RAILWAY / MEMORY

04 / Heritage

How a site learns to represent a railway

No heritage bureau can place an entire railway network behind a fence.

Laurajane Smith’s Uses of Heritage begins from a deceptively simple claim: heritage is not a quality that old objects possess by themselves. Heritage is something people define.

By this standard, railways are especially difficult to fit into preservation systems because their significance and histories are dispersed across stations, cities, and local memories. No heritage bureau can place an entire railway network behind a fence.

Two images, two moments

A station in the archive and in the present

The older image is a photograph of a museum display, not a dated original negative. It shows a historic scene; its original maker and date still need verification.

Undated historic view of Bisezhai station with trains and tracks, photographed from a display in Gejiu Museum
Bisezhai station, historic view. Gejiu Museum display
A contemporary view of Bisezhai station buildings and tracks published by The World of Chinese
Bisezhai station, contemporary view. Photograph by Hu Yan Hong, The World of Chinese, published 2021.

A sequence, not a single decision

How Bisezhai gained public reach

  1. 1987

    Protected as provincial heritage

    Bisezhai entered a formal system for recognizing historical structures.

  2. 2011

    Named a point of concentration

    During an inspection of Bisezhai’s development, a prefectural official described the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway as a linear resource whose dispersed form made cultural and tourism development difficult, and argued that Bisezhai could serve as the railway’s best “concentrated point” (Liu 2011). Inspect the reported visit

  3. 2013

    National designation

    The designations recognized historical structures and created an official route for visiting and interpreting the station.

  4. 2017–18

    Film and tourism promotion

    After the local government prepared Bisezhai to carry the railway’s image through reconstruction and protection projects, the 2017 film Youth introduced this image to a national audience. Mengzi’s 2018 government work report explicitly proposed using the film’s popularity to develop the historical and cultural park (Mengzi Municipal People’s Government 2018). Inspect the work report

  5. 2023

    A railway tourism core

    During the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan period, municipal planning aimed to position Bisezhai at the center of a wider railway heritage tourism belt (Mengzi Municipal People’s Government 2023). Inspect the plan

Documents behind the timeline

When a station was made to stand for a line

Each record documents a stated proposal or plan at a particular date. The linked paper passages explain how those statements enter the argument.

2011 / Reported site visit

A “concentrated point”

A 2011 report demonstrated this logic. During an inspection of Bisezhai’s development, a prefectural official described the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway as a linear resource whose dispersed form made cultural and tourism development difficult, and argued that Bisezhai could serve as the railway’s best “concentrated point” (Liu 2011).

Liu Xia’s report in Time Weekly, republished by Sina on January 27, 2011, records the official’s proposal during a visit. It is a newspaper account of the proposal, not a planning decree.

Read the dated report ↗See the paper paragraph ↗
2018 / Government work report

From film visibility to a park

Mengzi’s 2018 government work report explicitly proposed using the film’s popularity to develop the historical and cultural park (Mengzi Municipal People’s Government 2018).

The city’s report names the 2017 film Youth and the Bisezhai railway history park in its work for 2018. This is evidence of a development commitment, not proof that the work was completed that year.

Read the March 20 report ↗See the paper paragraph ↗
2023 / Culture and tourism plan

A core for a wider route

During the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan period, municipal planning aimed to position Bisezhai at the center of a wider railway heritage tourism belt (Mengzi Municipal People’s Government 2023).

The published plan makes Bisezhai a core of its metre-gauge railway visitor route and names other connected places. Its language sets out an aim, not a historical ranking of stations.

Read the January 7 plan ↗See the paper paragraph ↗

A symbol with a contested story

The red-clay court

The tale of the tennis court, for example, now has two competing narratives: one associated with government agencies and official experts, and one offered by the curator I met at the museum. I did not obtain any construction records or documents that could prove or disprove either account.

The 2023 sports authority account documents its official certification as the “first red-clay tennis court in China.” Certification does not, by itself, identify every worker who built the original court.

The red clay tennis court at Bisezhai photographed by Jiang Wenyao on March 30, 2023
Bisezhai red-clay tennis court, March 30, 2023. Photograph by Jiang Wenyao / Xinhua, State General Administration of Sport.

What becomes easy to see

Protection brought restoration and tourism planning; restoration created attractive settings for photography and drew visitors; visitors’ posts reinforced Bisezhai’s popularity and created economic incentives for further protection and restoration.

What takes work to explain

His private exhibition was an answer to that loss. By collecting tickets, photographs, letters, maps, tools, and architectural fragments, he had built a counter-archive of the railway and Kaiyuan.

Beyond one mistaken caption

Correcting one caption does not explain why some captions circulate widely while others remain unknown to the public. Trouillot directs attention to the unequal machinery that carries facts.

Next: the finding