About Chinese Heritage

Chinese Heritage

Chinese Heritage, in Chinese Zhonghua Yichan, is a Beijing monthly magazine devoted to Chinese cultural heritage, launched in December 2004. Published in association with Zhonghua Book Company, China's venerable publisher of classical and historical works, it covers historic sites, archaeology, crafts, festivals and traditional culture in a richly illustrated format. In March 2008 it formally became a member of the Chinese National Geography magazine brand, as a sister title to that famous geography monthly and to the youth magazine Museum. Subscription listings record it as a monthly of some 160 pages (CN 11-5247/G2), written for readers interested in history and traditional culture.

A magazine founded on an idea

Chinese Heritage was created to do for China's past what Chinese National Geography had done for its landscapes: to explore the country's treasures from the angle of history. Its founding descriptions present it as a magazine that re-recognises China and the world from a historical perspective, spreads the beauty of the humanities and goes in search of Chinese treasures — a fine magazine, its publishers said, for readers who love reading and love history, and one worth keeping. It was formally launched in December 2004, with sponsoring and supporting institutions drawn from China's heritage establishment; Zhonghua Book Company, founded in 1912 and the country's great publisher of ancient books and historical scholarship, has been its publishing partner, giving the magazine direct access to scholarly editing traditions. Where the geography magazine's photographers documented landscapes, Chinese Heritage's contributors — historians, archaeologists, museum specialists and writers — documented the human past embedded in them.

Subject matter: the heritage of a civilisation

The magazine's field is the whole material and intangible inheritance of Chinese civilisation. Its issues treat historic cities and ancient capitals, archaeological discoveries, tombs and grottoes, traditional crafts and their surviving masters, festivals and folk customs, calligraphy, painting and antiquities, and the great texts and myths through which China has understood its past. A representative run of coverage can be seen in its treatment of the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing), the ancient compendium of mythic geography: Chinese Heritage returned to the classic repeatedly, with issues in December 2014 on its mountains and rivers and the world of its mythology, in April 2016 on the creatures that inhabit its world, and in April 2017 on its flood myths — treating a single canonical text as archaeology, literature, natural history and myth at once. That method, taking one heritage subject and examining it from every side, in depth and in pictures, is the magazine's signature.

The Chinese National Geography family

To understand Chinese Heritage's home, it helps to know the brand it joined. Chinese National Geography began in January 1950 in Nanjing as Dili Zhishi (Geographical Knowledge), founded by geographers including Shi Yafeng and Wu Chuanjun, who contributed from their own salaries. Sponsored by the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Geographical Society of China, it survived suspension during the Cultural Revolution, was printed in colour from 1993, and in October 2000 was renamed Chinese National Geography, becoming one of China's most popular high-end magazines, famed for photographic special issues such as the 550-page "Beauty of China" special of October 2005, which printed 550,000 copies and sold out. The magazine house built a family around it: the youth edition Museum (Bowu) launched in 2004, the same year as Chinese Heritage's founding, and in March 2008 Chinese Heritage formally became a member of the Chinese National Geography magazine brand. The three titles divided the world between them — geography and nature, youth natural history, and cultural heritage — under one of China's most trusted magazine names.

Format and readers

Chinese Heritage follows the visual standards of its brand family: a large-format monthly, printed in full colour, of about 160 pages in recent subscription listings, priced at 30 yuan a copy in the late 2010s. Its articles are long, illustrated with photography, maps, reproductions of artworks and artefacts, and written to be kept — its publishers promote it as a magazine that does not date. Its registered readership in subscription catalogues spans families, teachers, students, collectors and history enthusiasts. The magazine's combination of scholarly subject matter and popular presentation filled a specific niche in the Chinese market of the 2000s: as incomes rose and domestic tourism boomed, millions of Chinese travellers began visiting the historic sites the magazine described, and a heritage consciousness — expressed also in television programmes, museum building and the growth of China's World Heritage list — created a large audience for serious popular writing about the past.

Heritage in a changing China

The magazine's life has coincided with a transformation in China's relationship with its inheritance. The decades of its publication saw breakneck urban redevelopment destroy many old neighbourhoods even as the state expanded heritage protection and monument restoration and promoted traditional culture as a source of national identity. Chinese Heritage's pages both fed and documented that movement: they argued implicitly, issue by issue, that China's heritage was a living treasure to be understood rather than an obstacle to development or a mere backdrop for tourism. Its treatment of crafts, festivals and local customs recorded intangible heritage at the moment when many of its practitioners were the last of their lines, giving the magazine an archival as well as a journalistic value.

The magazine and its sister titles today

Within the Chinese National Geography brand, Chinese Heritage continues as the history title, sold in subscription bundles alongside the flagship geography magazine and Museum. Its editorial identity remains distinct: where the flagship moves across landscapes and the youth title across natural history, Chinese Heritage moves through time. Its back issues are collected by readers and libraries as a reference set on Chinese cultural heritage, and its thematic issues — on ancient capitals, on canonical texts, on crafts and on sites — are used by teachers and guides as introductions to their subjects. In a market where general-interest magazines have struggled, the heritage niche, anchored by scholarly publishing through Zhonghua Book Company and by the brand strength of Chinese National Geography, has proved durable.

The brand's special-issue tradition

Chinese Heritage operates inside a publishing culture famous for its monumental special issues, and that culture shapes its own thematic method. The flagship Chinese National Geography built its modern reputation on specials of extraordinary scale: the 550-page "Beauties of China" special of October 2005, printed in 550,000 copies for the magazine's fifty-fifth anniversary and sold out so completely that copies were hoarded and resold at inflated prices; the 410-page special on the 318 National Highway, the Sichuan-Tibet road, in October 2006; a northern and western special in October 2007 that printed a million copies; and, in 2008, rapid specials on the Wenchuan earthquake and on Beijing for the Olympic Games. Chinese Heritage applies the same single-subject, lavishly illustrated treatment to the past: an entire issue's resources concentrated on one site, one text or one craft tradition, researched with scholars and produced to be kept. Its recurring returns to the Classic of Mountains and Seas across 2014, 2016 and 2017 show the method at work — heritage treated not as a column but as the whole magazine.

Legacy

Chinese Heritage's significance is that it created, in 2004, a popular monthly literature of Chinese cultural heritage where none had existed in magazine form. Drawing on Zhonghua Book Company's scholarly tradition and, from 2008, on the Chinese National Geography brand's photographic and popular-science expertise, it taught a mass readership to look at historic sites, artefacts, crafts and myths with informed eyes. Its hundreds of illustrated features now form a popular encyclopaedia of China's inheritance — and a record of how, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, China chose to remember itself.