VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
Suzhou is recognized as a world-historic site for its distinctive urban form of canal grid which matured in the 13th century. Urban waterways began to diminish as the society’s productive mode gradually shifted from agriculture to industry during the 16-19th Centuries. Local officials endeavoured to preserve the hydraulic infrastructure and produced a series of maps. This research takes these hydraulic maps as its subject and investigates the relationship between maps, mapping, and hydraulic strategies. It examines mapping practices across time, including organizing labour to accumulate data, criticizing former hydraulic schemes, and revising cartographic composition and annotation. The conservationists conceptualized the canal system from the neo-Confucian ideology. Resisting industrialization, they advocated both the cultural and functional values of waterways. These conservationist ideas and agendas were promoted to the public by establishing stele maps and disseminating printed maps. The research contributes to the early conservation history of China and sheds light to reflect on the government’s current hydraulic strategies.
I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University. I received my PhD from Faculty of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong. I am recently working on a book “From Temples to Garden Estates and Academies: Landscape Transformation of Suzhou during the 13-16th Centuries and Beyond”, which is in contract with Routledge Press. I’m specialized in Suzhou’s garden and urban history, and fascinated in experimenting digital tools such as GIS and 3D modelling for historical researches. I’m interested in urban history and conservation in the global context.