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.

Making heritage part of everyday life

Beijing and Paris are different cities, shaped by different cultures and histories. But when it comes to protecting their heritage, the two cities have more in common than one might expect.

Take Beijing's Central Axis and the Banks of the Seine in Paris. Both are World Heritage sites, but neither is simply a collection of historical buildings or monuments. They are part of living cities, where history has continued to unfold.

The Central Axis reflects traditional Chinese ideas of order, harmony and the relationship between people and the natural world.

Along the Seine, layers of Parisian history have accumulated through centuries of urban life, from Roman times and the Middle Ages to the industrial era.

There are three things these two heritage sites share.

The first is continuity. Their historical value has not been cut off from the present. They have remained part of the city and continue to shape urban life.

The second is diversity. Alongside grand royal and monumental buildings are places closely connected with ordinary residents.

Heritage is not only found in palaces and landmarks; it can also be found in neighborhoods and streets where people live.

The third is everyday life. Beijing's Central Axis includes places where popular culture and intangible cultural heritage remain part of the city's life. The Seine, too, is not merely a landscape with a history. People still use the river for sports and recreation.

The two cities also share similar approaches to conservation: making the least intervention necessary, using technology to protect and restore heritage, bringing out its value through better interpretation, and finding ways to put historical sites to new uses.

The cultures of Beijing and Paris are different, but their experience points to the same principle: heritage is best protected when it remains connected to the life of the city. The past does not have to be separated from the present. It can continue to live, and to grow, alongside it.

Writing ordinary lives into history

Can migration itself become a museum? When France created its National Museum of the History of Immigration, this was one of the questions we had to confront.

Our museum is housed in the Palais de la Porte Dorée, a historical building that was originally built for an international exhibition.

Today, the building has become a new cultural heritage site, while the museum inside tells another essential part of France's history: the history of immigration.

France is a country shaped by migration. If we want to understand French society, we must recognize that immigration is part of our fundamental history. But how do we preserve a history that is not always made up of famous people, great works of art or monumental buildings? Our answer has been to collect the lives of ordinary people.

Some of our most meaningful objects would never have been considered museum treasures in the traditional sense. One is a sleeping bag once used by an immigrant when he first arrived in France. Today, we treasure it as much as any celebrated work of art, because it carries the memory of a life.

We also have a Chinese bride's dress and a cloak donated by a Vietnamese immigrant woman. She told me the cloak was one of the most important things in her life — something passed down from her ancestors that she now wanted to pass on to the next generation.

These objects connect great history with private history.

They remind us that a nation's heritage is not made only by its most famous figures.

This is also what art and museums can do: help us understand the "other" by allowing us to feel something of another person's life. Stories make distant lives personal.

That is why cultural exchange between China and France matters. It is not simply about displaying one civilization to another.

It is about preserving different memories, sharing them across borders and learning to see our common human experience through the stories of others.

A museum does more than preserve objects. It helps decide whose memories will become part of history.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.