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Special feature

Curated Nostalgia: The Loss and Recreation of the Recent Past in China

Yimei Zhang
p. 43-53

Abstract

This paper uses the case of Wenheyou, a retro-themed restaurant in Changsha, to examine how the recent built environment is heritagised and junkified in contemporary China. Wenheyou’s deliberate celebration of the dilapidated streetscapes, dirt, and mundane everyday life of the 1980s and 1990s has been widely discussed as a cultural and commercial phenomenon. Situating Wenheyou within Changsha’s broader processes of urban redevelopment and heritage reconstruction, the paper argues that recreated “trash” in Wenheyou operates alongside recreated heritage in the city, stabilising, rather than challenging, the boundary between what can and cannot be preserved. Drawing on scholarship on material culture and trash studies, the paper argues that, in the context of rapid urbanisation following the reform and opening up of the 1980s, the designation of “shantytowns” or “old and dilapidated neighbourhoods” emerged in parallel with the recognition of recent heritage in official listings. These two processes are produced through the same urbanisation mechanism that granted the government the spatial power to determine how the past is materially inscribed onto the cityscape.

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Editor’s notes

Manuscript received on 1 August 2025. Accepted on 11 March 2026.

Excerpt

Full text document will be published online on March 2027.

Outline

The Wenheyou phenomenon
Literature review: Heritage and trash
Heritagisation and junkification of the recent past in official narratives
Official heritage discourse
Urban renewal discourse
From rubbish to durables
Destruction and recreation of the recent past in Wenheyou
Destruction
Recreation
From created heritage to recreated trash
Conclusion

First lines

In recent years, the retro-themed restaurant Wenheyou 文和友 in Changsha has attracted widespread public attention in the media. The restaurant created an immersive experience of the lost “urban village” in the 1980s and 1990s. Though similar approaches have been taken in various commercial spaces, Wenheyou stands out not only because of its sheer size, which spans seven floors, but also because it unabashedly displays the dirt and dilapidation of the lost streetscape, in stark contrast with the sanitised version of the recent past displayed in museums or heritage sites. However, in academic discussions, the success of the restaurant has been discussed primarily in relation to its commercial strategy, experiential design, and cultural branding, framing it as a paradigmatic example of nostalgia-driven consumption in contemporary Chinese cities, emphasising its ability to transform memories of everyday urban life into a profitable cultural spectacle. Within architectural and heritage sch...

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References

Bibliographical reference

Yimei Zhang, Curated Nostalgia: The Loss and Recreation of the Recent Past in ChinaChina Perspectives, 144 | 2026, 43-53.

Electronic reference

Yimei Zhang, Curated Nostalgia: The Loss and Recreation of the Recent Past in ChinaChina Perspectives [Online], 144 | 2026, Online since 01 March 2027, connection on 17 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/20527; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15zuo

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About the author

Yimei Zhang

Yimei Zhang is a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and a lecturer at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands (zhang.yimei@tum.de).

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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