Touched by the Past? Re-articulating the Longxing Temple Sites as Community Heritage at Qingzhou County, China

Community heritage usually reveals bottom-up celebrations of the many dimensions of social life, which negotiate the meaning of certain places, sites, or even monuments under practices of heritage. In 1996, excavations and restorations of the Longxing Buddhist temple in Qingzhou County, especially hundreds of precious Buddhist statues, drew the attention of the general public and all Buddhist communities. The rebuilding of the temple was initated by Xia Jingshan, an eminent Buddhist figure painter, and the undertaking allowed the religious community and other local inhabitants to collaborate to express their voices in a heritage discourse. The reinterpretation of Longxing Temple visible in this reconstruction was influenced  by a number of factors. The main aim was to raise the profile of Qingzhou County and promote it as an important place in ancient China, showing it as a place with a rich cultural and religious diversity, and to attract tourists and religious communities to visit Qingzhou.

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