Remembering trees as heritage: Guji discourse and the meaning-making of trees in Hangzhou, Qing China

Abstract

This article explores local-historical ways of remembering trees, physically traceable or not, in the Chinese discourse of guji (古迹, ancient vestige), focusing on the city of Hangzhou during the Qing Dynasty (1636–1911). By analysing guji documentation of trees in five local gazetteers of the focal region and timeframe, I foreground a fourfold apparatus of meaning-making that effectuates the transformation of trees from natural existence to culturally significant heritage. That is, to frame and transmit trees as (1) rare or most beautiful jing (景landscape), (2) site of poetics, (3) site of memory, and (4) place name. These intersecting, subaltern ways of meaning-making and remembering help us further critique the culture-nature dualism rooted in Western Cartesian epistemology, which still prevails in contemporary heritage research and practice in China and the wider world. It also allows us to see the culturalisation of nature within the framework of an alternative discourse of heritage from China. This nature-to-culture transformation, I argue, is not just adding ‘intangible cultural values in natural heritage’ or making ‘intangible natural heritage’; it is constructing natural existence as what is analogous to cultural or cultural landscape heritage.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.