China’s vast economic transformation has ushered in a “heritage boom,” in which state actors, economic elites, and ordinary people struggle over how the material sediments of the past might be preserved, refurbished, commodified, authorized as signs of the nation, or tended as the soil of lived attachments to place. In this conceptually rich volume, scholars based in China collaborate with researchers from the UK to interrogate a diverse variety of heritage projects, from Beijing’s alleys and Anhui’s mountains to the temples and tea plantations of Fujian, and from museums and minority ethnic communities in the southwest to Tibet’s oldest monastery. These essays interrogate heritage work from a “grassroots” perspective, analyzing its contradictions, revealing its many forms of violence, and thinking through alternative ways that the preservation of the material past might coexist with local worlds where the past is a lived reality.

Erik Mueggler, University of Michigan

A timely book on heritage in China with special attention for grassroots values and the connection of the local with economy, politics and international heritage regulation. A wide variety of excellent case-studies from seven different regions of China, written by renowned specialists in their fields, makes the book a standard work for many years to come. In China's 'heritage boom,' the local appears as a site of negotiation with national and international points of view, processes, and tensions. Heritage has influenced the local immensely, as the rich case-studies clearly show. It fundamentally challenges dichotomies such as male-female, the local-the global, the official-the non-official. With an introduction by editors Harriet Evans and Michael Rowlands and an Afterword by Wang Mingming, the framework of the book is solidly defined. With both the empirical examples as well as the analytical framework the editors have produced an extremely important book. For specialists in the field of heritage and for people working on grassroots values, this book is an absolute necessity to read.

Pieter ter Keurs, Leiden University

This book makes a timely and wholly distinctive contribution to anthropological studies of cultural heritage in China. It represents a compelling assessment of how people at the grassroots engage with cultural heritage projects in regions throughout China. These essays deal primarily with the enabling capacity of cultural heritage, offering first-hand insights into how the heritage boom in China is played out in communities in their everyday lives, as expressed through their strategizing and entrepreneurialism. Questioning how the local is constituted as a site of negotiation, this book is a must-have addition to the growing literature on the complexities of heritage in Asia.

Graeme Were, University of Bristol

This brilliant book presents recent ethnographic case studies of local cultural heritage in China, conducted by nine scholars in China and the United Kingdom over the past decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the complicated implications and impacts of the “heritage fever” or “heritage turn” from the bottom-up. Their diverse fieldwork sites range from Beijing, southern Anhui, southern Fujian, and Sichuan to northern and northwestern Yunan and Tibet... This book is a must-read for anyone interested in heritage, grassroots values, ethnicity, gender, popular religions, Buddhism, social justice, and China.

Journal of American Folklore