Deciphering Historic Landscapes: A Case Study of Slender West Lake in Yangzhou, China

Abstract

Historic landscapes today are changing gradually or abruptly, and the abrupt changes have caused the loss of much historic information. How to identify and protect the significant evidence of dynamic landscapes is a question that must be answered by each cultural community. This article establishes a decipherment process—an operational guide for landscape assessment in China. This is a methodology using European methods integrated with traditional Chinese ways of landscape appreciation, providing an effective approach to translate the cultural landscape framework into the conservation inventory. Using Slender West Lake as a case study, the decipherment process has expanded the existing landscape investigation theory using the factor of artistic conception to integrate intangible values into the assessment process. It has also established a unit-based method to classify and represent historic landscapes.

Key words:

• Historic landscape
• Landscape assessment
• Conservation
• Shanshui
• Slender West Lake

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The number of cities in China increased from 135 to 661 between 1949 and 2004. More than 120 cities have been nominated as National Historic and Cultural Cities since 1982.

2. ‘Lianghuai’ (两淮) means the northern and southern sides of the Huaihe River. This area was a significant salt producing area in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911 CE). For example, the salt tax income of this region accounted for 62 per cent of China’s salt revenue in the Shunzhi period (1644–1661 CE).

3. Scholar-officials (士大夫) were civil servants appointed by the emperor of China to perform day-to-day governance from the Han dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty. They were schooled in calligraphy and Confucian texts. The culture of scholar-officials dominated traditional Chinese culture until 1911.

4. Shanshui (山水) refers to mountains and waters in Mandarin. It is the artistic expression of Chinese landscape appreciation. The combination of landscape poems, landscape paintings and landscape gardens is the most important feature of Chinese landscape (Shanshui) culture.

5. In ancient China, Confucian and Legalist philosophers developed a social structure of the four grades of people during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC). This structure had a great influence through the imperial period. In descending order, the four grades (occupations) were the shi (士) (scholars), the nong (农) (peasant farmers), the gong (工) (artisans and craftsmen) and the shang (商) (merchants and traders). The merchants were viewed by the scholarly elites as essential members of society, but were placed on the lowest of the four grades in the official Chinese hierarchy, due to the view that they do not produce anything, only profit from others’ creations.