ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on the meanings of World Heritage as a concept and the essential value of West Lake for local people and tourists and compares their understanding with the views of international and Chinese experts. It argues that the majority of those interviewed, whether tourists or locals, did not passively accept the authorised discourse from national and local heritage authorities that had framed the management and interpretation of West Lake. This interpretation stressed a dichotomy between the natural and cultural heritage embedded in the UNESCO/ICOMOS concept of ‘cultural landscape’, rather my respondents expressed an active sense of an aesthetic or poetic idea of the heritage site which is firmly linked to the traditional Chinese philosophical concept of ‘harmony with nature’. This sense of poetic expression is also widely linked to one of the significant themes of the book – a sense of feeling.
