Our social practice project was themed “The Protection of Traditional Culture and Its Relationship with Tourism.” With this question in mind, we examined places such as the ancient city of Pingyao and Mount Wutai in Shanxi. Below, I will mainly connect my impressions from the visit and investigation of the ancient city of Pingyao to offer my views on this topic.
First, if we look at this theme more concretely, it gives rise to three main questions: first, what is tradition? Second, how should it be protected? Third, what is the significance of tourism—after all, is tourism to be developed in order to protect tradition, or is tradition to be protected in order to develop tourism, or can the two really promote each other?
The answers to these three questions are often interrelated. For example, if tradition is regarded as a kind of “resource”—which is precisely what local officials conveyed in the interview—then the protection of resources means their development and use within limits, ultimately striving to make the best possible use of everything and to let the exploited resources fully realize their economic benefits. In concrete terms, this is achieved through tourism and the related industries it drives.
From natural resources to human resources, treating everything as “resources” is a modern habit. This perspective cannot be said to be wrong, but if one clings to it alone, one always feels that something is missing.
Resources in themselves have no intrinsic value; only when they are used to serve other purposes do they acquire use value. Others emphasize that tradition also has intrinsic value—that is, even if it cannot generate benefits, the protection of tradition itself still has meaning. Treating tradition as “heritage” is one such middle-ground perspective: heritage has use value, and at the same time—it is worth cherishing in itself, out of reverence for the ancestors and respect for the heritage itself. Or one may compare tradition to a yellowing photograph: even if it is of little practical use, one still cannot bear to throw it away. From this understanding of tradition, the way to protect it is probably to frame it carefully and place it behind glass for people to sigh over and marvel at. As for tourism, it helps bring more people to visit these treasures, and at the same time it also helps provide funds for their upkeep and maintenance.
This approach is also reflected in the planning of the ancient city of Pingyao—they have turned the various scenic spots into “museums,” placing cultural relics and stories in glass display cases for people to admire.
However, both of the above perspectives have a certain limitation—they both treat tradition as something tangible, as those jars and pots, houses and towers, and so on; on the other hand, they both treat tradition as something handed down from the past, that is, old and aged things.
Chuan means transmission; tong means continuity, and in its original sense it refers to the strands of a thread. In fact, tradition is not some kind of thing, still less something handed down from the past; rather, it truly refers to “transmission” itself. Tradition is neither the past nor the present, but precisely the transmission between past and present, the thread and continuity connecting the past and the present.
When we use “traditional” as an adjective, it means that this thing is a clue leading back to the past, that it connects the past and the present. And things that have severed their connection with the present, no matter how ancient or wondrous they may be, cannot be called “traditional.” In other words, when an object is placed in a museum display case, when it is carefully protected so as to avoid disturbance, its connection with the present is severed. If something is preserved and restored so well that it is no longer affected by time and space, like a collector’s item, then whether we look at it decades ago or decades later, whether we view it in a museum in Pingyao or in the British Museum, it remains unchanged—this means that it has been isolated from its own era, and thus has broken away from the “present.” It will forever be merely a cultural relic, and can no longer bear the weight of “tradition.”
This leads to a paradox: the more we try to “protect” tradition, the more we sever it.
Every age is the “modern” of the people living in it, yet only our age styles itself as “modern.” What is embodied here is precisely the rupture of tradition: whether by disparaging the past or by “protecting” the past, people are all striving to separate the present from the past. And yet, completely severing tradition is impossible, because once civilization exists, tradition exists. People’s thought, customs, rites, language—all are permeated by tradition. That is to say, in any thing that does not simply appear out of nowhere, there are threads connecting it to the past—and nothing appears out of nowhere. Some reformers attempt to break free from the shackles of tradition and create a new culture, but all such efforts end in failure. They attribute the reason to the obstruction of the residual power of tradition, but the real problem is that trying to build castles in the air by shaking off the fetters of tradition was itself always a fantasy. From the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution, no great transformation has not been based on a rediscovery of tradition. Tradition does not mean conservatism; quite the contrary, what remains unchanged is not tradition. Only those things that maintain contact with the times through constant change are the bearers of tradition. Tradition is indeed an obstacle to progress, but just like friction on the ground, it is both an impediment to walking and a driving force. Without this resistance, we would either be unable to move at all, or once set in motion would lose control and not stop until we crashed headlong.
Fortunately, we cannot rid ourselves of the resistance of tradition. So the key question is not the “protection” of tradition, but rather facing squarely the relationship between ourselves and tradition.
What is distinctive about the ancient city of Pingyao is that it is still “alive”; it is still a city with life. It is not like those fragmented and scattered ancient buildings in other modernized big cities, nor like a dead and desolate ruin. What makes the ancient city of Pingyao precious is that it is a whole—not only with complete city walls and complete buildings, but also with residents who live there, so that the life of the city has never been interrupted. Not long ago, the children here were still attending classes in the Confucian Temple, and the local government was still conducting its affairs in the county yamen… This is tradition: we see a long thread connecting the ages. What deserves our reverence and cherishing is neither Pingyao’s former glory nor its present achievements, but precisely this connection.
August 30, 2007
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply