. Barnum and Marshall Field – give the punters what they are looking for. What they are willing to pay for.

Even in the 1980s when I got started in historic preservation, there was a lot of emphasis on heritage tourism. It is still a major part of what we do, and a significant piece of what we are doing in Weishan, the next valley over from Dali. But we have the one thing that preservation holds precious – authenticity. In this country we talk about integrity of physical fabric, but the international community talks about authenticity and that is a better word because it connotes more than simple a curatorial approach to historic fabric. It also allows for a consideration of cultural authenticity. On the one hand, you could say this justifies the “fake antiques” because they are authentic to the living historical culture. One the other hand, those decisions – like at Three Pagodas – seem less driven by local cultural expressions and more by a desire for tourism income. That impulse is not an authentic cultural expression as much as a calculated economic decision.

In Weishan, where the above image is from, our goal is to maintain authenticity. We discouraged the local government from rebuilding the entire city wall, lost hundreds of years ago. They are rebuilding a portion of it (when they get the money). And we did provide counsel – and funding – for the rebuilding of Dong Yue temple, which has been a very well-done project. They saved as much original fabric as possible and rebuilt only what they knew had been there.

The biggest challenge remains the two-headed demon of cultural tourism. Because as much as fancy graduate school types like me and perhaps you prefer the “authentic,” there are plenty of everyday punters born every minute who want the good story and the good-looking antique whether it is real or not. And those folks may well represent three out of four or even four out of five tourists. There is another site near Dali called Butterfly Spring, which has been in existence for less than a generation but tons of Chinese tourists flock to see the spring where some star-crossed lovers turned into butterflies. It is a lovely place, with all the authenticity – and drawing power – of Dollywood.

The success of places like Butterfly Spring inspired the investment that gave us Changsheng Temple, and it inspires those of us working in Weishan to urge – as we would say at the National Trust – that “real” places matter to real people. Some would argue that this is an elitist position – why not allow the average punter their fantasy in three dimensions? The problem, of course, is that tourism-driven decisions are economic decisions, and like Goldman-Sachs, they are notoriously short-term decisions whose bubble will burst within a year or three. In Yunnan, there are already examples of tourist sites that went whole hog for recreation and reorganization of the economy for tourism. And then came a change in fashion or taste or a threat like SARS or avian swine flu and it all blew up because all of the eggs had been put into a single, inauthentic basket.

The message for Weishan – and every other place that matters – is that preservation of authenticity works in the long term. It means the place works as a local economy as well as a tourist economy. That it works based on past stories as well as present stories. That it functions and has meaning and value both human and economic for those who live there whether or not anyone visits. It is real planning for the future because it recognizes that the future – like the past – is a very long time, and decisions we make won’t only affect us or our lifetimes.

Hello Again China

This is my longest absence from my blog since it began a little shy of four years ago. The first three weeks I was unable to access wordpress to post while I was in China on our SAIC summer Study Trip to Weishan, our wonderful Southern Silk Road town in Yunnan. The subsequent two weeks of inaction we can attribute to a combination of jet lag, illness and procrastination. But now, the wait is over, so a little about our trip to Yunnan and the excellent work of the 14 students who made the trip.

There they are – 3 teams of four students, including architecture grads Traci Wile, Racquel Davey and Rebekah Ison, working to develop plans to modernize a traditional courtyard house. This is not the first time this project has been attempted, but it is an important counterweight to the traditional tendency – in China as in the U.S. and Europe – to preserve buildings as museums. Buildings are only saved for long if they are used. In Lijiang, also in Yunnan, they kicked everyone out and made all the shops into tourist boutiques and all of the houses into museums and hotels. Consequently, the place has a Disney amusement park feel to it. Weishan, as yet less trammeled by tourism, is still a real place with real people doing non-tourist things every day. If we can demonstrate ways to make traditional houses competitive with the new construction going up on the periphery, we have a chance to shake an old and unsustainable model.

This is the group talking to the residents at 66 Bei street, whose ancestors were Ming officials that were banished to the relatively remote Yunnan province at some point. Everyone in Weishan was incredibly nice to us – granting us interviews and serving us tea as we tried to assess what modern conveniences were most important to people. The answer wasn’t always what you would expect. We assumed indoor bathrooms would be highest on the list, but that wasn’t always the case.

The trip would be IMPOSSIBLE without our faculty member Yunxia “Jingjing” Gao who serves as chief translator, negotiator, problem-solver and logistical maven as our group of 16-18 boarded overnight trains, planes, and buses as we wandered from Beijing to Xi’an to Kunming, Dali, Weishan and a place called Jianchuan we hadn’t seen before. There is a wonderful restored temple at Shaxi and some pretty unusual grottos in Jianchuan – including one to the female sex organ, which looks pretty much exactly as it sounds. Pictures aren’t allowed of the grottos themselves, so here is the setting:

I can’t finish today everything I want to say about yet another trip to China and Weishan, but I do have to comment on the food, which is always the greatest joy in China. My wife said I looked fit when I came home. That was because I ATE AS MUCH AS I WANTED ALL THE TIME. How so? Simple. All the food is fresh in Weishan, and there is no milk, cheese or dessert. Try this experiment – go to a restaurant in the U.S. (or Sweden, where it is even creamier) and order everything on the menu that DOESN’T have milk or cheese in it. You won’t get much.

Unslumming

I am reading Michael Meyer’s The Last Days of Old Beijing which is an excellent journal about the death and life of a traditional Beijing hutong, which is a narrow lane of courtyard houses. I was reading about how the planners and developers considered these areas slums even though they functioned extremely well and served more as incubators of improvement and socialization than harbingers of decay. Yet a crime and statistics that “proved” the area was overcrowded were enough to mark it for demolition.
As Meyer described it, I thought immediately of Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities and the story of Boston’s North End, which was statistically a slum but visibly NOT. I only had to turn the page and Meyer told of Herbert Gans’ 1959 article on Boston’s North End and Jacobs’ coverage of the same subject and her wonderful term for what was happening in these traditional “stable, low-rent areas:” Unslumming.

Wow. There it is. For the last quarter century we have had only the term “gentrification” but the problem with that term is that it describes something that can happen with old buildings – like much of the near north side of Chicago or Wicker Park – OR with new buildings, like those unprotected areas near Old Town and Wicker Park where the values rise so fast and high that the developers are putting up $2 million Lollapallazzos on spec. Like this one on Burling. Which is probably $5 million.

But “unslumming” DOESN’T happen with new buildings. It only happens with old buildings. I had forgotten Jacobs’ term, but it exactly describes what happened in North Kenwood and Oakland in the early 1990s, which I chronicled in Future Anterior four years ago ( http://www.arch.columbia.edu/futureanterior/past_issues/vol_2_2_2005.htm).

In Meyers’ Dazhalan hutong in Beijing, as in the 1950s North End and 1990s North Kenwood, people with middle-class aspirations were unslumming their neighborhoods by rebuilding them bit by bit and little by little and with the existing buildings. But – as Meyers’ quotes Jacobs – such neighborhoods are doomed because no one is making a fortune on them. No fortunes, no big plans, no developers, just tons and tons of incremental improvements in safety, in socialization, in economic strength, in morality and education. A brilliant story of reclaimed humanity and human progress, but one with no place in our limited, clumsy economy.

It’s funny. In politics this Spring, the LOSERS are whining about socialism but when it comes to real estate development, it works the same under socialism and capitalism. I noticed it when I first went to China in 2003: In communist China huge skyscrapers were built not because they were needed but because their were pension funds that needed to invest in real estate, whereas in capitalist USA huge skyscrapers were built not because they were needed but because their were pension funds that needed to invest in real estate.


Neither country makes room for the aspiring middle class that wants to do what Jacobs counseled: Save the people and fix the buildings. But in socialist China, that approach doesn’t show enough progress fast enough for government officials and it doesn’t show enough profit for wealthy developers. In capitalist USA, that approach doesn’t show enough progress fast enough for government officials and it doesn’t show enough profit for wealthy developers. So you see the difference, right? Right?


Preservation as we know it today derives from a postwar effort to rebuild with what was already there. It was opposed to centralized planning in the form of urban renewal and it was opposed to catastrophic development in the form of big projects. Preservation actually points the way toward a third economics, a democratic economics that frees us from the clumsy hands of the cadres and the equally clumsy hands of the hedge fund managers, from the destructive tendencies of two outdated approaches to city building.