Review: Conservation challenges in China

Cultural and political awareness are key to the battle to preserve China's historic towns, according to Professor Ruan Yisan, Director of the Chinese National Research Centre of Historic Cities, who spoke at UCL on 21 October. Ruan Yisan - who is also Chairman of the Yangtze Heritage Foundation and Professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University - set out the challenges facing Chinese conservation efforts in a guest lecture reviewed here by Kelvin Ang and Dorina Dobnig, students at the UCL Centre for Sustainable Heritage. ?This guest lecture, co-hosted by the Centre for Sustainable Heritage and the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archeology, gave an insight into some of the specific problematics facing conservation efforts in China and the need for balanced sustainable urban development. The lecture itself was given in Mandarin and relayed to the audience in consecutive translation. Interestingly, the English title of the talk was amended in translation, where instead of 'water-villages' as per original (and the term used in Chinese), the term 'Venetian towns' was used, perhaps to make the concept more readily accessible to a non-Chinese audience. This struck a chord with the reviewers (both non-British), who had to acknowledge the primacy of Venice as the model of how we understand what a 'water-based' urban environment is like! With his animated expression and use of passionate speech, Professor Ruan certainly did not come across as a member of the intelligentsia isolated in an ivory tower - a perception which he explained was a constraint in early 1980s China, when he was spearheading his ideas in the field.