Search Results (69)

Linpan in Chengdu Plain, a distinctive form of dispersed rural settlement on the Chengdu Plain, is composed primarily of traditional rural dwellings embedded within woodlands environments. These settlements play multifunctional roles related to agricultural production, daily life, ecological sustainability, and the preservation of folk culture, thereby holding significant ecological and cultural value. In recent decades, rapid urbanization has profoundly impacted the spatial patterns, ecological environments, and livelihood systems of Linpan in western Sichuan, posing severe challenges to their preservation and development. To investigate the extent and nature of these changes, this study examines the spatiotemporal evolution of Linpan in Chengdu over five time periods from 1980 to 2020, employing both macro- and micro-scale analyses. Settlement types were classified based on their transformation trajectories, and representative cases were selected to identify and interpret the key driving forces behind these changes. The results indicate that: (1) at the macro level, Linpans have undergone a clear transition from small-scale, widely distributed, and irregularly shaped patterns to more centralized, aggregated, and standardized spatial configurations, particularly in the peri-urban areas of Chengdu; (2) at the micro level, the internal composition of Linpan has changed substantially, with a marked decline in woodlands coverage. The original integration of buildings and trees has shifted towards a spatial arrangement characterized by peripheral and fragmented vegetation; (3) Changes in production methods have prompted the spatial restructuring of Linpan settlements, transitioning from uniformly dispersed arrangements to clustered formations along road-adjacent resource points. Concurrent population and housing migration has reduced the total number of Linpan, while individual settlements have increased in size and density. Additionally, planning and construction policies have guided the morphological transformation of Linpan from organically evolved forms to geometrically regular configurations. Full article

During China’s social transformation, the spiritual life of young people exhibits a dual tendency toward secularisation and consumerization. While traditional institutional religion continues to wane, a consumption-based religiosity has surfaced, marking a shift from collective, class-based subcultural expressions to post-subcultural practices centred on individual affect, meaning bricolage, and fluid identities. Through a comparative analysis of historical Real Person Fiction and Yonghe Temple bracelets, this study reveals how contemporary youth transform historical memory and religious symbols into flexible cultural resources. Crucially, this transformation is not a wholesale rupture with tradition but rather a selective appropriation and recontextualization of religious concepts inherited through family upbringing and folk customs. Their practices thus embody a dialectic of discontinuity and continuity: what is discontinued is institutional allegiance to prescribed rituals; what continues is the deep-seated impulse to seek meaning through symbolic practices. The research finds that young people construct temporary scene-based tribes through emotional identification and symbolic consumption, using fluidity and multiplicity to counter anxieties in daily life. Compared to traditional communities, such tribes offer individuals meanings that are more personalised and immediate, reflecting the lifestyles individuals wish to cultivate. Within a context of high uncertainty, they convey fragmented responses to the predicaments of modernity through the reinterpretation and re-narration of historical and sacred symbols. Full article

Contemporary studies of religious modernity tend to view faith systems as static traditions that resist secularization. Although it has recently been acknowledged that local religions may be resilient, scholars often overlook the internal creativity of action that enables such faiths to actively navigate secular constraints. To address this gap, this study investigates a shamanistic folk religion, the Moed faith, to answer a critical question: How can a marginalized religious system innovate to survive within a strict secular order without compromising its spiritual principles? This paper proposes Performative Adaptation as a mechanism of religious creativity by combining historical analysis and ethnographic data through the lens of Actor-Network Theory. It argues that the Moed faith reassembles itself as a dynamic ritual-art continuum rather than remaining a fixed entity. The findings reveal that practitioners actively separate ritual form from function, transforming sacred exorcism chants into the secular performing art of Modlaenz to secure Intangible Cultural Heritage status. Furthermore, this adaptation fosters a transnational Pan-Tai spiritual community, turning rigid geopolitical borders into zones of cultural contact. Ultimately, this research challenges the view of religion as merely a repository of tradition, demonstrating that faith systems can actively engage in institutional innovation and identity construction. Full article

In historic districts, the audiovisual environment plays an important role in shaping both cultural expression and spatial experience. However, the influence of acoustic and visual environmental factors on perceived street vitality remains insufficiently understood. Taking the Shangxiahang Historic District in Fuzhou as a case study, this paper employs on-site sound pressure level measurements, panoramic visual data collection, questionnaire surveys, principal component analysis, correlation analysis, and multiple regression analysis to systematically examine the effects of acoustic and visual environmental factors on perceived street vitality. The results indicate that traditional cultural sounds and natural sounds have a significant positive impact on perceived street vitality, while construction noise and tour guide’s horn sound exhibit negative effects. Regarding the visual environment, street and alley spaces, traditional architecture, greenery, and the sky are all important factors in promoting perceived street vitality. Further regression analysis reveals that the perception rate of street and alley spaces has the strongest influence, followed by the perception rate of traditional architecture, the perceived frequency of folk activity sounds, preference for greenery, and the perception rate of the sky. These findings demonstrate that perceived street vitality in historic districts does not depend on a single environmental factor but rather arises from synergistic interaction between culturally meaningful acoustic cues and legible spatial forms. These results offer practical implications for multisensory design and vitality-oriented regeneration in historic districts. Full article

Protecting and preserving the agricultural heritage, folk culture and ecological environment of traditional villages is a key element in advancing the strategy for comprehensive rural revitalisation. This paper constructs a theoretical framework for tourism symbiosis, examines the level of tourism symbiosis in the 13 national-level traditional villages of Jia County, and proposes strategies for tourism development. This study employs the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method, alongside spatial analysis techniques such as the Hotspot Analysis, to reveal the levels of tourism symbiosis in traditional villages and their spatial distribution. The results indicate that traditional villages are distributed along the Yellow River, with a linear clustering pattern particularly evident in the central region of Jia County; the overall level of symbiosis exhibits a spatial pattern of higher levels in the north and lower levels in the south, with uneven levels across various dimensions; The traditional villages are categorised into four symbiotic models: comprehensive advantage-led, cultural corridor-dependent, ecological and cultural tourism potential, and low-development conservation. Based on these categories, strategies are proposed to deepen the exploration of local culture, promote industrial integration and regional collaboration, prioritise ecological conservation and environmental restoration, and establish distinctive brands through the rational utilisation of surrounding resources. The research framework and conclusions of this paper provide methodological references and practical insights for the concentrated and contiguous protection of traditional villages, as well as for research on rural revitalisation and sustainable development. Full article

Vulnerable road users in informal urban environments confront a distinct set of hazards that standard computer vision datasets are ill-equipped to represent: artisanal speed bumps constructed without regulatory compliance, deteriorated road markings, and the mototaxi—a three-wheeled motorized vehicle that constitutes the primary informal transport mode in intermediate Andean cities yet is absent from all major international repositories. This paper presents QHAWAY—from Quechua qhaway, a transitive verb meaning “to look; to observe”—an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) predicated on instance segmentation, monocular distance estimation via the pinhole camera model, and Time-to-Collision (TTC) computation, developed for the road environment of Ayacucho, Peru (2761 m a.s.l.), a city recognised by UNESCO as a Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art since 2019. A hybrid dataset comprising 25,602 images with 127,525 annotated instances across 12 classes was assembled by combining an original local collection of 4598 images (10,701 instances) captured through four complementary acquisition methods across the five urban districts of the Huamanga province with three established international datasets (BDD100K, BSTLD, RLMD; 21,004 images, 116,824 instances). A three-phase progressive training strategy with monotonically increasing resolution (640, 800, and 1024 pixels) was evaluated as an ablation study. A multi-architecture comparison spanning YOLOv8L-seg and the YOLO26 family (nano, small, large) identified YOLO26L-seg as the best-performing model, attaining mAP50 Box of 0.829 and mAP50 Mask of 0.788 at epoch 179. The integration of ByteTrack multi-object tracking with the pinhole equation $D=(H_{\mathrm{real}}\times f)/h_{\mathrm{px}}$ delineates operational risk zones aligned with the NHTSA forward collision warning standard (danger: <3 m; caution: 3–7 m; TTC threshold ≤ 2.4 s). The system sustains processing rates of 19.2–25.4 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 5080 GPU. A systematic field survey established that 96% of the audited speed bumps fail to comply with MTC Directive No. 01-2011-MTC/14, constituting the first quantitative record of informal road infrastructure non-compliance in the Andean region. Validation was conducted under naturalistic driving conditions without staged scenarios. Grad-CAM explainability analysis, encompassing three complementary visualisation algorithms (Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and EigenCAM), confirmed that model attention concentrates consistently on safety-critical objects. Full article

Traditional villages embody regional culture and local knowledge, yet culture–tourism integration often suffers from a mismatch between resource value and effective transformation. To address this problem, this study proposes a two-dimensional “benefit–obstacle” diagnostic and strategy-matching framework and tests its case-based applicability in Dayuwan Village. First, a cultural landscape gene (CLG) atlas was constructed for the village based on a geo-information coding scheme, covering both tangible and intangible CLGs. Second, a four-dimensional evaluation system was operationalized through five expert judgments and 106 valid on-site questionnaires collected from tourists (n = 67) and residents (n = 39). Criterion weights were determined using an AHP–entropy combination approach, and the comprehensive benefit closeness coefficient was calculated via TOPSIS. Third, an obstacle degree identification model was employed to pinpoint key constraints and derive composite obstacle degrees. Results within the Dayuwan case show that the TOPSIS closeness coefficients of the 17 genes ranged from 0.653 to 0.782 (mean = 0.714), with 4, 6, and 7 genes classified as excellent, good, and medium, respectively; composite obstacle degrees ranged from 0.0228 to 0.1975. In Dayuwan Village, higher obstacle degrees clustered mainly in intangible CLGs, whereas Ming–Qing architecture and frequently practiced folk-cultural genes showed comparatively lower obstacle degrees. The transformation process is constrained by four mechanisms—landscape character protection, economic transformation, social identity, and market demand—with economic transformation constraints being the most prominent. Based on the benefit–obstacle matrix, 17 CLGs were classified into five activation scenarios and matched with corresponding revitalization strategies. This framework links benefit ranking, obstacle diagnosis, and strategy matching, and provides a case-based diagnostic reference for the conservation and culture–tourism integration of villages with comparable heritage conditions, subject to local recalibration of indicators, weights, and thresholds. Full article

Under the dual pressures of urbanization and tourism development, the Historic Centre of Macao, as a World Cultural Heritage site, faces challenges including the inadequate transmission of cultural elements and the excessive commercialisation of tourism development. To systematically identify and safeguard its cultural characteristics, this study introduces the theory of cultural genes, constructing a dual-strand identification model encompassing both tangible and intangible cultural genes. This model integrates architectural function, structure, and ornamentation, alongside indigenous religions, arts, and folklore, thereby achieving a comprehensive extraction of cultural elements. Building upon this foundation, the study employed the AHP-fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to quantitatively assess the degree of identification with various cultural elements, integrating perspectives from three distinct groups: tourists, residents, and third-party experts. The findings revealed significant disparities in cultural identification across these groups. For instance, residents demonstrated the highest level of identification with beliefs and folk customs, whilst tourists favoured more tangible aspects such as decorative elements and cuisine, exhibiting generally weaker identification with architectural structures. The findings demonstrate that this study, through the establishment of a systematic framework for identifying cultural genes and a multi-stakeholder evaluation system, has accurately discerned the characteristics of various cultural genes and the public’s level of identification with them. This provides a scientific basis for evidence-based, differentiated, and precise governance of the Historic Centre of Macao, offering significant reference value for the conservation and revitalisation of similar cultural heritage sites. Full article

Against the backdrop of globalization and rapid urbanization, the weakening of regional cultural identity has emerged as a significant challenge in contemporary architectural practice, particularly within the context of large-scale campus development. University architecture must navigate the complex task of balancing functional demands with long-term cultural and social sustainability. However, the prevalence of homogenized architectural forms in many newly constructed campuses often undermines local distinctiveness, leading to diminished place identity and reduced social sustainability. In response, this study takes the Yan’an University new campus in China as a representative case to explore how regional culture can be sustainably integrated into campus architecture through spatial organization, typological strategies, and symbolic translation. The study employs qualitative analysis and a life-cycle perspective, integrating architectural semiotics and typological methods to construct a multidimensional analytical framework of “space–material–culture”. This framework is systematically applied to examine how the loess culture, revolutionary heritage, and folk art of Yan’an are translated and expressed in a contemporary context. The findings reveal that achieving cultural sustainability does not rely on direct imitation of historical forms but rather on an adaptive spatial framework, modular architectural typologies, and a performance-integrated material system, which together shape a resilient and organically evolving campus entity. Specifically, the design employs strategies such as “symbolic translation from archetype to type”, “dialogue between traditional materials and contemporary craftsmanship”, and “spatial translation from enclosed courtyards to open landscapes”. These approaches facilitate the organic embedding of regional cultural genes, promote the continuity of collective memory, strengthen local identity, and enable phased development throughout the campus’s life cycle. By extending the concept of sustainability from environmental performance to cultural continuity, social cohesion, and spatial adaptability, this study provides actionable design pathways and theoretical references for campus development in regions with profound historical backgrounds. Full article

As an important component of Chinese folk art, rural paper-cutting embodies rich regional cultural connotations and distinctive aesthetic expressions. In this study, a Chinese rural paper-cutting image dataset covering multiple regions and artistic styles was constructed, and a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based framework was proposed for regional and stylistic identification of paper-cutting works. Five representative mainstream CNN models were evaluated for both tasks. For regional classification, all models achieved high accuracy, with EfficientNet-B1 attaining the highest accuracy of 91.46%. The style classification task was more challenging due to subtle visual differences, with MobileNetV3-Small achieving the highest accuracy of 73.20%. In addition, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) visualizations further confirmed that the models were able to effectively distinguish different regional and stylistic categories in high-dimensional space. To enhance model interpretability, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) was applied to visualize the optimal models. The results show that the CNNs consistently focus on core structural features of paper-cutting works, suggesting that CNNs can capture visually and culturally meaningful features. Overall, this study demonstrates the feasibility of applying CNNs to the analysis of traditional folk art and provides a practical technical pathway for digital management, intelligent classification, and educational dissemination of rural paper-cutting art. Full article

During the mid-to-late Qing Dynasty, the folk-belief text Yuli constructed a systematic “underworld legal code” via its image–text system, distinct from traditional religious karma and religious law. This study focuses on Yuli’s core image system, exploring its unique legal characteristics and social governance functions through an interdisciplinary approach integrating religious studies, art history, and legal history. Yuli transforms real judicial symbols, such as government offices and prison gates, into underworld visual elements, establishing the core legal principles of “correspondence between crime and punishment” and “universal equality” while reflecting contemporary legal thought. The formation of this “underworld legal code” is closely linked to the creative practices of Qing Confucian scholars, who utilized folk beliefs as a vehicle to disseminate secular legal concepts and respond to social demands for behavioral norms. The Yuli thus became the primary behavioral norm for its grassroots audience, who, due to low literacy, could not understand the formal laws of the Qing Dynasty, and guided them to refrain from criminal acts. Yuli’s “underworld legal code” not only supplemented the national legal system but also reflected the pluralistic pattern of social governance in late imperial China, providing crucial empirical support for the theory of legal pluralism. This study deepens the understanding of the interactive relationship between folk beliefs and legal order in traditional China, and further clarifies the unique mode of grassroots social governance in the Qing Dynasty. Full article

By analyzing the devotional practices at Qinglong Temple in Chaozhou, this article illuminates a symbolic circuit in Chinese folk religion wherein sincerity is materialized through reverent offerings to secure divine reciprocity. It further explores the ethical logic, symbolic mechanisms, and processes of social construction underlying the pattern. More broadly, the vibrant ritual life at Qinglong Temple demonstrates that far from being a relic of the past, such economies of sincere exchange are a vital and adaptive mechanism through which folk traditions negotiate their place and thrive within the complexities of modern China. The study reveals that Chinese folk religion operates as a dynamic system of practices embedded in everyday rituals, emotional ethics, and social relationships. Its legitimacy arises not from abstract doctrine but from ritual performance, moral expression, and affective interaction. The article elucidates how monetary offerings, when grounded in sincerity, are reinterpreted as symbolic gifts and subsequently transformed into symbolic capital through practices such as temple donations and vow fulfillment. While resisting full assimilation into market rationality, folk religion simultaneously engages official structures to construct a hybrid religious economy that reinforces communal ethics and sustains transcendent relationships through public ritual and collective devotion. Full article

Amidst rapid urbanization and modernization, numerous traditional villages in China face severe challenges, including landscape homogenization and the erosion of their distinctive characteristics. Addressing this issue requires a method capable of systematically identifying, analyzing, and reconstructing both the landscape and its underlying cultural features. This study proposes a digital analytical approach that integrates multimodal artificial intelligence with landscape language theory to address the homogenization of cultural landscapes in traditional Chinese villages. Taking Xinye Village in Zhejiang Province as a case study, the research systematically decodes its landscape spatial narratives and underlying cultural genes. This framework systematically deconstructs village landscapes across four levels: “vocabulary, context, grammar, and semantics”. The village image database is first automatically recognized and statistically analyzed by computer vision technology, which extracts 31 core landscape vocabulary items from three main categories and nine subcategories. Second, Retrieval-augmented Generation technology is employed to synthesize from the constructed domain-specific corpus, a natural context structured around Yuhua Mountain and Daofeng Mountain, as well as a cultural context based on ancestral hall order, connected through folk activities, and idealized by farming and reading passed down through generations. Building on this framework, a multimodal model was used to examine the spatial composition and combinatorial laws of landscape features. Six essential dimensions—spatial layout, visual order, element combination, functional relationships, circulation layout, and scale correlations—revealed the spatial grammar of shuikou landscape. Lastly, the semantic values conveyed by the landscape vocabulary were thoroughly analyzed across three dimensions—form, function, and culture—by integrating a knowledge base. This work creates a landscape language atlas of Xinye Village by combining these studies and using a linguistic model of “character-word-sentence-paragraph”. By methodically deciphering the clan’s cultural code of “farming and reading passed down through generations”, this clearly reconstructs the spatial narrative logic from micro-elements to macro-patterns. This research not only advances the study of landscape language in traditional villages from qualitative description toward a systematic, digital, and interpretable paradigm but also provides an operational theoretical and methodological foundation for the in-depth interpretation, conservation, and transmission of traditional village cultural landscapes. Full article

The Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritages (ICH) Law was passed in 2011, followed by the Regulation on Copyright Protection of Folk Literature and Art Works (Draft calling for comments) released in 2014, which finally called for opinions from experts and practitioners again in 2024. This article examines the challenges in directly applying copyright law to protect ICHs in Mainland China, emphasising the fundamental differences in the rationales of ICHs and copyright, despite partial overlap in their subject matters. Although copyright is not suitable for directly safeguarding ICHs, it can play a constructive role in protecting derivative works and creative expressions embodying ICHs. When granting copyright to the creations, certain limitations should be imposed on the exercise of these rights, particularly respecting the local communities and avoiding distorting the original cultural expressions of the ICHs. Such a design could benefit the preservation of Chinese ICHs and also promote the exchange of culture. It also provides a reference to other nations to avoid directly transplanting copyright law onto ICH protection without adaptation. In light of recent international developments, the findings contribute to comparative and cross-border debates on international collaborations, fair remuneration and benefit-sharing, supporting more equitable and sustainable global preservation of ICHs. Full article

This essay reads Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” as folk horror about the late-Victorian spiritualist debates. We read Allen’s story as not only sympathetic to spiritualism, but also as critical of the gendered and genred politics of fin-de-siècle scientific materialism which would preclude such occult experiences—or what we frame as feminine ways of knowing. In both form and content, “Pallinghurst Barrow” challenges masculine science by foregrounding the powerful influence (on Rudolph, the protagonist) of the Gothic ghost story (“gipsy” Rachel’s cautionary tale, repeated by young Joyce). Allen’s interest in the folkloric origins of religion can be traced back to Herbert Spencer’s “Ghost Theory,” a proto-sociological explanation for the cultural construction and transmission of myth (or spirits). A lifelong friend and devotee of Spencer, Allen employs his mentor’s sociology as a way to make sense of non-material forces, including the ghost story circle and its production of Gothic awe or wonder (the wonder tale). Ultimately, then, Allen’s infamous folk horror reads as an allegory of late-Victorian spiritualist debates and, more importantly, as a defence of feminine modes of knowledge and myth-making through collective story-telling. Full article