Hong Kong Heritage Preservation

Hong Kong is well-known for its beautiful night scenery, especially when you look down from the peak. But what can you see? They are all modern and artificial buildings? Turning around backward and you will discover a totally different view- those old and vintage buildings, which are what we called heritage. However, if you asked any tourist or even locals in the peak about the heritage nearby, I am surely the answer will be: I know nothing about them. That is the reason why we need to preserve the heritage-we are so lacking of knowledge and understanding toward our heritage, surroundings and more importantly-history.

Many may question why do we need to put so much attention or resources to heritage preservation? In fact, heritage isn’t just talking about that particular building but it is representing the history or we can say in this way: heritage is history itself. History is the base of a country because we always learn from history so as to evaluate ourselves and make a fruitful future. And heritages are the strongest prove of a country’s development. This shows there is a crucial need of keeping history for public society. According to Dr. Tang Wing-shing (2008) “Hong Kong has traditionally been a consuming society that is too focused on the now. It does not help that little attention has been paid to educating about heritage in our schools.” (p.1)Without history, country won’t be able to survive just like a person can’t live without memories. These kinds of history are not just for present generation but also the next generation. Instead of learning history from textbook, heritage is the best teaching materials to educate people.

 

Heritages are not past tense, but they got potential to create something new. With the presence of heritages, people can continue visiting those history and get inspiration from them. By continuous interacting with the past, people can thus create their own history and story. The key point is that we need to keep those origins and also the footages created along.

On the other hand, there is one main reason why we need to preserve heritage-the values behind. Heritages provide historical, educational and artistic values. Values can influence people, both locals and non-locals, on different aspects, for example the most common area: how they think about this city. Values built up by heritages can create sense of belonging of citizens toward the city. According to Professor Ricardo Mak (2008) “Preserving structures that reflect or conjure a sense of history enriches Hong Kong’s diversity, character, culture and traditions. Heritage preservation also promotes a collective identity among a group of people.”(P.1) Losing heritage means we are facing losing our unique value in the world. We don’t have any special feature to show the world.

It is sad to hear that people claim’ Economic development should be prioritized over preservation of heritages.’ At the same time, they hope government will pay more effort on economy or other issues like housing problem etc. There is no doubt that there must be certain degree of importance of solving those problems. However, in order to make Hong Kong a fully developed city, we should plan the development under the principle of sustainability. Sustainability includes the balance between social, economic and environmental aspects. According to the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) ranking in 2012, Hong Kong is ranked around 37 among the world which is an acceptable place. Although there are still plenty of opportunities for Hong Kong to raise the economic competitiveness, we can’t deny that economy in HK is already on a developed level. Compare to social and environmental aspects, we are definitely paying less awareness.

Being a well-developed city, even if Hong Kong ranked at the top of the list of GDP, it doesn’t mean that HK is a fully successful city. What we need to consider is the balance between economic and cultural or social aspects. Compare the pattern of GDP per capita ranking and HPI which stands for happy index for several places, using US and HK as more developed countries while Vietnam and Brazil are less developed countries.US and HK are ranked as 6 which is much higher than that of Vietnam (134) and Brazil (81). But if we observe their happy index, the result is totally reversed. Vietnam and Brazil are ranked higher than that of US and HK. This reveals that economic development doesn’t mean everything. Even though everyone can earn a living and enjoy high standard living condition, citizens may not be happy- the atmosphere of the society can still remain terrible.

 

In my point of view, although heritage preservation is very essential thing to deal with, we still need to stick with reality. It means we need to make sure preserving heritage can bring maximize benefits to different stakeholders. There are many suggested ways to achieve this goal and I would like to introduce a solution that satisfies both economic and cultural concerns- Heritage Tourism. According The National Trust for Historic Preservation, heritage tourism is defined as “traveling to experience the places, artifacts and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present.”Before launching heritage tourism, buildings may need to carry out redevelopment project which definite as keeping external architectural design but changing its function. For the economic benefits, tourism attracts more tourists to visit local heritages and thus stimulate economic activities like shops and restaurants, in particular districts. For the cultural aspect, not only we can keep the heritage, we can further promote special features and history of the heritages to the world. This provides a chance for cultural and information exchange and also varies the image of HK.

In fact, heritage tourism has been carried for several years and US is one of the successful cases. According to the studies on US, cultural tourism has consistently shown that heritage travels stay longer and spend more money. Between 1996 & 2002, heritage travel increased by 13% compared to US travel overall (5.6%). This proves that heritage tourism isn’t a written solution but it is practical and achievable.

To conclude, there are still lot of works can be done by HK government to preserve our valuable heritages. Due to the special ownership of some heritages, we have already lost part of the history of HK. The HK government should work on this issue and ensure the next generation can still able to see those histories of HK. To solve this problem and balancing out the benefits of different groups of people, heritage tourism should be adopted.

 

 

 

Reference List

Tang Wing-shing. (2007/2008). Built heritage in focus. New Horizons Hong Kong Baptist University, 3. Retrieved from http://cpro.hkbu.edu.hk/online_pub/nh0708_3/p4-10.pdf

 

The Historic/Cultural Traveler, , Travel Industry Association of America and Smithsonian Magazine. (2003) .Travel Industry Association of America Travel Scope survey [Data file].Retrieved from

http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Key-Topics/Creative-Economic-Development/Cultural-Visitor-Profile.php

 

Cheryl M. Hargrove. (2002). Heritage Tourism. Cultural Resource Management, 1 .Retrieved from

http://hisp323.umwblogs.org/files/2013/09/hargrove-cheryl.pdf

 

 

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