Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Starter: Into a World Heritage City
- 1 A Cityscape below the Winds
- 2 Heritage Affairs: Mouse-Deer, White Elephants, and Watchdogs
- 3 UNESCO and the City
- 4 Melakan Row Houses from the Ground Up
- 5 Divide and Brand: Public Space, Politics, and Tourism
- 6 A Melakan Ancestral Village Beyond World Heritage
- 7 Epilogue of a Blessing and a Curse
- Bibliography
- Index
Starter: Into a World Heritage City
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Starter: Into a World Heritage City
- 1 A Cityscape below the Winds
- 2 Heritage Affairs: Mouse-Deer, White Elephants, and Watchdogs
- 3 UNESCO and the City
- 4 Melakan Row Houses from the Ground Up
- 5 Divide and Brand: Public Space, Politics, and Tourism
- 6 A Melakan Ancestral Village Beyond World Heritage
- 7 Epilogue of a Blessing and a Curse
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
You have to wait until night falls, and then walk silently along the walls, climb up one of the hills and sit quietly on the old stones, and you will hear it. It is almost a whisper, like the breeze, but you hear it all the same: the voice of history. Malacca is like that: full of dead. And the dead whisper. They whisper in Chinese, in Portuguese, in Dutch, in Malay, in English, some even in Italian, others in languages no one speaks anymore. But it hardly matters: the stories told by the dead of Malacca no longer interest anyone.
Malacca, on the west coast of Malaysia, is a city freighted with the past, soaked in blood and sown with bones. It is an extraordinary city where half the world's races have met, fought, loved and reproduced; where different religions have come together, tolerated each other and integrated; where the interest of great empires have struggled for primacy; and where today modernity and progress are pitilessly suffocating all diversity, all conflict, in torrents of cement, to create that bland uniformity in which the majority seem to feel at home.
– Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East (2002)The World Heritage site of Melaka consists of a core area, the World Heritage property, of 45.3 hectares in the historic city centre, surrounded by a buffer zone of 242.8 hectares. When the Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani visited Malaysia in the early 1990s, Melaka was not yet included in the prestigious World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). At that time, however, the historical charm of its downtown and the ongoing urbanization changing its surroundings were perhaps anticipating its future international fame in the tourism industry. In this book, I explore the social and cultural processes of heritage designations in this Malaysian city with a particular focus on the effects of the World Heritage recognition obtained in 2008. Terzani was probably writing about one of the two hills that extends above what is today Melaka's World Heritage site. One is Bukit Cina (‘Chinese Hill’), which is located in the buffer zone – the area that adds a further layer of protection to the World Heritage property.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- World Heritage and Urban Politics in Melaka, MalaysiaA Cityscape below the Winds, pp. 13 - 22Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021