From “Daobei” to “Daming Palace”: Toponymic Politics and the Reconstruction of Place Genealogy in Heritage-Making

Amid urban renewal and heritage-making in the “Global East,” toponyms are not neutral markers but media through which state power rewrites spatial genealogies. This article examines how the construction of the Daming Palace National Heritage Park in Xi’an contested the spatial memory of “Daobei,” a railway-migrant enclave formed by Henan refugees after 1934, and how naming reorganized its historical layers. Combining critical toponymy with Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) theory, the study analyzes the Xincheng District Gazetteer, planning and fiscal documents, press reports and a published oral-history collection and compares the micro-toponyms recorded in 1993 with the post-2010 landscape. Three findings emerge. First, official discourse redefined Daobei as “urban negative assets” awaiting clearance. Second, “linguistic disinfection” operated through two mechanisms: the erasure of the vernacular micro-toponymic layer (villages, alleys and workers’ compounds) together with its referents, and the monumental re-signification of ruin-derived names such as Hanyuan, ordinary local names since the 1950s. Third, rehousing without symbolic recognition produced cultural displacement and a “toponymic aphasia” among returnees, mitigated only by informal memory tactics. The article concludes that heritage governance should institutionalize toponymic pluralism and proposes concrete measures for recognizing migrant and industrial histories in heritage landscapes.