ABSTRACT
This chapter explores heritage, ritual space, and contested urbanization in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. While Shenzhen is typically viewed (and promotes itself) as China's most modern, and most secular, “city without history”, the urban villages (or “villages-in-the-city” 城中村) that have made up much of Shenzhen's urban fabric remain important spaces of ritual practice in which religious and ancestral communities are called into being. Such villages owe their seemingly improbable resilience as ritual spaces not to any ability to somehow remain separate from the massive city that has grown up around them, but rather from the integral urbanizing role that they have themselves played in making that city possible in the first place. Many of these villages have now refurbished themselves as visitable heritage spaces in an effort to showcase their own history and their role in building Shenzhen. The chapter argues that traditional ritual spaces are not so much erased by urbanization, but have been transformed into heritage spaces within which ancestral and religious identities persist. Indeed, heritage has become the principle medium for the display of what Herrmann-Pillath, Guo, and Feng (2020) have called a “ritual economy” that continues to govern Shenzhen in significant ways. While much scholarship has argued that the landscape of Shenzhen's urban villages blurs the ideological divide of rural and urban, it also blurs the realms of the secular and the religious. The urban village can thus be understood as part of a broader Chinese landscape of popular religious revival masked as cultural heritage, in which practices of tourism and leisure are blended with those of religion and ritual.
