Abstract
During the months prior to the 2008 Olympic Games, the Beijing Folk Customs Museum (located within a contested space from “Old Beijing” recently redefined as a working Daoist temple) saw temple caretakers and museum professionals reframe cultural phenomena as national cultural heritage. By implementing state directives to showcase “New Beijing,” a capital city blending modern civilization with traditional Chinese culture, both the temple and the museum could pursue distinct long-term goals. This chapter highlights dynamics of state-society relations at the local level, changing Chinese ethnographic museum practices, and complexities of identifying and preserving intangible and other forms of cultural heritage.
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Notes
- 1.
I find it ironic that just five years later, museums were closed as the Cultural Revolutionary campaign of “destroying the Four Olds” (posijiu 破四旧) meant attacking old ideas, old habits, old customs, and old culture. By 1976, all museums besides the Forbidden City had closed as a result of the Cultural Revolution. The 1980s saw more than 60 museums open or reopen in Beijing (Dong 2006). As a time for museum construction and restoration, 1976–1993 rivals the 2001–2008 Olympic run.
- 2.
Though overseen by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH), their status as World Cultural Heritage symbolically removes them from the national and onto the global political-economic stage (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006). In some ways this removal from national to international heritage may invite negligence in enforcing nationalistic messages and encourage individual co-optation of the space. Similar to what Kraus (2000) witnessed in Nanjing, for example, individuals gather in the Temple of Heaven’s park to perform and sell folk arts and crafts without permission from the Central government. I also found advertisements for a folk arts fair here, sponsored by Beijing City’s cultural bureau, even though technically the city government has no actual authority within a World Heritage Site.
- 3.
The lack of monks has always made this branch of Daoism harder to control from a state regulatory standpoint. This may be part of the cause of its marginalization within the state-sponsored Daoist Association. The National Association has its headquarters at Baiyun Guan (白云馆), a monastery located on the other side of the city that houses adherents to quanzhen (全真) Daoism.
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Ashton, C. (2013). Beijing’s Museums in the Context of the 2008 Beijing Olympics . In: Blumenfield, T., Silverman, H. (eds) Cultural Heritage Politics in China. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6874-5_10
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