Assembling legitimacy, translating Buddhism: Lingshan–Nianhua Bay and destination formation in contemporary China

This article examines how Lingshan–Nianhua Bay in Wuxi (无锡) became a powerful tourism formation in contemporary China through the sequential assembly and translation of Buddhist-coded authority rather than simple religious commodification. It first shows how a late-20th-century sacred-coded landscape, built around a historical temple site but lacking the continuous pilgrimage status of canonical Buddhist mountains, acquired and renewed public credibility through symbolic naming, monumentality, forum diplomacy, United Nations-framed Buddhist event-making, transregional Buddhist authority, expert validation, 5A recognition and repeated embodied visitation. It then traces how this authority was recoded, under regulations restricting overt religious commercialisation, into tourism infrastructure spanning leisure, hospitality, philanthropy, planning expertise and project replication. Drawing on long-term observation, recorded conversations, fieldnotes and policy, corporate, charitable and media documents, the article argues that destination-making in contemporary China depends on the culturally governed translation of religious authority into politically admissible and economically extensible forms.