A Study On Tourists’ Perception Of City Memory In History District

City memory is an important contributing factor for forming the city’s unique style. With the rapid urbanization, it aroused general concern from the academic community that many historic districts with simple style have suffered the pressure of renovation, including the loss of city memory with rich history information and profound cultural connotation. In recent years, with the transition of China’s tourism industry, tourists’ needs have shifted from sightseeing to emotional experiences, and city memory has become an important part of urban tourism products. The discussion on the tourists’ perception features about urban memory carrier elements and the different factors’ influencing mechanisms about tourist perception would not only provide ideas for tourism planning, but also preserve the urban memory collected in the historic districts in a relatively complete way, to achieve the organic renewal of historic district.City memory is a complex system, which includes three parts: subject, object and carrier. The object is memorized by the subject and characterized by the carrier. As an important part of city memory’s subject, the tourists can perceive the city memory by the carrier, and the tourist perception will be affected by local tourism resources and their own factors. This paper selected the Beiyuanmen Historic District in Xi’an as a case, based on the summary and combination of carrier in the city memory, according to the characteristics that carries elements own in the case area, and this paper developed the measurement scale based on the tourist perception about city memory, with the use of combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The analysis about the questionnaires tries to explore the visitors’ perception features about the urban memory in the historic districts and how different factors influence it.The study shows two aspects. First, there are differences between tourist perception about each dimension containing in the material carrier and non-material carrier of urban memory, and the tourist perception about urban memory would be influenced by the local resources derived from the characteristics that the city itself has and external macro context atmosphere. Second, some endogenous variables and exogenous variables in the individual factors have an impact on the tourist perception about urban memory, in addition to “familiarity”, and the impact of other personal factors on the tourist perception about urban memory exhibits irregular characteristics.In the renovation of historic districts, the criteria “protecting and passing on city memory” should be adhered to, and boost the district “vitality”, whilst giving consideration to economic development, in order to provide visitors with the perfect spiritual experiences and to achieve the organic renewal of historic districts.