From national monuments to World Heritage Site: Macau’s modern conservation history

Few works have offered insight on the formation of Macau’s conservation movement, which precedes its listing as China’s thirty-first World Heritage Site in 2005 by decades. This article examines twentieth-century processes and actions that helped form the bulk of Macau’s normative corpus for heritage management and preservation, ultimately leading to international recognition of its Historic Centre. Drawing chiefly on archival research, this work unveils the applied and discursive dimensions of heritage that convey political agendas, urban mandates and imaginations of identity, culture and the nation. The theoretical approach situates the impact of national, transnational and individual agencies on decisions on the ground, shedding light on the power dynamics shaping history and transforming the built environment into ‘certified’ heritage. Ultimately, a historically grounded and expanded analysis of Macau’s conservation movement allows us to consider novel angles in the modern development of heritage regimes, the role of colonies as receptacles of Western-centric heritage ideas and values, and the translation of global heritage practices in local contexts.