Heritage endures when the past keeps moving forward

Editor's note: The China-France Salon for Dialogue on Cultural Heritage, held at the Beijing Administration Institute on Sept 21, brought together Chinese and French experts and cultural heritage practitioners to discuss heritage protection, revitalization and cultural exchange. Below are reflections from three speakers, as reported by Li Wei of China Daily.

Preserving the past without freezing it

When I first visited Paris in 1983, as a young student of urban planning and architecture, I was struck by a simple fact: a city with a rich history does not have to choose between preserving its past and living in the present.

Paris showed me how urban planning could preserve a city's structure, colors and textures while allowing it to remain a living place.

After spending most of my life in Beijing, I have come to appreciate even more what the two cities can learn from each other.

Beijing, like Paris, is a city with deep ties between people, architecture and nature. Its Central Axis, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2024, is not simply a collection of monuments.

It is the organizing framework of a living city. Around it, neighborhoods with a rich history and traditional courtyard houses have been protected, allowing the city's history to remain part of everyday life.

This, to me, is the deeper meaning of heritage protection: we should not freeze history; we should allow history to continue.

My exchanges with France have reinforced this belief. When China was working to protect and nominate the Grand Canal — a vast waterway system running from Beijing in the north to Zhejiang province in the south — as a World Heritage site, the experience of France's Canal du Midi offered valuable lessons. In 2014, the Grand Canal was inscribed on the World Heritage List. Ten years later, Beijing's Central Axis followed. Such examples show that cultural exchange is not merely about displaying beautiful objects. It can change how we understand and protect our own heritage.

I saw the same principle in my early study of Le Corbusier's works in France. At the time, I was simply a young student photographing modern buildings. Today, many of those works are recognized as World Heritage. This reminds us that what is "modern" today may become the heritage of tomorrow.

For decades, Chinese and French museums have also opened their doors to each other, from Versailles and the Louvre to the Palace Museum and Sanxingdui. Audiences have lined up for hours to see exhibitions from the other country.

These exchanges matter because cultural dialogue is ultimately not about one civilization explaining itself to another.

It is about learning to see our own civilization differently after encountering another.

China and France have different histories and traditions, but they share a common challenge: how to preserve the memory of a city while allowing it to move forward.

That is where their cultural dialogue has its most enduring value.

Shan Jixiang is the former director of the Palace Museum and director of the expert committee of the Chinese Society of Cultural Relics.