Abstract Yibin, with its history of brewing spanning more than four millennia, is renowned worldwide as the epicentre of Chinese liquor production. However, with the encroachment of the urbanisation wave, traditional brewing industrial buildings, which carry cultural memory, are gradually disappearing. This study provides a review of the current status and trends regarding brewing industry architectural heritage, both domestically and internationally; adopts an interdisciplinary approach that includes archaeology; and employs field survey methods to identify 62 potential liquor-brewing industrial heritage samples from the city of Yibin. The issues revealed include urban spatial restructuring and land use pressure, a technical gap in conservation practices, typological and morphological homogenisation, an underrecognition of the value of heritage, and a regulatory lag in heritage designation and protection. This study formulates a value-based framework for interpreting Baijiu industrial architectural heritage and outlines preliminary implications for planning control, conservation practices, typological documentation, and the refinement of assessment and regulatory instruments. The results provide a structured analysis of the conservation challenges Yibin’s brewing industry building stock is facing and offer a reference for the protection of other locally specific forms of industrial architectural heritage in settings of rapid urbanisation.
Wang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.