Touched by the Past? Re-Articulating the Longxing Temple Sites as Community Heritage at Qingzhou County, China

Community heritage usually reveals bottom-up celebrations of multi-dimensions of social life, which negotiate meaning to certain places, sites, or even monuments under practices of heritage. In 1996, excavations and restorations of the Longxing Buddhist temple at Qingzhou County, hundreds of precious Buddhist statues, gained attention from the general public and all Buddhist communities. With the rebuild of the new Longxing Buddhist temple at Qingzhou County, actually motivated by Xia Jingshan, an eminent Buddhist figure painter, the religious and local community collaborated to express their voices in heritage discourse. A number of factors influence the reinterpretation of Longxing Temple sites: the desire to advocate Qingzhou County as an important city in ancient China, to depict Qingzhou County as having a rich cultural and religious diversity, and to attract tourists and religious communities to visit Qingzhou.