China Heritage was designed by Callum Smith, under the guidance of Geremie R. Barmé, who conceptualised the site and its contents.
The featured art work on the masthead, a photograph looking out at West Lake, Hangzhou, from Solitary Hill 孤山, was made by the New York-based photographer Lois Conner, a friend who contributed generously to the China Heritage Project from its inception in 2005, as well as to The China Story Project from 2012. We are grateful to Lois for her enthusiastic support for China Heritage from 2016.
The character 遺 yí, the leitmotif of China Heritage, is in the hand of Li Huailin 李懷琳 of the Tang dynasty. This calligraphic motif was suggested by Callum Smith. Like 讀 dú (read, reading, look at, interpret) and 書 shū (history, write, record, a book), which feature elsewhere in these interconnected sites, 遺 yí is taken from Li’s grass-script 草書 version of a ‘Letter to Shan Tao’ 與巨山源絕交書, a famous epistle by Xi Kang 嵇康, one of the outspoken Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 竹林七賢. Xi Kang’s letter frames the essay ‘On Heritage 遺’, a statement about the rationale of these websites and The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology.
New Sinology was first propounded in 2005 and, since then, I have developed the ideas related to this approach to China as part of the China Heritage Project (2005-2012) and as the founding director of the Australian Centre on China in the World (2010-2015). Some of the material herein previously appeared in the e-journal China Heritage Quarterly and The China Story Journal, which I founded with colleagues as part of The China Story Project in 2012.
The China Heritage Project and the Quarterly evolved together as part of an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship, which I held at The Australian National University (ANU) from 2005. Callum Smith’s work on the four China Heritage websites in 2016 was also made possible by that grant.
Without long years of support from ANU and the Australian Research Council, my work on New Sinology and China Heritage would not have been possible. In particular, I would like to thank Ian Chubb, Mandy Thomas, Claire Roberts, Bruce Doar, Sang Ye 桑曄, Judith Pabian, Gloria Davies, Jude Shanahan, Daniel Sanderson, Duncan Campbell, John Minford, Lois Conner, Jeremy Goldkorn, Linda Jaivin and Kevin Rudd for their encouragement and contributions to the first ten years of New Sinology. In creating China Heritage Nancy Chiu and Celiya Yang have also been constant in their support.
I am also grateful to Ryan Manuel, a former colleague at the Australian Centre on China in the World, for introducing me to Callum Smith, the designer of this site. In 2015, Callum worked with me on his Honours Year thesis, China’s Shanzhai 山寨 Entrepreneurs: Hooligans or Heroes?
In 2016, Callum agreed to help me create the four websites that make up China Heritage. We launched the first of the sites on 15 December 2016 when I presented a keynote address titled ‘Living with Xi Dada’s China — Making Choices and Cutting Deals’ at the conference ‘Political Enchantments: Aesthetic practices and the Chinese state’ organised by Gloria Davies and Christian Sorace in Melbourne, Australia.
The serif typefaces used on this site are part of the overall tradition-inspired, black and white style of China Heritage. Trajan is used for titles, Caslon for content and STKaiti, or Huawen kaiti 華文楷體, for Chinese.
— Geremie R. Barmé