Extended Abstracts

Compiled and edited by Neville Agnew and Martha Demas; 2014

Download PDF

Find in WorldCat









In May 2013 the Getty Conservation Institute, the Dunhuang Academy, and ICOMOS China co-organized a three-day international colloquium of invited professionals at the Mogao Grottoes (near Dunhuang in Gansu Province) to discuss visitor management and carrying capacity at heritage sites in China.

This compilation consists of extended abstracts of presentations and photographs. For the non-Chinese audience in particular, the compilation provides a rare window onto the emerging trends in China to deal with issues of preserving cultural heritage in the face of mass tourism.

Case studies were presented of World Heritage sites in China, including the Forbidden City, the Potala Palace, the Cultural Landscape of West Lake, Hangzhou, Longmen Grottoes, and the Classical Gardens at Suzhou, as well as international examples of visitor management at Angkor in Cambodia, Petra in Jordan, Port Arthur in Tasmania, and Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

China's domestic and international tourism, the largest in the world, has reached unsustainable levels at many of its World Heritage sites, including the Mogao Grottoes, where the GCI and the Dunhuang Academy have undertaken a visitor capacity study as part of a comprehensive plan to address pressures of mass tourism to the Grottoes.

It was in the context of visitor management challenges at Mogao and with a view to increasing awareness in China of methods and approaches to managing visitors that the colloquium was conceived.

How to Cite this Work:
Agnew, Neville, and Martha Demas, eds. 2014. Extended Abstracts of the International Colloquium: Visitor Management and Carrying Capacity at World Heritage Sites in China, 17-19 May 2013, Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute. http://hdl.handle.net/10020/gci_pubs/visitor_management