Lighting Up A Place with Good Stories: Heritage Interpretation Strategies and the Macau Historic Centre

The Macau Historic Centre, inscribed on the World Heritage List since 2005, carries the mainstream of the story of Macau as a lucrative port of strategic importance in the development of international trade witnessed by its historic street, residential, religious and public Portuguese and Chinese buildings and provides a unique testimony to the meeting of aesthetic, cultural, architectural and technological influences from East and West (The Historic Centre of Macao, n.d.).
To preserve and restore historical sites, the International Council on Monuments and Sites emphasizes the importance of public communications as an essential part of the significant conservation process since it defines the current generation's vision of what is substantial, what is necessary, and why specific legacy remains from the past should be passed on to next generations.
Over the past sixteen years, however, the Macau government has developed its own emphasis on interpreting the Macau Historic Centre as a heritage site mainly to serve the tourism industry. What is absent in the Macau government's heritage interpretation campaign is a meaningful consideration of the perspective and voice of Macau's citizens, as if the latter's ownership of the Historic Centre as a heritage site is unimportant, negligible, or even disposable.
In addition, perhaps to countervail Macau’s history as a foreign colony, the Macau government has purposely changed the heritage interpretation objectives to a more Chinese-oriented approach to enhance the Chinese identity of Macau citizens. The Macau Historic Centre, with over 70% of buildings being western-oriented, seems to be a challenge. On the one hand, it keeps reminding us of the colonized history, but on the other hand, it must be retained under the UNESCO mandate.
How the Historic Centre of Macau is or should be understood and interpreted, therefore, is really a challenging and, if not always explicitly, contested issue. It is the goal of this research to motivate a reconsideration of this challenge by teasing out the otherwise muted voice of the Macau public concerning the Historic Centre as patrimony and how this voice may offer us a more positive avenue into appreciating the identity of the Macau citizens.
For this purpose, this research uses the mixed methods of questionnaires, in-depth interviews, observations, and literature review to uncover the path of heritage interpretation and storytelling that could fully and richly light up the Historic Centre as Macau's shared heritage from the point of view of the Macau citizens.