Cultural Landscapes and Asia: Reconciling International and Southeast Asian Regional Values

Historic(al) landscapes with their heritage values—cultural landscapes—have reached key status in the field of cultural heritage conservation and planning. International recognition of cultural landscapes was extended in 1992 to World Heritage prominence with the establishment of three categories of cultural landscapes of outstanding universal value. The term ‘cultural landscape’ is now widely circulated internationally, although its use in South-eastern and Eastern Asia (hereafter SE and E Asia) presents problems. Notwithstanding this, cultural landscapes that have evolved in SE and E Asia reflect beautifully the interaction between people and their environment not simply as a tangible cultural product but as a result of cultural process with associated intangible values. In this way, and like their Western counterparts, they are part of a dynamic “process by which identities are formed’’,Footnote1 and also reflect organising philosophies and perspectives of different cultures imbued with value systems, traditional knowledge systems and abstract frameworks.Footnote2 The viewpoint of this paper is that of the need to draw attention to the cultural landscapes of SE and E Asia, to look closely at regional values and their inextricable connection to the continuing process of landscape creation, and finally to place SE and E Asian cultural landscapes in an international context.