Cultural Landscape Analysis of the Huashan Rock Art Area

Chen Bing

Guangxi University

Abstract: Huashan Rock Art (HRA) has increasingly drawn nationwide and even worldwide attention as scholars have completed and published multidisciplinary studies of the art, thus promoting a positive impact on the local tourism and economy. Through on-the-spot observations and in-depth interviews with local officials, farmers, and visiting tourists,this paper presents the cultural landscape of the HRA area from the perspectives of “place” and “space,” which have been little explored in previous studies of the HRA area. Presently, both the natural and cultural landscape of Huashan have been restructured by the local government and inscribed on the World Heritage List, and the problems of sustainable preservation of the rock art, balancing dynamic development with expanded tourism, and conserving the cultural heritage of the HRA are being addressed.

Keywords: Huashan Rock Art Area, cultural landscape, place, space

Introduction

For the Zhuang ethnic group, “Huashan” means “mountains with pictures.” Located in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape is considered to be one of the most important sites because of the unique pictographs on the cliffs along the Zuojiang River,which vividly depict the lives and works of the Luo Yue people, the predecessors of today"s Zhuang.Studies of the HRA area, and its cultural and social values, have received increased attention since the area was inscribed on the World Heritage List. A major, current focus on HRA is how to ensure the sustainability and preservation of the heritage site while developing and expanding cultural tourism.There are both opportunities and challenges in this issue, and widespread interest from various academic disciplines, governments at multiple levels, the local community, and the global population of cultural tourists has contributed to this study.

“Landscape” in this article is defined as “the surroundings filled with cultural meanings”(Crumley, 1994, p. 23). So, the term “landscape” emphasizes the projection of the objective“environment.” Landscape refers to the environment embedded with cultural significance(Yosho, 2014). Cultural landscapes are illustrative of the evolution of human settlements and societies and over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment, and of successive social, economic, and cultural forces, both external and internal (Fowler, 2003, p. 22). While attempting to explore the interactions between humans and their surroundings by studying the “cultural” medium between them (Kawai, 2016), the basic approaches of “place” and “space” have been applied in cultural anthropology. A triangle between the comprehensive concept of landscape and the two aspects “place” and “space” is drawn to “open the black box of landscape and bring its contents into view” (Hirsch ＆ O"Hanlon, 1995). Few previous studies have been conducted on the Huashan Rock Art from the perspectives of cultural landscapes. This study explores the cultural landscape of the HRA from the anthropological perspectives of “place” and“space.”

Figure 1: An aerial view of the Huashan Rock Paintings, photo by Zhu Qiuping

Literature Review

Rock art is a hot issue and has been studied by scholars and researchers from different perspectives for decades. Pictographs have been found on the mountains along the Zuojiang River, covering more than 800 square kilometers in Ningming county, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, which is the largest rock art group by scale in Southeast Asia,collectively known as the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art sites. Several relevant studies on the rock art have been systematically recorded (Qin. et al., 1987; Yang, 2012; Gao, 2013, 2016a,2016b, 2017; Tacon, 2016). As the HRA area is adjacent to Vietnam, 32 relevant studies from Vietnamese archives have provided a unique foreign perspective to the topic (Zhang,2016; He, 2017). Surveys and reviews regarding the Huashan Rock Art are numerous, some dating back to the 1950s which were conducted by members of rock art institutes such as the Museum of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in 1954. Other investigative groups led by the People"s Government of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and the Provincial Ethnic Affairs Commission in 1956 found seven new rock art sites along the lower reaches of the Ming River. An expert delegation consisting of historians, archaeologists and geologist organized by the Provincial Ethnic Affairs Commission in 1962 publishedCollections of Huashan Rock Art Paintingby the Guangxi Nationalities Publishing House. In 1985, 80 domestic experts organized by the People"s Government of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region made copies of all the rock paintings known to exist at the time. Qin Shengmin and Qin Cailuan publishedInvestigation and Research on Cliff Paintings in Guangxi Zuojiang Riverin 1987. The Department of Cultural Relics of Guangxi publishedGuangxi Zuojiang Rock Paintingin 1988.Proceedings of the Huashan Cultural Forumwere published in 2010. In 2014,36 experts from multiple research fields had a heated discussion during a Huashan Cliff Painting and Zhuang Culture Seminar held by the Guangxi Department of Culture (presently the Department of Culture and Tourism of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region) in 2014.These examples are only a small part of the large number of papers and works on the HRA that have been published and the enlightening results that have been achieved during the past four decades, which strengthened the theoretical support in applying for the world cultural heritage. Since the HRA cultural landscape in Guangxi became China"s latest World Heritage Site, declared by UNESCO on July 15, 2016, the subsequent expansion of literature in this area highlights the need for another review on the holistic approach to heritage values. The relevant studies on anthropogenic interpretations of the HRA could also be found in research which interprets the iconographic meanings of the HRA paintings (Pan, 2017), and which holds that squatting human figures are common in prehistoric rock art, globally. However,nowhere else have so many squatting human figures been displayed as in the Zuojiang area,with their arms stretched up at the elbows and legs semi-squatting, most with swords hanging at their waists or held in their hands, with dogs under their feet, and bronze drums engraved with frogs all around.

Figure 2: Squatting humans, dogs, drums, bells, swords, and daggers in a Huashan rock painting, photo by Zhu Qiuping

As for the study of the landscape from the perspectives of “space” and “place,” a research paper entitled “place and space: A Review of Landscape Anthropology Research,” written by Chen Zhao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Tokyo in 2017, which develops the topic of cultural anthropology and landscape architecture from three perspectives, focuses on how local people endow cultural meanings to their surrounding environment, and how people"s routine activities construct the landscape. The course description of “The Anthropology of Space and Landscape”given by Andreas Dafinger,①https://www.dafinger.net/Associate Professor, Department for Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University,Budapest, showed that this course opens and discusses the analytical toolbox available to the investigation of socially constructed space, exploring the development and the potential of spatial studies from a variety of perspectives: Psychological, sociological, linguistic, and anthropological models that ultimately challenge our own notions of “what goes without saying.” InLandscape of Peace, Eric Hirsch and Michael O"Hanlon made an effort to provide a comprehensive view and classification of the concept. In their bookThe Anthropology of Landscape(Hirsch ＆ O"Hanlon, 1995) they tried to formulate a uniform basis for landscape anthropology, and drew a triangle between the comprehensive concept of landscape and the two aspects “place” and “space.” In 1997, this book was reviewed by John C. McCall, and published inAmerican Ethnologist, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Aug. 1997), with the title “Review ofThe Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space.”

Clearly the HRA area has been studied by scholars for over 70 years since its discovery in the 1950s, and although abundant research achievements have been made, little attention has been given to the exploration and analysis of its cultural landscape from the cultural anthropological perspectives of “place” and “space.” To address this void, this study aims to contribute to this field by shedding additional light on the relevant, existing studies.

Methodology

The study of cultural landscapes emphasizes the analysis of panoramic views through observation and interviews. In terms of cultural background, relevant researchers must be non-judgmental and are not allowed to inject any personal beliefs or pre-existing cultural framework into the study, which means they must maintain a neutral and unbiased attitude while investigating and discovering the elements and characteristics regarding the unique symbolic systems of the research objects (Shi, 2010). Landscape anthropology research requires a considerable length of time (usually one to two years) in conducting the fieldwork needed to adequately observe and accurately record the information obtained from the research subjects. It also requires the proper and complete analysis of the data collected.Therefore, multiple qualitative methods were applied in this study including interviews that focused on the interviewees" thoughts regarding the historical relationships between preservation and development. Thoughts and feelings about the present and future plans for the HRA area were systematic and focused. These observations applied to my research can help other researchers understand the physical, social, and cultural contexts in which landscape is taken into consideration. For this study, my observations were guided by a predetermined observational protocol involving the coding and recording of observable behavior. Data collection involved interviews with the local officials and their colleagues, as well as the local villagers they introduced to me. The local Zhuang dialect was translated into mandarin for better understanding. Participants were first provided with the questionnaire and allowed sufficient time to familiarize themselves with the topic at hand and reflect on their personal experiences, beliefs, behaviors, roles, and identities when they talked about the HRA area. Then the interviews were scheduled, as interview data can both illustrate and illuminate questionnaire results and can “bring research study to life” (Dornyei ＆Taguchi, 2013, p. 56). During the interview process, the participants could refer to their questionnaire while the researchers drew from semi-structured interview techniques to allow the participants to elaborate on and clarify their answers. Voice-recording software was used,and the interviews were recorded for respondent validation and transcription purposes, which helped to gain a better understanding of the participants" point of view, and to fill any gaps and add detailed information about how the participants observed and perceived the HRA area.

Data of three separate field seasons (July 2017, 2018, 2019) were collected for this study.This paper adopts Hironao Kawai"s (2016) division of “theories on the construction of place”and “theories on the production of space,” in analyzing the cultural landscape and memories of the Huashan Rock Art Area inhabitants. Special attention was paid to the tensions between the government"s campaign in the landscape construction and the conservation of the space,to investigating the cultural memories of the local people to discover the “place” they constructed, and to elucidating the religious festival and the mythological live show of the construction.

“Place” and “Space” Perspectives of the HRA Area

“Place” indicates people"s daily lives, where the sense of belonging and social memories are constructed and shared through relations of kinship and community (Kawai, 2013).According to Eric Hirsch and Michael O"Hanlon (1995), “place” focuses on how local people endow cultural meanings onto their surrounding environment, and how people"s routine activities construct landscape. “Space” considers how academics, entrepreneurs,designers, and other main actors in cultural representations, express local culture, and how such representations influence the social production of space. Tilley, C. (1997) held that “place” is constructed by people"s experiences, feelings and thoughts, while “space”is a resource sphere created artificially for a particular purpose. For the Huashan Rock Art landscape, the “place” perspective focuses on the local people"s perception of the rock art site as sacred rather than mundane. Feeling blessed by their ancestors, the local people believe that the reddish human figure motifs engraved on the rock encourage them to work hard, plant rice, raise livestock and poultry, and produce brown sugar with ancient crafts,also to repair the Guanyin Temple and expand the temple"s festivals, social activities,during which community members can participate in blessings and entertainment, praying for the harvest and the eradication of disasters. These daily routine activities construct landscape. The “space” perspective considers how government officials, academics,entrepreneurs and designers who are the main actors in the cultural representation of the rock art area, were to express the local culture after being inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2016, and how their efforts in promoting cultural tourism can lead to the production of the landscape for social and economic development.

From the “Place” Perspective

From the “place” perspective, Laijiang village, under the jurisdiction of Yaoda village,Ningming county, the core area of the Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, which is only 500 meters from the second largest rock painting in the Zuojiang river valley, is taken as an example for landscape anthropology analysis. There are 73 households with 413 persons in this village. Among them, 93 percent are farmers (Ningming County Annals 2017). Laijing village is also the core hub of the waterway and land loop in the construction of the “Huashan Tourism Loop.” The waterway passes through the Laijing ancient wharf in the Mingjiang River, and the land road passes through the Zhulian-Yaoda grade three cement road at seven km intersection, with an advantageous geographical position and rich tourism resources for further development. These include the newly renovated Guanyin Temple, hundredyear-old almond trees, banyan trees and beautiful rural scenery. A “Laijiang Farmhouse”demonstration site has been built, including workshops steaming wine and local production of brown sugar using traditional crafts, a village history museum, and small inns and restaurants. A traditional folksong festival is held at the Guanyin Temple on February 19th every year in the lunar calendar, which includes cultural activities such as folk song competitions and other kinds of folk entertainment performances. This festival is now a famous cultural brand of the local community, which has become widely known around the county over the years. In a survey in Laijiang village conducted in 2017, the boss of a restaurant who was in his 60"s, and who had lived in this village all his life, said:

The ancestor-worshiping celebration and Nuo Dance (a local religious dance of praying for blessings and harvest) had been performed in the Guanyin Temple every spring when I was young; in the 1960s, it was banned as superstition. After the Guanyin Temple was renovated in 2015, we could burn incense and worship the gods in it, and watch religious performances,many visitors coming here for worship and the accommodation and catering of the visitors brings more money for us.

As for the means of livelihood, most of the local people are engaged in breeding and planting. After on-the-spot observations, I found that the local people were proud of their traditional crafts for extracting brown sugar from the sugarcane in Laijiang village. The craftsmen making and selling the brown sugar in the HRA area have become a vivid live show for the local specialty and have attracted more visitors to their workshops. A local craftsman, who was on the top 10 list of making brown sugar in this region, accepted our interview and said:

Making brown sugar is a craft in my family workshop inherited from my grandpa.Three generations" practice of the traditional way of extracting sugar brick not only maintains the original sugarcane nutrition, but also gives brown sugar a distinctive caramel-like flavor. Besides,we produce sugarcane wine,a kind of distilled liquor that uses sugarcane molasses as a raw material. These two local specialties are the most favorable souvenir that the tourists want to purchase.

Figure 3: Villagers were making the brown sugar, which is the local specialty, photo by from Li Yuanjun

Figure 4: A villager standing at the corner of a farmhouse, photo from image.baidu.com

These handmade foods created by the village craftsmen, along with the villagers" hard work and wisdom, are the precious gift of god. Living in Laijiang,a small village with no traffic and no noise, totally forgotten by time and tide of modernization, one can hear nothing but the bleating of herds and poultry and the sound of the wind blowing the leaves.In the picture taken in 2017 in Laijiang village, an old man who was standing on the corner of the tranquil village had wrinkles on his face, yet his expression looked so serene that it is the best description of the best time. His strong sense of belonging to the “place” and his memory of the “place” have constructed the “place” of the Huashan Rock Art Area and are shared through relations of kinship and community.

From the “Space” Perspective

The “space” perspective focuses on how government officials, academics, entrepreneurs,and designers, who are the main practitioners in the cultural representation of the rock art area, have expressed the local culture after the HRA area was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2016, and how their efforts in promoting cultural tourism have led to the construction of the landscape for social and economic development. In the Huashan Rock Art Area, the “space” perspective focuses on the tensions between the representation of the Huashan Rock Art landscape from the government and from the locals. Being inscribed on the World Heritage List indicates the potential promise of economic benefit and an international reputation, and the governments at all levels have shown their great enthusiasm towards both the conservation of the Huashan Rock Art Area and the development of its cultural tourism.

On November 17, 2012, the Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape was listed as a World Cultural Heritage site in China. To effectively protect the cultural landscape of the Huashan Rock Art Area, the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage formulated thePlanning for the Protection and Management of the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Painting Cultural Landscape(thePlanning) in 2014 after on-the-spot investigations with multidisciplinary experts, and thePlanningwas approved by the National Cultural Heritage Administration in 2014. The main planning objects are the heritage and landscape elements that constitute the “Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape,” including 38 rock art sites and mountains in the Zuojiang river valley, as well as the surrounding rivers and peaks. ThePlanningcovers the distribution scope of the rock painting heritage and the background environment under the concept of cultural landscape. There are about 80 rock paintings left in the Zuojiang river basin, among which 38 are selected as key planning objects according to the following standards. First,with outstanding representativeness, painting language is relatively unique and rare; second,it is located in three concentrated rock painting distribution areas. When interviewed in 2016, Xu, one of the experts of thePlanningfrom the Guangxi Urban-rural Planning Design Institute, told us:

Based on the relevant documents such asInternational Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (The Venice Charter)(1964),Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage(1972),The Nara Document on Authenticity, 1999 International Cultural Tourism Charter(1994),Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage(2003),Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions(2005),Xi"an Declaration on the Conservation of the Setting of Heritage Structures, Sites and Areas(2005),The ICOMOS Charter on Cultural Routes(2008),The ICOMOS Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites(2008), andThe Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention(2011), thePlanning for the Protection and Management of the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Painting Cultural Landscape(2014-2030) has been compiled, thus further improving the protection measures with the support of the relevant laws and regulation, and governments of different levels will take effective measures to protect the precious cultural landscape of the Huashan Rock Art site.

Figure 5: A small pond planted with lotus, photo by Zhu Qiuping

From 2009 to 2014, a large-sized renovation project on the Huashan Rock Art sites was conducted under the leadership of the local government to enhance the conservational status of these sites. The landscape was then re-opened to the public in 2014. During the preparation for its nomination in 2016 the infrastructure was improved and additional facilities were constructed to create a friendly environment around the sites, thus boosting cultural tourism through the construction of “hardware” in the landscape. Meanwhile, a “Big Huashan Culture” industry system based on tourism was being planned by the local government, mainly including the following items: the Huashan Ecological Museum, the Luo Yue Ethnic Culture Ecological Village, the Huashan Culture Theme Park, the Huashan Cultural Animation Works, and the Huashan Rock Painting Logo Related Industries (Liao, 2017).

Besides, as the Golden Beach of Laijiang village is located opposite the famous Gaoshan rock paintings, a tourism company signed a contract with Laijiang village for a RMB5 million investment in a tourism-oriented development, covering more than 3.33 hectare of ponds, wasteland and beach. Huang Haibo, a government official of Ningming Tourism Bureau, said in an interview in 2019:

In our country, expropriation is a kind of government behavior, which plays an important role to guarantee the rights and interests of farmers. Governments at all levels support rural collective economic organizations and farmers in their efforts toward development and operations or in starting up enterprises.

While a villager of Laijiang village expressed his complaint and worry in an interview in 2019:

I had a small pond with more than 200 square meters before the developers came;throughout the year, in addition to irrigation and flood control and drainage, I raised fish, and planted lotus, and in this way I could earn more than RMB30 thousand a year.

Since 2014, Laijiang village has taken the opportunity of applying to the world cultural heritage to inherit and explore folk traditions. First and foremost, the Huashan Cultural Festival has been held annually since 2011, which consists of a variety of traditional activities such as the ancestor worship ceremony, the“frog dance,” praying for rain and a good harvest. Associated with the local religious beliefs, this festival has become a tourism attraction itself. According to the statistics of the Ningming Tourism Bureau, tourism visitations increased remarkably from 2014 to 2019. See Figure 6 by Jiang Qiang,an agronomist of Guangxi Baise Modern Agricultural Technology Research and Promotion Center in 2020:

Figure 6Notes to Figure 6:i) The darker color bar indicates the visitations of the Huashan Rock Art Area while the lighter color bar indicates the visitations of the Paiyangshan Forest Park.ii) Source: Ningming county Bureau of Tourism, Culture, Radio, Television and Sports.

Also, the Guanyin Temple Festival,held on the 19th day of February in the lunar calendar, has revived its religious practice and is now regarded as a distinct name card of the traditional culture of Ningming county.To revive the Guanyin Temple Festival, great efforts were made by the local government to convert Laijiang village into a living museum of the Huashan Rock Art Area, and an ethnic village as well. With less than 100 households, Laijiang village has become a famous local “cultural center” due to the Guanyin Temple Festival. With the support and promotion of the government, the ancient Guanyin Temple in the center of the village with a typical architecture style of the late Qing Dynasty, has become a popular folk village in recent years. Zhu Qiuping, director of the Ningming Cultural Relics Management Institute, who has studied the Huashan Rock Art for three decades, said in the interview in July 2017:

The Huashan Ecological Museum was built in 2016, after the Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape was given World Heritage status, in which the sheep-horn bells, ring-head swords and short flat-stalk swords, bronze drums, dogs and humans are the main symbolic artifacts.They not only have been engraved forever on the cliff of Huashan by Luoyue ancestors, but also are demonstrated in the museum for visitors to observe and experience the significance of the primitive religion and mass sacrifice as practiced three thousand years ago, a vivid reflection of the united rituals of the large tribes, their solemn ceremonies, and the group participation of the grand and warm religious practices of the ancient Luoyue people, the ancestors of the Zhuang people today.

The Huashan Ecological Museum, like any other museum in the world, is like a live cultural memory store. There are excavated rock paintings, various cultural relics with explanatory notes, external artifacts including articles, books, texts, applied computer software, apps for mobile phones, and all the materials kept by these multimodal techniques perpetuate the history and traditions of the Huashan Rock Art Area, greatly help to preserve the true stories as they happened in the past, thus presenting the dimensionality and accuracy of the collective cultural memory, without which this knowledge of this ancient civilization could not be safeguarded and shared with today"s citizens.

In the Huashan Rock art area, religious revival has played an important role in the attempts to preserve the folk traditions and practices. Moreover, religious practices are often treated as a significant part of the traditions of Chinese ethnic minorities. The local people openly practice all kinds of traditional customs, such as burning incense when worshiping the gods, especially worshiping the god of land, which has gradually become the mainstream culture of the rural society of Zuojiang valley. The traditional customs in the Guanyin Temple and the Huashan Cultural Festival are approved or organized by the local government as“cultural heritage.”

In conclusion, the cultural landscape has been constructed by the daily routine activities and traditional customs from the local community and government. The “place” perspective focuses on the local people"s perception of the rock art site, while the “space” perspective considers how government can push the limits to generate a landscape suitable for further social and economic development. The Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape could be viewed as a design product of government, media, academics, and at the same time the construction of the local people"s routine venues.

After the HRA"s inscription on the World Heritage List and Beyond

Poulios (2010) holds that places of heritage are worthy of preservation because of the values they are deemed to represent. Things are the same in the HRA landscape after its inscription on the World Heritage List in 2016. Being both an institutionalized heritage site open to the public and a living heritage site associated with various social practices, its preservation requires us to consider the complexity of the values attributed to it (Duval ＆Smith, 2014). Governments at all levels have the potential to open opportunities for a broader form of preservation to grow in the Huashan Rock Art Area along the Zuojiang river valley.Several issues should be addressed to the preservation and development of the HRA, for instances, the development of integrated and sustainable rock art heritage management plans and the preservation measures towards cultural tourism with rock art sites officially open to the public.

One major issue is the inadequate integration of cross-county cultural heritage resources and cultural industry clusters. From the initial investigation of the Huashan Rock Art Area in the 1950s up to now, multilevel governments, research institutes, scholars and social elites have spent large sums of money and time participating in the social practices and activities relevant to the topic. Attention has been paid to the Luoyue ethnic groups and the rock art paintings along the Zuojiang river. However, the inadequate reorganization and integration of the rock art heritage resources have isolated the geographical and cultural context of the Huashan cultural heritage, thus restricting the development and management of the Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape. Since the inscription on the List in 2016, the brand of the Huashan cultural industry has not yet formed. Various cultural activities which have been held in all kinds of festivals launched by the local government, have improved the popularity of the Huashan, but a cultural industry beyond the performances is highly needed to create cultural tourism with complete supporting facilities and proper promotions.

Other aspects of the Huashan circumstances are currently hindering an embrace of its status on the World Heritage List. The tension arises partly from the tendency of the issue and implementation of the policy of “protection first, development second” towards the Huashan Rock Art site, which has led to the limits on commercial development in this area, thus resulting in the present scale of the cultural tourism. Since the site has precious historical relics, it is pivotal to be alert to “the anthropogenic risks to rock art sites are generally managed in consideration of the groups of persons visiting the sites and the nature of their activities” proposed by Deacon (2006) and Ndlovu (2009). Yet the government intends to boost the development of the local economy by promoting cultural tourism in the Huashan Rock Art Area. This is a paradox, and basically it lies in the multifaceted concerns for both the development and preservation of the rock art site. Liu Shuguang, deputy director of the National Cultural Heritage Administration remarked that China"s endeavor for a more representative, balanced, and credible list of World Heritage Sites could be seen in the case of Huashan. He holds that more work is needed to preserve the mountains and enhance followup surveillance. “We will do our best to protect and manage the site, improve its surrounding environment, and prevent forest fires.”①http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/10/c_137244255.htm.This relationship requires delicate and wise handling of both sides of development and preservation of the Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape.

In addition, construction of the infrastructure and facilities in the rock art area should be carried out to meet the current needs of the cultural tourism. Ningming county has rich tourist resources including numerous high-level natural and cultural landscapes. It is a tourist magnet with sound biological protections and cluttered with unique tourist attractions including the Huashan Rock Art Area, a state level protected site and scenic area, the Longrui Conservation Area, the Huashan Hot Spring Resort, the Rongfeng Tower, the Jinniu Pond in Aidian, and many others. In recent years, Ningming has been honored as a “Tourism Demonstration Zone of Guangxi,” and “China"s most beautiful rural tourism destination.”Up to now, there are more than 30 scenic spots in Ningming county. However, the supporting facilities of scenic spots are far from enough to provide the needed services for tourists.Huang said, according to Ningming county"s government, infrastructure has been built on the site into a national 5A scenic spot in 2017. Thus, it makes sense to consider investing in the infrastructure and facilities of the Huashan Rock Art Area, which are available but currently inadequate for the site. Restaurants, hotels, recreation facilities should be built to meet the needs of the increasing numbers of visitors, transportation should be improved for greater transport capacity, and services should be better for customers. This seems to be the best way to mobilize the resources available as it will bring in the intended impact with the least investment and improve the quality of life for the local population.

“Cultural Heritage: a powerful catalyst for the future of Europe” is the Europe Day Manifesto proposed in May, 2020, in which cultural heritage can act as a catalyst for positive change. Likewise, the cultural landscape of the Huashan rock painting area has been successfully declared a world cultural heritage and its influence has been rapidly enhanced.Therefore, it is inevitable to attract the attention of the world and greatly enhance the cultural image and popularity of Guangxi at home and abroad. The Huashan rock paintings are like a bridge, opening the cultural communication channels between the world and Guangxi.The world cultural heritage endowed the Zuojiang River basin with world-class cultural resources, which determined that the Huashan Rock Art paintings have become a symbol of cultural tourism. In short, Huashan cultural heritage is also a powerful catalyst for the future of cultural communications and cooperation with the ASEAN countries under the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). This study explored the cultural landscape of the HRA area from the perspectives of “place” and “space,” the major problems for the sustainable preservation of rock art as well as the development of tourism, and how to balance these two developments.