Let fragments speak for themselves: vernacular heritage, emptiness and Confucian discourse of narrating the past

China has developed, over thousands of years, a unique way of representing, valuing and using the past. However, it has silenced, ignored and even denied many aspects of this tradition when dealing with its own heritage in recent decades. This paper seeks to explore a non-western approach to the meaning-making of Chinese heritage by presenting a case of a grassroots project to record and make meanings of heritage in an ordinary village in China. Specifically, it will demonstrate how the Confucian discourse of narrating the past could be appropriated and deployed in Chinese heritage practice to interweave fragments of the past and present by means of holistically embracing the narrative of villagers’ lives in a subtle, transparent and critical way. By doing so, a locally situated way of managing heritage is sought in order to transcend the boundaries of the tangible and intangible heritage categories and to achieve a morally and spiritually enriched heritage experience.