Shaxi Cultural Landscape Features And Protection Strategy

Along with “the cultural landscape” concept is put forward and its contents are continuously improved, the awareness on local heritage’s protection is experiencing constant the change from technical maintenance of the buildings, structures and spatial form to the traditional culture attached on these tangible heritages. Meanwhile, the history cultural villages which exit thousands of years are now under the impact of globalization, and the life style is constantly changing, the town and small villages with local features and national tradition is disappearing. The radical “new rural construction” has put a threat on the cultural town’s spatial relationship, structural arrangement and the harmonious relationship between human and nature, thus, the cultural landscape of towns and villages are facing a crisis. However, our nation’s protection on the historico-cultural town’s cultural landscape is still on the initial stage for a long time, and the protection methods remains on academic stage.The ancient towns located on the northwestern Yunnan are the human inhabitation environment resulting by the special geographical environment of the Hengduan Mountains surrounding the plain, socio-cultural background and the long term interaction between human and nature, which has very distinct local features, and forms a very important part of China’s historical and cultural landscape heritage. With the aim to remedy the above said defects, this paper takes Shaxi Ancient Town as an example, fully describes the living examples of the ancient town’s cultural landscape protection strategies through the critical research method of literature research and field investigation. This paper contains two parts:The first part re-organizes the cultural landscape of Shaxi Ancient Town by contrasting the classification methods of cultural landscape at home and abroad, and use the science of human inhabitation, architecture and Feng-shui theory etc. to study the landscapes of area, human settlement, site, structure, environment, religious culture and folk art under that classification, thus, summarizes its unique features and historical and cultural values. The second part conducts a research on the protection of Shaxi Ancient Town as individual cases, and summarizes the protection experience and shortcomings. It then systematically concludes the protection of Shaxi Ancient Town, sums up the protection strategy, and supplements the deficiencies. At the end, the paper sums up the results of the first and second part, explains the new understanding of historical and cultural town protection task, hopes that it will provide some meaningful reference information on the protection of other ancient towns.