China Heritage Project
The China Heritage Project provides a focus for university-wide research on traditional China, its modern interpretations and recent scholarship. Under the direction of Geremie R Barmé, the Project advocates a 'New Sinology' that builds on traditional Sinological strengths while emphasizing a robust engagement with the complex and shifting realities of contemporary China.
The Project produces the e-journal China Heritage Quarterly. The other major related publication is East Asian History, a refereed journal edited by Benjamin Penny and produced twice annually. A continuation of Papers on Far Eastern History which dates back to the 1970s, East Asian History features research on countries throughout East Asia and highlights academic quality and visual culture in its conceptualization and design.
The Project, as well as the two journals, operate under the aegis of the Australian Centre on China in the World.
China Heritage Quarterly Latest Issue
West Lake 西湖
This issue takes as its focus West Lake (Xihu 西湖), the defining landscape of Hangzhou, capital of one of China's richest provinces, Zhejiang. We approach West Lake anew, not merely as a fabled dynastic 'leisure zone', but more as a place where the pursuit of culture has constantly intermingled with the practice of politics, where the wealth of its denizens has risen and fallen in tandem with the economic strength of Zhejiang and surrounds. It is a place where memory and nostalgia jostle with the lived. While the constructed (and tirelessly reconstructed) past may threaten to constrain the present, still the sheer physical variety and beauty of the Lake and its environs even manage to thwart today's cultural and political engineers.
In our extended Features section devoted to West Lake we also introduce 'China Heritage Glossary', an attempt to offer new insights into old words, as well as providing alternative interpretations of new expressions. In T'ien Hsia we carry another chapter from Pierre Ryckmans' (Simon Leys) 1996 Boyer Lectures, this time the subject he addresses is reading. We also reprint a powerful statement by the novelist Murong Xuecun and pay further tribute to the translator, essayist and novelist Yang Jiang. In Articles we conclude our retrospective on the Xinhai year of 1911 by reproducing an essay on Luo Zhenyu (Lo Chen-yü) and the Waste of Yin, while in New Scholarship we mark the online publication of 'East Asian History', introduce important new websites, and carry a number of conference and workshop reports.
Geremie R Barmé
Editor, 'China Heritage Quarterly'
Further reading
New Sinology
