Multi-ethnic Cultural Landscapes as Heritage: The Case of Jingmai Mountain Traditional Tea Forests, Pu'er City, Yunnan Province

Abstract

The Jingmaishan Traditional Tea Forest is located in Lancang Lahu Autonomous County, Pu'er City Province, Yunnan Province, on the southwestern border of China. Its earliest known record was in 180 A.D, when Brown ancestors discovered tea on their migration journey and settled in Jingmai Mountain, where they built villages, planted tea trees in the primeval forest, and developed unique cultivation techniques. Throughout the millennia, several successive ethnic groups such as Brown, Dai and Lahu have come together to nurture the cultural landscape of this traditional tea forest. In 2012, the Traditional Tea Forest of Jingmai Mountain was inscribed on the Preparatory List of China's World Cultural Heritage. In 2022, it was approved as a project of China's 2022 official nomination for World Cultural Heritage, whose heritage contains three major elements: traditional tea forests, traditional villages, and segregated protected forests. In this paper, I will focus on the interaction between the cultural landscape as heritage and the multi-ethnic cultural system, focusing on three major elements: nation memory and history, religious beliefs and local governance systems, and ethnic ecological culture. Accordingly, I attempt to understand the localized development of cultural landscapes in an interactive perspective.