Accompanying Jimmy on the journey were sundry family members, including three sons and two nephews. They were in search of the family home that Jimmy’s father, Mar See Poy, had left in 1914 and to which he returned after being deported from Australia in 1926. The moment when Jimmy approached the front door, recalls his nephew Phillip, “was remembered [by all] as an emotional ‘high point.’”

Jimmy’s is one of several stories about Chinese immigrants and their hometowns told in a new collection of essays, The China–Australia Migration Corridor. The corridor in question is a virtual one, constituted by the movement of people to and from Sydney and what is now the municipality of Zhongshan, in Guangdong province, where Sha Chong village is located. The stories have a number of common elements: more than one generation, an extended lapse in time between migration and return, a “house-hunting” quest — which is central to the book’s heritage theme — and the “affect,” or emotional content, of the journeys. Jimmy’s has all these characteristics.

The book is an outcome of the Heritage Corridor project, launched in 2017 by Ien Ang and Denis Byrne at the University of Western Sydney. Ang brings to this project a long history of engagement with migration, race and identity. Byrne is an archaeologist working in the field of critical heritage studies. Together with anthropologist Phillip Mar (Jimmy’s nephew), historian Michael Williams, research fellow Alexandra Wong and PhD student Christopher Cheng (now graduated), they have been collecting stories of return as part of an investigation of Australian-Chinese built heritage. The nine chapters in the book, to which the entire research team has contributed, are concerned with memories and material remains almost in equal measure.

The book’s publication follows closely on that of Byrne’s 2022 monograph, The Heritage Corridor: A Transnational Approach to the Heritage of Chinese Migration. Both books are concerned with the migration corridor “as a transnational field of material heritage.” With the concept of the corridor, Byrne takes aim at both the idea of a national heritage bounded by the nation-state and the related top-down definition of heritage. Focusing on the flow of people and money between Sydney and Zhongshan, the project’s researchers have kept an eye on grassroots heritage-making at both ends of the corridor.

Zhongshan, which covers an area considerably larger than Sydney, is part plains, part hills. It used to be called Xiangshan, meaning “fragrant hills”: hence the title of Michael Williams’s informative opening chapter, “Villages of the Fragrant Hills.” Its present name, as a footnote by Williams tells us, is a legacy of its most famous emigrant, “Father of the Republic” Sun Yatsen (1866–1925), also known as Sun Zhongshan. Sun was founder of the Kuomintang, or KMT — the Chinese Nationalist Party, to give it its English name — which was China’s governing party in the years 1928–49. The place that bears his name is the only one of 2000 or so Chinese counties to have been named, like Sydney, after a historical figure.

Zhongshan was a major source of migrants to Pacific Rim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounting for perhaps a plurality of Chinese residents in New South Wales and Queensland before and during the White Australia era. In their chapter “Zhongshan in Sydney’s Chinatown,” Ang and Wong note the dominance of Zhongshan natives in the Sydney branch of the KMT, founded in 1921. KMT party members met (and still meet) in built-for-purpose headquarters at 75–77 Ultimo St, Sydney, constructed in 1921 by Robert Wall and Sons. Locally, the party probably served in lieu of a native-place association for Zhongshan people; internationally, it was also headquarters of the Australasian KMT, the party’s regional branch.

The Sydney building has a counterpart in the party’s Victorian state headquarters in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, which features a facade designed by Walter Burley Griffin. Support for the KMT was strong in both cities but rested on different native-place foundations. In Melbourne, Zhongshan immigrants were well outnumbered by natives of See Yup, a cluster of four districts geographically contiguous with Zhongshan but distinguished by language sub-group and local-place networks.

With strength in numbers, high profiles in Sydney Chinatown’s commerce and politics, and considerable prominence in the business history of China itself, the Zhongshan migrants and their descendants were a natural focus for the Heritage Corridor project. The decision was facilitated by the fact that Michael Williams’s 2018 book, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers Around the Pacific, 1849–1949, also focused on Zhongshan, provided ready-made foundations for this differently themed project.

Like Williams’s pioneering book, the project foregrounds the home district of the migrants — the place to which they sent money and letters and to which, before the second world war, they not infrequently returned. They typically came from the poorer villages of the hills, which in the first half of the twentieth century sent abroad up to one in every three of their able-bodied males. With their skewed sex ratios and untended fields, these “sojourner villages” (qiaoxiang) became the beneficiaries of overseas remittances and the source of further migration.

A high degree of mobility is a well-known feature of Chinese migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emigrant men periodically returned home for family reasons; a son born in China might then, in his turn, come to Australia as a student or to help in the family business. This was partly an effect of White Australia–era immigration restrictions, which produced a strange pattern of migration in which a family might be in Australia for three generations before anyone was actually born there. The Ma (Mar) family, represented by several people interviewed for this book, is an example.

If these accounts of comings and goings are the warp of the book, then “heritage-making” is its weft.

Byrne distinguishes rather sharply between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below”: the former is evident in the national and state registries of heritage sites; the latter is exemplified in the “quest for the ancestral house” in the course of which “old houses are brought forward into the landscape of the present.” But something exists between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below.” The examples of Sydney’s Kwong War Chong building, discussed by Ang and Wong, and the Ma and Kwok family mansions of Zhongshan discussed by Byrne himself, show that local government in both countries has a significant role in preserving historical buildings, even if — in the case of Sydney at least — the intervention followed community lobbying.

Nonetheless, the book’s accounts of heritage-making as a grassroots social process are persuasive. Returning to the ancestral village and finding the ancestral home, Byrne argues, means inscribing the past in the present. This reading is given force by the fact that the process, in very many cases, involves communicating meanings from one generation to the next. When Mabel Lee went to Zhongshan in the late 1970s it was because her father wanted to go: “He would say, ‘If you don’t take me, I’ll be dead.’” Gordon Mar and his brothers took his mother back in 1997, at her insistence, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer: “She felt it was her duty to bring her sons back to the village to be acknowledged.”

The other aspect of heritage-making concerns the material sites of meaning: the village, the house, sometimes even objects within the house. The buildings described and discussed range from commercial buildings in Dixon Street to “remittance houses” and schools in Zhongshan, built with money sent or brought back to China. Byrne presents a useful typology of these houses, which at the upper end were palatial. The same is true of schools, the focus of Christopher Cheng’s PhD research. Photos of multistorey buildings with porticos, columns, and cupolas show the ambitions of the donors.

Read from cover to cover, The China–Australia Migration Corridor leaves a strong impression of buildings in Sydney, on the east edge of one continent, juxtaposed with buildings in Zhongshan, in the southeast corner of another. For Byrne, these two clusters represent the two ends of the transnational corridor. Yet they also seem to define a period of history. In her chapter on “(Un)making Transnational Identities,” Ang repeatedly refers to a sense of closure in the Zhongshan–Sydney connection. Kam Louie, born in Zhongshan in 1949, is the only one of a family of many siblings ever to have returned to his home village, and his own children show no interest in going. For Gordon Mar, a one-off visit “seems to have reinforced his Australianness rather than his Chineseness.”

Like everyone else interviewed for the book, Louie and Mar are at the tail-end of a history of chain migration and eventual settlement that began under the Qing dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. The return to Zhongshan, accompanied in some cases by renewed investment in the ancestral village, followed the huge historical rupture created by war and revolution in China. When a new history of Chinese-Australian journeyings is written to cover subsequent migration, it will mostly be about people from other parts of China whose lives have been shaped by different historical circumstances.

This is an engaging collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese-Australian history. Like all good scholarly books, it opens up new research questions. The concept of “corridor” powerfully evokes the historical connections between Zhongshan and Sydney, but a corridor has walls. Who benefited from Zhongshan networks? Who was left outside those notional walls? How did other native-place connections operate in Sydney’s small Chinese community? Did native-place cleavages inform political cleavages? And in this small community, with its limited number of women of Chinese birth or parentage, who married whom? •

The China–Australia Migration Corridor: History and Heritage
Edited by Denis Byrne, Ien Ang and Phillip Mar | Melbourne University Press | $40 | 288 pages

The post Heritage hunting appeared first on Inside Story.

James Lesh’s Values in Cities charts the explosion of heritage advocacy in that decade, from the Whitlam government’s inquiry into the National Estate to the heritage legislation passed in every state — even Queensland, where Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party hoped to find and mine oil on the Great Barrier Reef. With cities now no longer part of the national conversation — apart from the housing crisis and never-ending traffic jams — it is refreshing to find a book that places them centrestage.

As Lesh demonstrates, heritage battles and community advocacy have done more to retain a sense of place and history in our cities than the leadership of the town planning profession, which have been increasingly captured by property developers. Streetscape overlays in the inner suburbs of our cities, from the terraces of Sydney and Melbourne to the timber-and-tin of traditional Queenslanders in Brisbane, owe their existence to patient lobbying by National Trusts, historical societies, a variety of professionals, and state government heritage councils, all garnering community support.

Imagine Sydney without The Rocks and its finger wharves, Hobart without Battery Point, or Brisbane without remnant sandstone colonial buildings (even if one is now a casino). Office block developers — and later apartment developers — were restrained from knocking down much of Melbourne’s Collins Street. Central Perth didn’t survive so well, and Adelaide maintained its dignity partly because there simply wasn’t as much money to be made there as in the other capitals. In all these battles strong community groups emerged, aided by the remarkable green ban movement of the Builders Labourers Federation.

Some heritage protections have been aggressively undermined by developers over the last decade or so — particularly in the West End of Brisbane, where hapless investors have bought into high-rise towers with a view not just of the flood-prone Brisbane River but also of traffic jams on Coronation Drive. Vale, too, the Sirius building in Sydney’s Rocks, social housing refurbished for multimillion-dollar price tags.

In September this year Australia will welcome more than 1000 delegates to our first-ever general assembly of ICOMOS, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, founded in Paris in 1965. As an advisory body to UNESCO, it provides assessments of nominations for much sought-after world heritage recognition.

Australia has achieved notable international landmarks in heritage conservation, especially the Burra Charter, developed here in 1979 at a meeting in the town of Burra. This was the first charter to argue convincingly that heritage conservation should take account of successive uses of a building or site. As Lesh explains, it has had a major influence on heritage practice around the world.

Internationally, the federal government has successfully nominated major “natural” sites, not least the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu, and notable buildings, including the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and the Sydney Opera House, for world heritage listing. Innovatively, it also nominated a group of convict sites spread across the continent. Only national governments can nominate buildings and sites, and with that comes an obligation to maintain and conserve the site. Even the Morrison government had to look like it was trying hard to curb agricultural flows into the Barrier Reef.

One of the great strengths of Lesh’s book is his attention to First Nations issues. He points out that many heritage advocates (including me) were slow to appreciate the Indigenous context of the places they were writing about. We were all conscious of the contribution archaeologists and National Parks officers had made to understanding Indigenous landscapes, and the Mabo judgement established beyond doubt claims for continuous Indigenous occupation. But the fact that nineteenth- and twentieth-century structures were also on unceded land has taken much longer to apprehend. Lesh cites the impressive amount of scholarly work on clan recognition over the last three decades that has led to the renaming of many urban places, especially in Melbourne.

Values in Cities identifies the explicit and implicit values that have underpinned the heritage movement, values that have of course changed dramatically over time. TV restoration programs still celebrate the haute bourgeoise in Sydney and Melbourne doing up homes designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Robin Boyd, and gentrifying Sydney’s Millers Point, but they also feature workers on more modest budgets tackling abandoned country churches and even bush shacks.

You don’t have to be a heritage devotee for this book to be worth consulting. Any readers facing redevelopment pressures in their street or the destruction of key structures in their local community will get useful clues about how to protest against what they regard as essential to a sense of locality and history. Given the book’s high price, get your local library — one of our most vital community assets — to buy a copy.

We need a parallel book to Lesh’s that explains and exposes the implications of our private property regime and also how developers, building companies, land-consuming retail giants and wealthy tax-minimisers have ruined whole coastlines and happily demolished heritage structures in many suburbs and country towns.

At a time when most members of federal parliament hold one or more investment properties, we have run out of popularly elected representatives prepared to question the untrammelled rights of property owners to do what they want, not only with their own structures but also to undermine the amenity and sense of place of their neighbours. Local governments, with only modest conflict-of-interest reporting requirements, have given us many examples of the shameless reshaping of our urban environments. The evidence is in your face on the scandal-ridden Gold Coast, the Sydney suburb of Canterbury and the Melbourne suburb of Berwick, but you can also witness it in all those other councils that have been or should have been placed under administration.

As I write, developers are demolishing older blocks of flats — and expelling tenants — to erect grandiose luxury apartments. In the midst of our greatest housing crisis since the early postwar years, heritage advocates and town planners will have to give more thought to saving the apartment blocks that remain the backbone of affordable rental housing in all our cities.

Adaptive refurbishing conserves embodied energy and helps reduce climate change impacts — which is one of the reasons why the heritage-listed Marks and Spencer department store in London’s Oxford Street has survived the threat of demolition. Our design and planning professions, as well as our councils and parliaments, need to give a lot more thought to sustainable buildings and how they provide for current and future residents of our cities. •

Values in Cities: Urban Heritage in Twentieth-Century Australia
By James Lesh | Routledge | $256 | 325 pages

The post Mixed heritage appeared first on Inside Story.

CHINA’s government talks a lot these days about promoting culture. It has launched a massive push to expand cultural industries, both to project “soft power” and to compensate for a slowdown in growth in other areas of the economy. In Shanghai, the authorities have warmly embraced the idea, pledging to rely less on heavy industry, and to build up not just financial services and logistics, but also creative industries and tourism. In line with such plans, the city government talks increasingly about promoting heritage conservation and highlighting Shanghai’s rich history, not least as a way of appealing to visitors. A recent survey of foreign residents of Shanghai by the city’s Jiaotong University showed that culture, heritage and architecture were seen as the city’s most important attractions.

Yet while significant sums of money have been poured into renovating the famous Bund waterfront and a few prominent historical buildings, it’s always seemed to me that the government is missing a trick when it comes to promoting the city’s cultural heritage. Just a few blocks south of the Bund is Shanghai’s Old City — the original settlement, the one that existed before the 1840s when the foreigners arrived with their gunboats and their opium. The new arrivals began building their own neighbourhoods, which evolved into the city’s famed International Settlement and French Concession, on the muddy flats further along the Huangpu River, leaving the Old City largely alone. It was the Chinese themselves who demolished the unusual oval city wall, built to keep out Japanese pirates from what was by the Ming dynasty already a prosperous trading port, after the country’s first revolution in 1911. But as the foreign concessions developed through the 1920s and 30s, the Old City retained much of its distinct character, with its warren of narrow winding streets, many with quaintly poetic names: Green Lotus Street, Dream Flower Street, West Horse Alley, to name just a few.

Even at the turn of this century, much of the area seemed little affected by modernisation. Walking down the narrow alleys, with their bustling street markets, squawking chickens and playing children, one could almost imagine oneself in a small town during the Qing dynasty. Foreign visitors tended to be astonished — and charmed. The survival of this area, just a few minutes’ walk from the gleaming shopping centres and office buildings of one of the city’s main shopping districts, felt quite miraculous, something perhaps worthy of a UNESCO conservation award. Yet the city government did surprisingly little to promote the area to foreign visitors, and development continued apace.

Yes, the Yuyuan, an exquisite classical walled garden built in the Ming dynasty by a scholar-official for his elderly father, is still on every tourist itinerary, attracting thousands of visitors a day with its rockeries, pavilions and small bridges. Crowds cluster round the nearby Huxinting, better known as the “willow pattern tea house,” having crossed a zigzag bridge over a tiny lake. Some even pop into the City God Temple next door — the old Taoist heart of city life, more or less destroyed during the Cultural Revolution but recently restored.

But other than that, it seems, the government’s main ambition for tourists who come to the Old City is to get them to part with their money. Way back in the 1980s, the area on two sides of the Yuyuan garden was levelled to make way for a multi-storey tourist market, filled with tacky shops, fast food outlets and touts of every kind. Nearby, the planners have built several fake “old streets,” in pseudo–Ming dynasty style, offering cheap textiles, tourist trinkets and antiques of varying degrees of authenticity. Yet the neighbourhood’s real “old streets” have been largely ignored: in most guidebooks, Chinese or foreign, the area beyond the Yuyuan gets barely a mention. Even the grand Confucian temple, a few blocks to the south, remains remarkably quiet on a busy weekday — its classical courtyards and traditional study halls, with their sloping eaves and imposing red pillars, attract just a few students from the nearby high school, presumably seeking peace and quiet as well as a little academic inspiration. The branches of the trees in the main courtyard are festooned with little yellow cards carrying messages written by anxious parents appealing to Confucius — the ancient sage seen as a kind of god of education — to bring their children success in their studies.

Yet what’s left of the old town has a unique character, retaining much of its bucolic atmosphere. Step off the main road that replaced the old city wall into one of the nearby side streets, and the first thing you notice is how quiet it is: the hubbub of traffic fades into the background, voices carry easily across the street. The houses are often tiny, the oldest ones with their upper floors fronted in red-painted wood; even the grander old buildings, many constructed by successful merchants in the 1920s, are subdivided among many families. But there’s a human quality here: life feels slower; old people sit outside their houses on stools, chatting with their neighbours; children play in the street, something they could hardly do safely in other parts of Shanghai; flowers poke out from tiny balconies; and in some streets ancient trees cast their shadows. The residents sometimes look curiously at foreign visitors, but many are friendly and relaxed — on one visit, two old gentlemen beckoned me over and told me tales of the area’s history, pointing out where red guards had chipped away an old Nationalist flag on a nearby house during the Cultural Revolution.

There’s certainly no shortage of fascinating buildings — strange hybrids of Chinese style and art deco, many with interesting tales behind them. One crumbling old mansion, hidden away behind an arched entrance, was the home of a famous artist who supposedly hosted a dinner here for Albert Einstein when he visited Shanghai in 1922. Yet there’s little attempt to identify such historic sites: the area’s oldest building, a narrow early Qing dynasty tower in a tiny street, has no sign, and is inaccessible behind its high walls; the former home of Paul Hsu (Xu Guangqi), the sixteenth-century government minister and Jesuit convert who played a key role in early scholarly interaction between China and the West (and who has an entire memorial park devoted to him in another part of Shanghai), has just a tiny stone sign, written only in Chinese, and is in a decrepit state. The Old City’s original fire tower, some one hundred feet tall and over a hundred years old, is another neglected landmark.

A few of the buildings, and one or two lanes, have been refurbished, yet little attention seems to have been paid to the neighbourhood. It was the only part of town that wasn’t spruced up when Shanghai hosted the World Expo in 2010. Two of the bigger roads that run through the area have been widened into eight-lane traffic arteries, effectively carving the Old City into four rather forlorn quarters. A number of streets and blocks have been replaced by modern residential buildings, their towering height (and in some cases, gold roofs) a brutal contrast with their surroundings.

It’s a process which is probably inevitable. Professor Wu Jiang, an architect who recently served for several years in Shanghai’s planning bureau, did try to have the whole Old City zoned as a historic conservation area, but admitted it was too late for sizeable chunks of the area where plans for demolition had already been approved. Opposite the City God Temple, for example, a shiny new shopping mall now looms over the narrow streets, like a strange spaceship parachuted into the Old City, with branches of H&M and Zara, and a Marks & Spencer largely empty except for a few curious tourists. It’s a symbol of the government’s continuing desire to modernise the Old City. On Dew Fragrance Garden Road, a few blocks west, I find a famous old school almost completely demolished, its front building apparently spared, but another elegant block, with a plaque identifying it as having been built in 1921, standing half-wrecked amid a pile of rubble.

Nearby, another neighbourhood which traditionally linked the old town to the riverside is also on the way down. Centred on a long road known as Wang Family Wharf Street (Wangjia Matou Jie), this was Shanghai’s original “docklands,” a warren of small lanes with a rare, village-like quality, where many houses had their own small courtyards. Of course, the houses, most of them now owned by the state, were often decrepit, and some of the residents welcomed the chance to be relocated to new homes in the suburbs. But the forced eviction notices flapping from some of the half-demolished buildings are a reminder that not everyone was happy with the process. And there’s no doubt that the loss of such neighbourhoods erases something of Shanghai’s uniqueness. Visit them while you still can… though if you’re too late, you can always make do with the “old” building that has just been built round the corner, in the new high-rise compound beside the six-lane road, at the bottom of Wang Family Wharf Street.

The post On Green Lotus Street appeared first on Inside Story.