Mianzhu’s Nianhua Village and the Rise of Intangible Heritage Tourism

By 2002, the state-led folk art industry was in the midst of reinventing itself by

moving away from the preservation/reproduction of historical works and towards largescale

constructions aimed to appeal to tourists. It was apparent that the Mianzhu Nianhua

Museum in the town’s urban center had largely failed as a heritage attraction; it neither

engaged the local community nor outside visitors. In contrast, a booming tourism

industry was emerging in the naturally scenic rural areas surrounding Mianzhu, where

many ancient sites of cultural importance were being redeveloped for recreation,

including Dujiangyan, Qingchen Mountain, and the Sanxingdui archaeological site.310

Eager to revamp nianhua’s tourism potential, Mianzhu’s officials teamed up with land

developers to build “sites of nianhua history and culture.” The centerpiece project was

the Nianhua Village, an ambitious attraction built at the location of former printshops

from the Qing dynasty. It is not clear what historic structures related to the print trade

remained in the area, as no formal survey or study was conducted before everything was

torn down to begin construction of the Nianhua Village in 2004.

310 These developments in the region were catalyzed by the China Western Development 􀼆􀒆􀕶􀤷􀘿, a

national campaign that began in 2000 to build infrastructure in energy, telecommunications, transportation,

and education, as well as increased ecological protection and foreign investment. In 2000, China also

joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), which marked a new phase of China’s integration with global

politics and trade. For an in-depth analysis of these developments in relation to Sichuan, see Christopher

McNally, "Driving Capitalist Development Westward," China Quarterly, no. 178, (June 2004): 426-447.

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The allocation of state funds for the construction of the Nianhua Village was

directly tied to the expansion of China’s heritage bureaucracy, which has been expanding

rapidly towards the identification and management of intangible forms of culture over the

past decade. In 2000, central state authorities launched the “Project to Preserve the

Intangible Heritage of China’s Ethnic Minority Groups” and in 2004, China signed on to

UNESCO’s “Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage,” publicly

aligning its policies with the global prestige of UNESCO. Also in 2004, significant

funding for heritage protection was included in the centralized state budget, sparking the

nation’s largest survey of ICH that would result in the collection of hundreds of

thousands of objects and countless hours of audio and video recordings documenting

about 870,000 items.311 In the rhetoric of the policies, these activities draw on the

heritage discourses and core values adopted by UNESCO, yet the proclamations to

protect and preserve ICH are not always carried out in practice.

Mianzhu’s Nianhua Village is a compelling example of how authorized

discourses around ICH are used to further privilege the tangible assets of heritage over its

intangible counterparts. In maintaining a distinct separation between tangible and

intangible assets, the focus on ICH has not supported a critique of existing policies, but

has further legitimized the state’s expanded role in managing cultural resources that were

once beyond its jurisdiction. Instead of prompting a critical discussion around the social

implications of collecting, isolating, and displaying a community’s cultural objects in a

311 The program lasted from 2005 to 2009. According to incomplete estimates, researchers have visited 1.15

million folk artists and practitioners. With an overall investment of 800 million RMB, they have collected

290,000 items of precious materials and documents, made text records of about 2 billion Chinese

characters, audio records of 230,000 hours, 4.77 million photographs and compiled 140,000 volumes of

general survey studies, covering altogether about 870,000 items of intangible cultural heritage across

China. See Xinhua News Agency, “Protection and Promotion of China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage,”

news release, June 2, 2010, accessed November 5, 2010, http://www.china.org.cn/china/2010-

06/02/content_20171387_2.htm.

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museum, the introduction of ICH discourses only spurred a state-led effort to further

expand their activities into the realm of heritage tourism, another sector of the economy

that could be used to promote the nianhua in the state collections.

The promotion of the state’s nianhua collection played a central role in the overall

design and layout of the Nianhua Village, which is adorned with countless painted murals

on the exterior surfaces of the homes, shops, walkways, and gates. Mianzhu’s Cultural

Affairs Bureau worked with investors and developers to contract the murals to a

professional advertising company, essentially outsourcing the visual program of the

entire complex. The murals are almost entirely based on the historic works held in the

Mianzhu Nianhua Museum, along with a few recreations of familiar nianhua themes.

The murals’ key design elements, such as the placement, colors, and execution of

the murals, were left up to the advertising company, who speedily took to the task

without consulting the residents or shop owners who already lived in the village. The

murals simplify many of the elements in the historical prints by reproducing only the

most basic lines and shapes. The historical prints were thus rendered into a uniform set of

images through the advertising company’s use of standardized lines and colors. This may

be a design strategy to make the prints more legible and graphic so that they function as

highly visible murals to be easily discerned from a distance. In the same way advertising

billboards work, the murals can be seen across the valley and from the main road,

marking out a well-defined set of buildings to be gazed upon as touristic space. For

sociologist John Urry, who has theorized the social relations of tourism, “the tourist gaze

is directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from

everyday experience,” where visual elements may be “objectified or captured through

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photographs, postcards, films, models, and so on. These enable the gaze to be endlessly

reproduced and recaptured.”312

As a marketing tool, the placement of the newly painted murals is geared towards

framing the village and heightening its sensual appeal for the touristic gaze, to set it apart

from the ordinary residential areas surrounding it. Their presence thus reflects a new set

of concerns that completely overrides how the images would have been displayed in the

past. For instance, the historic “beautiful maiden” prints that were designed for the

intimate space of the bedroom are blown up as larger-than-life outdoor murals, such as

the three beautiful maiden images painted onto the walls of a courtyard (fig. 72). Two of

the standing figures face one another on either side of the door, suggestive of protective

door deities. A revamped version of the Bicycle-riding Maiden print appears on the wall

of the building on the left, in a bright orange costume and blue cap. The light shades of

color and fine details seen in the historical print are absent here, as the mural painters

opted for contrasting colors and bold lines.

In contrast to the print ephemera and handmade spring couplets seen in various

stages of decay on the household doors in Mianzhu, these murals do not attend to the

spatial and temporal elements of ritual renewal that usually activate the images’

auspicious meanings. Permanent and weatherproof, the murals establish new forms of

engagement with the historic works, as brightly colored billboards, photo opportunities,

or talking points for tour guides and hosts. The murals also direct movement through the

village, which doubles as an outdoor gallery through which visitors engage in leisurely

walks to gaze at the works. While moving through the space, I noted how the enlarged

images of the past appeared frozen in time against the white walls, as if sterilized from

312 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 2002), 3.

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any association with ritual print ephemera. It seemed as if the museum was simply turned

inside out, so that the small-scale works displayed behind glass were now transposed onto

large, monumental surfaces that guided the viewer from one building to the next. The

Nianhua Village is thus transformed into an outdoor exhibition space for the works inside

the Museum, although the Museum’s spatial and temporal ordering of the pieces and their

written captions are no longer present to provide a sense of nianhua’s historical or

cultural contexts. Instead, the onus is clearly set on the viewer to make sense out of the

new configuration of traditional and modern elements.

On one hand, the Nianhua Village sustains the idea that heritage is tied to the

tangible assets of the past by foregrounding the works in the Mianzhu Nianhua Museum