China is a nation that has a huge amount of old historical and cultural sites. That is one of the reasons why so many tourists every year travel to China. Since it joined the International Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1985, China has 38 world heritage sites to date; of these 27 are cultural heritage sites, 7 are natural heritage sites, and 4 are mixed cultural and natural sites, ranking third in the world. Ask your China Travel Agency if they have special tours to visit these sites. Since 2004, China has undertaken the first large-scale renovations on 6 world cultural heritage sites in Beijing – the Ming Tombs, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, and the “Peking Man” site at Zhoukoudian, all of which are planned for completion before 2008. On the other hand, China has a rich non-physical cultural heritage, with many of them registered on UNESCO’s list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Foreign visitors from all over the world are coming to China every year to visit those cultural and historical sites, the most visited of them being the Great Wall of China. China Hotels located around these sites are usually the most expensive so it is advised to choose hotels that are a little bit away (say 20 mins taxi ride) from the sites. The money saved on the price of the room per night will be much higher than all the taxi rides you will take daily to and from the sites.
More relics and masterpieces are being found by Chinese specialists year by year. As a matter of fact, Modern Chinese Archaeology was launched unofficially in 1921. That year, the Yangshao Village sites in Henan were first uncovered by Johan G. Andersson. The intellectual and political men of the 1920s contested the historicity of the legendary inventors of Chinese culture, such as Shennong, the divine farmer, and Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor. At the same time, scientific study of the prehistoric period was being sponsored by some Western archaeologists and paleoanthropologists. The establishment of the Academia Sinica (Chinese Academy of Sciences) in 1928 enabled Chinese students to study Chinese archaeology for themselves, but the eruption of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 made it difficult to pursue excavations. Some researchers found themselves, with their collections, in Taiwan after 1949 and that much archaeology practiced in the People’s Republic of China was reported within a Marxist framework further demonstrate archaeology’s links to politics. The gradual fall of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s meant the resumption of archaeological excavation operations and publication. A modernizing nation began to produce scholarship, increasingly informed by scientific analysis, in a quantity and quality proportionate with its size and its traditions of learning.
The Chinese Nation has nearly 400,000 known unmovable cultural relics above and underground on its territory. Since 1996, the State Council has listed 770 key historical and cultural sites under state protection, more than the total number of the past 40-odd years. The number of key historical and cultural sites under state protection is planned to reach 1,800 in 2015. China has listed more than 7,000 historical and cultural sites under provincial protection, and over 60,000 under municipal and prefectural protection. The national database for the information of cultural relics is to be completed by 2015.
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