Excavating a History Already Found

A carved stone discovered in Qinghai Province in 2020 drew wide attention in June 2025 when a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences proposed that it was an inscription from the reign of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang (r. 221–210 BCE), a claim that seemed to extend Qin influence to the Tibetan Plateau. Scholars quickly questioned the claim, citing textual and epigraphic inconsistencies and implausible geography. Their critiques prompted academic debate and even public controversy. In September 2025, the National Cultural Heritage Administration stepped in to clarify the situation and affirmed the rock carving’s dating and authenticity (Xinhua 2025). The episode illustrates both intense public engagement with archaeology in China and its entanglement with questions of political authority and national history.

The drama in Qinghai strikes at a broader shift I trace in this essay: the emergence in China of an archaeological state that translates excavated material into claims of civilisational continuity, in which curated materiality stands in for contestable historical narrative. In China, archaeology and material culture are now among the principal media through which the state imagines, curates, and displays its authority. Places such as Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Warriors (discovered in 1974, opened in 1979), exemplify this trend.

Yet Xi’an is hardly unique: almost every major city hosts or is planning a museum devoted to cultural relics, while many local governments are piloting museums (including digital ones) in rural areas. In Luoyang, Henan Province, the Erlitou Site Museum, opened in 2019, presents what it frames as the supposed remains of the Xia Dynasty (c. 1900 BCE), China’s first polity in traditional historiography. Yangzhou’s Museum of the Tomb of Emperor Yang of Sui (r. 604–18 CE), opened in 2024 (Figure 1), celebrates the Sui Dynasty’s (581–618 CE) brief reign by way of an unearthed royal tomb. By 2024, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) recorded 7,046 registered museums—a sevenfold increase from 1990 and more than double the 2012 total (China Museum Think Tank 2025). While exclusively archaeological museums make up only about 3 per cent of registered museums, site data indicate that perhaps more than 3,000 museums display excavated artefacts or replicas, accounting for about half of all museums (Figure 2). With registrations rising annually, China in 2024 had roughly one museum per 200,000 residents, putting the country on a trajectory towards—though still some distance from—average European per capita rates.

Since the 1970s, building on Qing (1636–1912) and Republican (1912–49) precedents, China has developed a large, sophisticated bureaucracy around the protection and display of cultural relics. This elevation of archaeology has accelerated under President Xi Jinping (2012–present), who is said to have a strong personal interest in the field and has called for the discipline to serve the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ (SCIO 2021).

I call this ensemble of practices the PRC’s ‘archaeological state’: a fragmented bureaucracy that routinises excavation, registration, and display—mobilising archaeology as both discipline and method—so that material culture becomes a medium of narration, governance, and legitimation. Its rise is best explained not exclusively by nationalism but by an administrative incentive structure that includes performance targets, tourism ratings, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and domestic benchmarks, training and education, and fiscal strategies that render cultural relics as productive assets for local authorities. This bureaucratic logic tends to privilege catalogable, exhibitable objects; because funding, awards, and performance metrics reward visibility, institutional resources for documenting contested or lived histories are more limited. Yet, this bureaucracy is not monolithic: provincial and municipal officials translate national narratives of civilisation and unity into regional projects that promote tourism, investment, and local identity, and archaeologists and curators sometimes quietly stretch these narratives. The result is a complementary administrative ecology in which central claims to continuity depend on locally produced fragments of the past.

This essay draws on Chinese Government documents, newspapers, museum visits, and curator interviews (2023–25), situating these practices within debates about bureaucracy, heritage, and historical memory. My aim is not to judge the official elevation of archaeological curation, but to consider its implications for historical understanding. As these state-sponsored narratives gain prominence, what becomes of the historian’s craft? I understand history as a discipline grounded in contestation and critical engagement with primary sources—a process that exists in tension with the seamless narratives of state archaeology. While many states, such as Israel and India, use archaeology to underwrite national identity (Abu El-Haj 2001; Avikunthak 2021), China offers a uniquely well-documented case for examining how an expanding archaeological imagination reshapes narrative authority.

Imperial and Republican Antecedents

China’s modern archaeological foundations originated in the ritual bureaucracy of the Qing, when wenwu 文物 (‘material embodiments of culture and order’; today, ‘cultural relics’) were integral to the ceremonial order but not yet a distinct domain of governance. The study and collection of antiquities served moral governance: through exemplary forms of the past, officials sought to restore ethical coherence in the present (Smith 2013: 7).

The Board of Rites managed the registration of temples, altars, and steles according to li 礼 (‘ritual propriety’), treating ancient vessels and monuments as instruments of sacrifice and legitimacy. Alongside the Board of Works and the Hanlin and Imperial academies, imperial institutions pursued ritual and educational continuity with antiquity. Though individual scholars and collectors advanced epigraphy (金石学), official concern lay not in reconstructing the ancient past but in performing a classically received one.

A shift came in the early Republic (1912–1930s), when wenwu became an administrative and scientific category of ‘cultural relics’. The Ministry of Education established antiquities offices, culminating in the Central Committee for the Preservation of Antiquities (1928) and the 1930 Law for the Preservation of Antiquities. Field archaeology, institutionalised through Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology, and discoveries at Zhoukoudian such as Peking Man linked modern science to national identity (Schmalzer 2008). Objects once valued for ritual and ethical continuity now served as scientific evidence of a distinct, ancient civilisation.

Mobilising the People’s History in Mao’s China

Contrary to the common Western view of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) as an iconoclast hostile to antiquity, the PRC, founded in 1949, inherited and transformed a long institutional concern with the past. The new regime absorbed the Republican system of museums, antiquities offices, and scientific archaeology, redirecting them towards a revolutionary project grounded in historical materialism and dialectical narratives of class struggle adapted to China’s circumstances (Karl 2010: 52–53). The idea of a ‘New China’, later institutionalised as the PRC, expressed rupture yet depended on a historicisation of what had come before (Dirlik 1978: 180–228).

During the 1950s and 1960s, archaeology demonstrated Marxist historical stages. The Chinese Academy of Sciences established the Institute of Archaeology in 1950 to study the material culture of working people. Finds from excavations at Yinxu (the last Shang capital, c. 1300–1046 BCE) and Banpo (a Neolithic site, c. 5000–3000 BCE) were interpreted as evidence of class formation in an early Chinese ‘slave society’—an early stage of Marxist social development. Even surface relics such as the Taiping murals of Jiangnan were catalogued as traces of pre-revolutionary struggle and protected as symbols of proto-revolutionary movements.

The 1957 excavation of Ming Emperor Wanli’s tomb marked a turning point. Poor conservation and the rapid deterioration of its contents provoked controversy that reshaped policy for decades, establishing a principle of restraint towards imperial tombs.

But even amid the political upheaval of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the state’s archaeological infrastructure persisted as a current of historical imagination. The discoveries of the Western Han (206 BCE – 9 CE) tombs at Mawangdui (in 1971–74) and the Qin-era Terracotta Warriors (in 1974) marked the re-emergence of a state-sponsored archaeology that presaged the rehabilitation of a past once dismissed as feudal. These years also saw the first large-scale overseas exhibition of newly excavated archaeological finds organised by the People’s Republic of China: a travelling show that opened in Paris in May 1973 and reached the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in December 1974.

Reframing History and Heritage in the Reform Era

As China entered the late 1970s, the discourse of ‘reform’ reshaped, though did not replace, the revolutionary legacy of the Party-State. Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) and his successors continued to ground their authority in the revolution’s achievements but supplemented Marxist dialectical history with narratives of recovery, civilisation, and endurance. This evolving vision found institutional expression in the 2003 merger of the Museum of the Chinese Revolution (established in 1961) and the Museum of Chinese History, forming the National Museum of China in Beijing.

From the 1980s, three frameworks fused the Reform-era agenda with revolutionary memory and cultural heritage. The first was a sharpened focus on the ‘Century of Humiliation’, reframing foreign invasion and national suffering from the Opium Wars to 1949 as moral lessons and sources of renewal. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall (opened in 1985) and the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park (opened in 1988) turned sites of atrocity into monuments of endurance. Together with refurbished revolutionary ‘Red History’ sites such as Yan’an, these commemorative landscapes narrated China’s descent into humiliation and recovery through communist leadership (Vickers 2007; Matten 2012).

The second framework sought international recognition, especially through UNESCO (Maags 2023). Beginning with Mount Tai in 1987, significant Chinese historical sites were inscribed on the World Heritage List (Shepherd 2009). By the close of 2025, China boasted 60 such sites—second globally only to Italy. This international logic found a domestic counterpart in the national ‘A-rating’ system for tourist attractions, introduced by the government in 1999. At present, more than 300 sites across China hold the top-tier AAAAA rating, with many more ranked below.

Archaeology itself formed the third framework. Building on Mao-era excavation and classification, it offered Reform-era China a proud vision of uninterrupted civilisational depth. At the close of his career, Xia Nai 夏鼐 (1910–85), China’s most internationally recognised twentieth-century archaeologist and former director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, declared that archaeology’s central task was ‘to trace the origins of Chinese civilisation’, defining it as a discipline of national destiny (Xia 1985). After the Cultural Revolution’s widespread destruction of antiquities, the search for new ones underground became a logical, if ironic, response.

In the 1980s and 1990s, major excavations gave material form to this vision. The bronzes unearthed at Sanxingdui in 1986 revealed a previously unknown Bronze Age civilisation (c. 1700–1150 BCE) that could be claimed as both local and Chinese, while the nearby Jinsha site, flourishing between about 1200 and 650 BCE and discovered in 2001, reinforced the idea of regional diversity within a shared civilisational arc. Together, such discoveries suggested that China’s origins were multiple, simultaneous, and geographically distributed: a unity built from diversity (Li 2013: 86–88). Archaeology thus helped shift China’s self-image from revolutionary project to civilisational narrative, linking ‘national rejuvenation’ to the material rediscovery of deep antiquity.

Together, these frameworks helped the government navigate notions of past, present, and future during the 1980s and 1990s. Newly opened ‘Century of Humiliation’ museums and refurbished revolutionary sites explained the modern era’s suffering and justified the revolution, offering a narrative that made sense of the recent past. Conferral of heritage status through international and domestic rankings placed Chinese landmarks on the global map, bolstered a growing domestic tourism industry, and anchored elements of the nation’s cultural inheritance that could be unambiguously celebrated in the present. Archaeology, meanwhile, promised a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new material: an investment that could yield prestige, money, and legitimacy. Digging into the deep past became a way of shaping the nation’s future.

Archaeology and Cultural Relics in the Xi Jinping Era

Under Xi Jinping’s leadership since 2012, the state bureaucracy has evolved into a fully institutionalised regime of cultural governance, under which archaeology, heritage administration, and urban development operate as instruments of state messaging (Perry 2013; Tseng and Tsai 2025). New institutions such as the China Archaeological Museum (opened in 2023) invoke the official claim that China is the world’s only continuous civilisation from antiquity.

Local officials have sought to align the built landscape of contemporary China with the imagined brilliance of what lies beneath the soil. Temples to the sage kings of antiquity have been restored and new monumental complexes have been erected in their honour (McNeal 2015). In Xi’an, visitors encounter Tang (618–907 CE) themed districts such as the Great Tang All Day Mall (Figure 3), developed from 2002 and reopened as a pedestrian street in 2018. Its avenues and facades evoke the splendour of Chang’an at its height. Nearby, the Anren Ward Archaeological Exhibition Hall, opened in 2023 above an active excavation, lets visitors peer through glass floors at the buried city. The Qin and Han Dynasties Hall of the Shaanxi History Museum, opened in 2024, projects self-sufficiency, centralised power, and cultural continuity onto ancient history, aligning them with themes of President Xi’s governance. Echoing broader schemes such as the Belt and Road Initiative (since 2013) and the Global Civilisation Initiative (since 2023), Xi’an’s identity as a Silk Road hub frames these projects as a return to a normative past. Archaeological rediscovery thus grounds a rhetoric of civilisational continuity and international exchange.

This curatorial logic extends to Qing palace museums in Beijing and Shenyang, where labels emphasise dynastic continuity, multiethnic harmony, and national unity’s deep roots. Yet, despite the crowds these museums attract, the PRC has never released an official History of the Qing (清史), even after decades of work to revise the Draft History of the Qing compiled in the 1920s. This absence exposes a deeper tension between acknowledging the dynasty’s imperial, Manchu-centred nature and sustaining a narrative of the Qing as the formative stage of a unified, multiethnic Chinese nation-state. Where textual history remains unsettled, material evidence provides a more flexible resource. In 2021, not long before authorities reportedly rejected a completed draft of the new ‘History of the Qing’—a project first approved in 2002—the government instructed Beijing’s municipal authorities to expand Ming and Qing archaeological programs, integrating the capital directly into the national search for antiquities (Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage 2021).

Beyond Beijing, development and heritage politics converge as cities reinvent themselves through selectively reconstructed ‘golden ages’, producing and circulating highly prized images of success for both the locality and the officials who govern it (Sorace 2017: 105). Many have launched initiatives aligned with their perceived eras of civilisational height—for example, Kaifeng and Hangzhou with the Song (960–1279 CE), Xi’an with the Qin, Han, and Tang, and Datong with the Ming (1368–1644 CE), alongside a nod to the Northern Wei (386–535 CE). These projects offer a narrative of a brilliant and enduring civilisation that flattens historical periodisation and allows each place to claim its own moment of golden antiquity. They also link archaeology to urban political economies by shaping land-use strategies, promoting tourism, and stimulating intermunicipal competition.

This archaeological turn has even extended into nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, with the government launching another program (2018–22) to protect and make use of ‘revolutionary cultural relics’ (革命文物) dating from the Opium Wars, the Xinhai Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and the War of Resistance Against Japan (General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council General Office 2018). Some of the more than 490,000 ‘movable’ objects classified under this category include swords used by Taiping fighters, bows used by Tibetans against the British Expeditionary Force of 1904–05, and a list of American-made goods subject to boycott during the 1905 campaign protesting discrimination against Chinese. By registering as many objects as possible—including photographs, rifles, grenades, maps, armbands, letters, notebooks, badges, hats, uniforms, belts, and jewellery—authorities have found an ideal means of creating a mountain of tangible evidence for the authorised past that gives Marxist historical ‘materialism’ a distinctly literal twist.

The directive mentioned above anticipated yet another initiative: the Fourth National Census of Cultural Relics, launched in 2023. China had previously conducted three such surveys: the first in the 1950s, shortly after the PRC’s founding; the second in 1981, following the Cultural Revolution; and the third in 2007, before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Through these nationwide censuses, the government has encouraged officials to locate, identify, and register antiquities (Office of the Leading Group for the Fourth National Cultural Relics Census 2024). The number of registered cultural relics, categorised as either movable or immovable, rose sharply in anticipation and in the wake of this new census. ‘Movable revolutionary cultural relics’, for example, increased from more than 1 million in 2023 to 1.5 million in 2025 (NCHA 2023; Zhou 2025).

While evidence of promotion based solely on cultural relic work is limited, relic protection is integrated into the performance evaluation system for local cadres, shaping incentives through compliance metrics and disciplinary risk. Successful registration, preservation, and utilisation of wenwu contribute to ‘spiritual civilisation’ (精神文明) and compliance metrics, whereas negligence can incur significant demerits. This dynamic was illustrated in 2025 by an internal party investigation in Hubei Province, which censured cadres in the Xiangyang Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism for insufficient rigour in registering ‘revolutionary cultural relics’. Following intervention by a dedicated party leadership group, 129 ‘immovable cultural relics’ in Xiangyang, a former industrial hub of the Third Front (c. 1964–80), were added to the provincial registry (Chen 2025). Beyond party discipline, officials face growing external judicial pressure. Prosecutors are increasingly filing public interest lawsuits against derelict culture and tourism bureaus—for instance, authorities in Shaanxi, Shandong, and Guizhou have been sued for failing to protect World War II sites despite formal notices. This trend reflects a concerted national effort: from 2023 to mid-2025, procuratorates handled 2,243 public interest cases concerning cultural relics, revolutionary sites, and the honour of heroes and martyrs, averaging about 2.5 such cases a day (Supreme People’s Procuratorate 2025).

In isolation, these cases highlight how the official designation of a cultural relic activates legal mechanisms for its preservation. Taken together, they show that the continued development of China’s ‘archaeological state’ since 2012 stems less from ideological nationalism alone than from a bureaucratic incentive structure that favours cultural relic registration and rewards the financial, educational, and tourism benefits that relics bring to local governments. Bureaucratic actions both sustain and respond to nationalist sentiment, rather than create it ex nihilo.

Those incentives coincide with the revival of ‘traditional culture’ and the state’s promotion of ‘national learning’ (国学), recasting cultural consumption as patriotic duty. Archaeological exhibitions, historical theme parks, and popular television series such as National Treasure (国家宝藏; since 2017) and If National Treasures Could Talk (如果国宝会说话; since 2018) extend the museum into the home, blending pedagogy with entertainment. On social media platforms such as Douyin and RedNote, viewers can experience these museums and exhibitions from their phones. The livestream appraiser ‘Listening to the Springs, Admiring Antiquities’ (听泉赏宝), whose online following nears 37 million, exemplifies this merging of entertainment, heritage, and commerce, transforming artefact appreciation into a participatory ritual of national pride. Archaeology merges with consumer culture, promising aesthetic pleasure, moral uplift, and patriotic sentiment in a single visual encounter.

The same online conduits also give rise to Cold War–inflected conspiracy theories. Narratives of civilisational continuity have coincided with the popular spread (since 2013) in China of the ‘Western pseudo-history theory’ (西方伪史论), which originated in late Soviet Russia and holds that many, if not most, Greek and Roman antiquities are Renaissance or modern fabrications (Tseng and Tsai 2025). Although never officially endorsed and subject to online censorship as of 2025, the theory’s claims represent a logical extension of the official narrative: if China alone has endured unbroken since antiquity, the ancient pasts of others must, by comparison, be suspect or inauthentic. The authority that archaeological spectacle carries in public culture amplifies this suspicion.

Even allowing for such theories, archaeology remains relatively safe political capital: disputes tend to focus on authenticity rather than interpretation, as the Qinghai rock carving controversy shows. Once state authorities authenticate an object, it is readily merged into the authorised past. Consider, for instance, that many of China’s modern borders are a legacy of the Qing Empire’s eighteenth-century territorial expansions. Yet, if a newly discovered Qin-era inscription, allegedly more than 2,000 years old, can be invoked to demonstrate ancient influence over distant frontiers, there is less need to emphasise the importance of the Manchu conquest (Millward 2024). Neat archaeology, unlike messy history, seldom disappoints.

The Promise and Peril of China’s Archaeological Turn

China’s current turn towards archaeological curation favours material continuity through an impressive supply of uncontested heritage, rather than historical critique with its plural memories, interpretative risks, and political sensitivities. Yet, beneath this surface lie the discontinuities of demolition, restricted archives, and contested interpretations across online and diasporic publics. The final sections of this essay consider what these tensions might mean for China’s future.

The PRC’s embrace of archaeology has clear strengths. It renders the past tangible through material culture, extending heritage beyond elite texts into popular experience. In this respect it builds on Mao-era traditions of museum pedagogy (Ho 2018). Museums are technically sophisticated and visually engaging, with reconstructions and digital displays that make ancient life appear immediate. Some even preserve items such as ladders once used by tomb looters (Figure 4). The resulting ‘museum boom’ has professionalised the sector: curators, architects, and designers now circulate among provinces as cities compete for visitors and AAAAA ratings (Zhang and Courty 2021). This competition has raised exhibition standards and encouraged experimentation with layout and narrative design. Low admission fees and exemptions for students and older visitors make museums accessible civic spaces, combining leisure, education, and a shared sense of national belonging.

The archaeological turn has also produced advances in research and preservation, elevating the discipline’s prestige relative to other fields. Chinese archaeologists have uncovered early connections among the regions that now constitute China and its neighbours and led collaborations across Central and Southeast Asia. The government has reinforced this expertise through new academic programs: a Cultural Heritage major (in 2016) and an Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection major (in 2021), both offered alongside archaeology at more than 20 universities. Zhejiang University, one of China’s top institutions, introduced an archaeology undergraduate program in 2023 to meet growing demand (Li and Du 2023).

For all these achievements, the PRC’s claim to archaeological authority masks a long and complex history of official cultural relic management. Legal definitions of cultural relic ownership and sale evolved over time, culminating in a national framework only in 1982. Early regulations in 1950 banned the export of ‘precious cultural relics’ (珍贵文物) and required others to pass through designated customs ports and expert committees. Thereafter, the state deepened its role in the global antiquities market, in 1960 prohibiting the export of artefacts made before 1795 and, in 1974, permitting limited sales of general cultural relics through state-managed stores (Chen 2020).

In practice, however, the distinction between general and precious cultural relics proved difficult to enforce, since many items lacked reliable dating or provenance. As a result, some valuable artefacts likely left the country through these channels. According to the Chief Research Fellow of the China Cultural Relics Exchange Centre, Chen Yun, between 1981 and 1985, millions of artefacts were appraised for export, 80 per cent through foreign trade networks. After reallocations in 1978–79 and 1986–89, roughly 390,000 significant objects entered domestic museum collections, including the National Museum of China (Chen 2019).

At the same time, illicit excavation and smuggling expanded, driven by market demand and weak border controls. Many artefacts moved through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, with seizures in the 1980s and 1990s revealing networks linking looters and dealers. These twin economies of official export and underground trade blurred the boundary between protection and commerce, suggesting that heritage management was entangled with the circulation of artefacts and the production of value.

Today, the PRC presents itself as the guardian and restorer of national heritage through new museums, high-profile repatriations, and the China Stolen or Lost Cultural Relics Information Publishing Platform, which posts images and metadata to aid recovery. Enforcement remains active: authorities solved more than 900 cases and recovered more than 16,000 artefacts in 2024 (Ministry of Public Security 2025). Yet, this contemporary image of government stewardship rests on a chapter of state-managed disposals and export programs during the second half of the twentieth century, designed both to earn foreign exchange and to safeguard key antiquities.

The government’s shifting position on cultural relic protection and sale parallels its evolving management of the authorised past. Policies that incentivise visibility for certain eras, events, and objects contribute to the relative invisibility of other histories, whether through institutional omission, censorship, or lack of public resonance (Trouillot 1995; Wang 2004). The same logic extends to archives, where restricted access and selective declassification narrow the evidentiary base from which alternative histories might emerge. The result is a striking contrast: curated pasts, represented through material objects, are unambiguously celebrated, while other histories remain unrepresented and unspoken. In truth, China’s modern landscape, urban and rural, is filled with history in the form of lived spaces that are overlooked or slated for demolition, from fading Cultural Revolution murals of the 1960s and 1970s to the timeworn housing that accommodated the workers who enforced family planning policies (1980–2015) in the 1980s and 1990s (Figure 5).

These neglected spaces embody neglected pasts, including the One-Child Policy. As Gail Hershatter (2004: 1028–29) observes, women’s labour and reproductive roles have long been central to the Chinese State’s projects of modernisation and social transformation. The same selective logic shapes the China National Museum of Women and Children, opened in 2010, whose exhibits trace women’s contributions from antiquity to the present through oracle-bone inscriptions, Han bronze mirrors, and portraits of heroines such as Miao Boying 缪伯英 (1899–1929) and Song Qingling 宋庆龄 (1893–1981). Absent, however, are more controversial twentieth-century figures—notably, Jiang Qing 江青 (1914–91). Operating within the archaeological state’s framework, the museum presents women as symbols of national virtue rather than as subjects of complex lived experience (Dai 2007), leaving controversial policies that most directly shaped their lives, such as the One-Child Policy, outside the frame of remembrance.

The growing number of registered ‘revolutionary cultural relics’ has empowered museums dedicated to modern events, though certain histories remain easier to commemorate than others. Maoist-era industrial sites such as the steelworks at Anshan (Ansteel Museum, established in 2014; Hirata 2024: 2) are easier to commemorate than agricultural ones, since they offer narratives of success that sidestep the Great Leap Forward’s grain crises and the more charged Cultural Revolution. Even apparent exceptions such as Dazhai commune in Shanxi Province—once the model of Maoist self-reliance in agriculture, designated a national key protected site in 2013, and, in a further act of institutional commemoration, having its exhibition hall granted separate provincial-level protection in 2021—continue a longer pattern of self-display and state commemoration that began in the early 1960s.

The public knows that the modern history chapters of textbooks and museum exhibits leave much unsaid. Views differ: many people continue to support the government or regard such omissions with indifference. Most people, after all, rarely dwell on history outside anniversaries, crises, or entertainment; everyday life in most parts of the world leaves little space for sustained reflection on the past. Yet, in China, absence itself generates forms of remembrance that state institutions cannot fully contain, through unofficial channels, private collections, and family stories. At times, popular memory shapes official narratives (Denton 2014: 14). The scale and resonance of defining events in China make complete social amnesia impossible (Connerton 1989), and it remains uncertain which ghosts from the past will one day return to haunt the leaders of the future.

Where Artefacts Await History

How China came to curate rather than contest its past reveals much about its political transformation out of a century defined by revolution and reform. At critical moments during the twentieth century, history was not an abstraction but a living, contested, and often violent experience (Cohen 1997). Today, by elevating an idealised premodern unity and folding the revolutionary decades into that same civilisational continuum, the PRC sets a benchmark that the present can neither easily inhabit nor openly debate.

Parts of this transition recall earlier dynastic patterns, particularly the idealisation of distant pasts. Since the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE), Chinese regimes have repeatedly sought renewal through imagined returns to moral or civilisational peaks, only to be criticised later by scholars at the margins of power. Like its dynastic predecessors, the current era cannot yet be fully historicised in an official way; that task will likely be undertaken by whatever successor follows.

What distinguishes the present from earlier moments is the scale of the bureaucracy and its public sector extensions through which this search for continuity unfolds. As of 2023, more than 181,000 people worked across China’s network of heritage bureaus, museums, and archaeological institutions (Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2024)—a 44.6 per cent increase since 2012 (Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2018). Most are employed in public museums, conservation centres, and research institutes, with a smaller but still significant minority serving as civil servants in cultural relics bureaus or site administrations. The institutionalisation of heritage as a career has turned administrative growth into a visible marker of the continuity it seeks to project. Today, the curation of history is bound up as much with jobs as with the past itself.

The bureaucratic success of the archaeological state nevertheless fails to capture a complete history. Politically effective as this model is, it leaves unresolved problems of lived memory, raising the question of whether curated display and its digital extensions can continue absorbing more troubling recollections. Grief, hardship, loss, complicity, and other experiences that resist measurement fall outside what can be catalogued for posterity. As museums proliferate, they may open cracks through which alternative memories and regional narratives surface, contributing to a decentralisation of official history (Denton 2014: 13–14). If faced with financial or administrative pressures, heritage institutions may find themselves drawn into practices that echo earlier episodes in which the line between protection and commercial circulation again proved difficult to sustain. Future research might examine whether cultural relic registration correlates with official career advancement, analyse artefact repatriation as an input into domestic narratives, and conduct visitor ethnographies to see how museumisation reshapes local memories.

On the other hand, the existence of alternative memories outside official channels may stabilise the archaeological state rather than threaten it. Because museums present compelling narratives, contestations in families, online forums, and diasporic publics tend to appear peripheral or anecdotal rather than evidentiary. The state’s material archive does not rely on silencing these memories; rather, its institutional weight and the persuasive authority of objects often allow it to absorb or marginalise such memories in public forums.

Whether this equilibrium evolves remains uncertain. The infrastructure of museums, the incentives for cultural relic registration, and careers in heritage are enduring features of China’s bureaucratic landscape. Future tensions may emerge not through policy or protest, but through the accumulation of details that resist classification: records of villages displaced by hydrological projects that no museum can exhibit, workers’ housing from the height of the family planning drive that the census cannot categorise, or stories that refuse to conform to the artefacts they are meant to explain. History may return not as argument but as friction between what can be enumerated and what stubbornly remains lived. And through that friction, the past might become more than the sum of its ruins.

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