China Heritage Annual

China Heritage Annual is a New Series based on China Heritage Quarterly, the e-publication of the China Heritage Project founded in 2005.

After a hiatus from 2012, the journal will now by published as an Annual, still under the editorship of Geremie R Barmé. The inaugural issue, published in 2016, is guest edited by Yayun Zhu 朱亞運 and William Sima. It takes the city of Nanking 南京 as its focus. Previous issues of China Heritage Quarterly have featured Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and West Lake/Hangzhou. Future issues of the Annual will cover such topics as: ‘Hong Kong, The Best China’, ‘Translated China’, ‘Fakes, Phonies, Forgeries and Follies’, The Story of the Stone 石頭記, ‘Chinese Food: A World in Five Flavours’ and Changchun 長春. Some material from the Annual will be pre-published in the Journal section of this site.

China Heritage Annual provides a focus for research on traditional China, its modern interpretations and recent scholarship in the context of a New Sinology that builds on traditional Sinological strengths while emphasising a principled and meaningful engagement with the complex and shifting realities of the contemporary Chinese world.

The original e-journal was established in 2005 and covered recent developments and scholarship in areas related to China’s heritage, culture, history and society. It was originally named China Heritage Newsletter, becoming a quarterly with Issue No.6 in June 2006. From 2005-2007, it was jointly edited by Bruce G. Doar and Geremie R. Barmé. In the Quarterly Archives Doar’s contributions to the journal are marked [BGD] while those of Barmé appear as either [GRB] or under his full name. Dr Doar left the China Heritage Project in late 2007, and relinquished his involvement with China Heritage Quarterly. During the years 2008-2012, the Quarterly expanded its purview to include more material on literature, culture (in the broadest sense) and translation.

China Heritage Quarterly went into abeyance from 2012-2016 as the pressures of work related to the Australian Centre on China in the World, The China Story Project and illness prevented the Editor from updating material. During this period, William Sima, a contributor to the Quarterly, produced the book China & ANU — diplomats, adventurers, scholars, Canberra: ANU Press, 2015, an archive-based work that grew out of an issue of the Quarterly focussed on the city of Nanking and its legacies. In 2016, that planned issue of the Quarterly become the inaugural China Quarterly Annual.

From 2005-2012, the Quarterly was produced under the aegis of the China Heritage Project originally based in the Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. That project was supported by an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship awarded in 2005. A series of institutional reorganisations, and the creation in July 2010 of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW), lead to the China Heritage Project being relocated to CIW in the ANU’s College of Asia & the Pacific. Geremie R. Barmé was founding director of CIW. Shortly after relinquishing his role in the Centre he retired from formal academic life in November 2015. He is an Emeritus Professor at The Austalian National University.

We are profoundly grateful to our colleague Jude Shanahan for the design work, suggestions and crucial contributions to the creation and maintenance of China Heritage Quarterly from its beginnings in 2005 until 2010. From early 2010, Daniel Sanderson, then a doctoral candidate in the ANU School of History, Language and Culture, was in charge of the design and innovations at the journal, and we would like to acknowledge his role and contribution as the Associate Editor of China Heritage Quarterly until 2012.

China Heritage Annual was designed by Callum Smith, with the Editor.

Geremie R. Barmé