ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what tourists do and feel at West Lake, and identifies the sense of place, identity, feeling, memory and freedom that characterised many tourists’ responses to the site. I analyse the active sense of engagement by Chinese domestic tourists at the heritage sites. My observation, based on research in a Chinese context, supports the sense of agency illustrated by Laurajane Smith and other Western researchers in critical heritage studies and critical tourism studies in their work with heritage visitors. The sense of feeling is one of the significant themes I will discuss in this chapter, as the Chinese domestic tourists were much more overt in acknowledging that they were having or seeking feelings, and they expressed their feelings in a more self-conscious way than has been recorded in Western contexts. This chapter also identifies locals’ reactions to tourists, with particular emphasis on another significant finding of this research – the ‘sense of pride’ that many local people expressed, while also acknowledging the tensions expressed by those locals removed from this landscape.
