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Published on August 26, 2007

From Himalayan temples and historic villages to ancient towns and boutique hotels, Asia's cultural and religious sites are growing from mere beauty spots to become the region's icons of conservation. 

In the field of conservation this year, no one does it better than India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia - the countries that last week won Unesco's Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards for Culture Heritage Conservation with their exemplary restoration schemes for religious and cultural structures. For this, the eighth running of the annual awards, the winners were announced in the appropriately grand setting of Phra Ratchawang Derm Palace across the Chao Phya River in Thonburi. The palace, once the seat of power of King Taksin, was a merit award winner in the 2004 competition.

 The 25 entries sent in to the programme were projects involving buildings at least half a century old that had been newly restored. They comprised commercial, cultural, religious, industrial and institutional buildings, as well as houses, gardens and bridges.

The entries were competing in five categories: Award of Excellence; Awards of Distinction; Awards of Merit; Honourable Mentions; and Jury Commendation for Innovation.    

For this year's round: the Award of Excellence went to the Maitreya Temples in Ladakh, India. The three Awards of Distinction went to the Convocation Hall (Mumbai, India), the Altit Settlement (Gilgit, Pakistan) and the Galle Fort Hotel (Galle, Sri Lanka) respectively.

The four Awards of Merit recipients were the Bonython Hall (Adelaide, Australia), Lijiang Ancient Town (Yunnan, China), Little Hong Kong (Hong Kong) and the Astana of Syed Yahya (Skardu, Pakistan).

The two Honourable Mention prizes went to the Liu Family Civil Residence (Shanxi, China) and the Old St Andrew's School (Singapore).

The Jury Commendation for Innovation was awarded to Whitfield Barracks (Hong Kong).

The 11 winners receive certificates and plaques from Unesco, but not financial support. 

Thailand sent three entries: Buala House (a folk museum in Lamphun), Rachamankha Hotel and Tamarind Village Hotel (both in Chiang Mai). Despite the Kingdom's rich legacy of historic sites, none of the three found favour with the judges. 

 "These sites failed to win awards because they appeared to lack a systematic conservation plan. Yet they are old and beautiful cultural structures," says Montira Horayangura Unakul, Unesco's programme specialist.

"Conservation is something new for most private owners of old buildings and they tend not to have concrete restoration plans [an important factor in the programme's selection criteria], unlike their public sector counterparts," she says, adding that things could be different if more private owners knew about the awards programme.

 However, two Thai sites have won recognition in previous years. Wat Srathong in Khon Kaen province was a 2002 Merit Award winner and Phraratcha Wang Derm in Thonburi, Bangkok, won the same award three years ago.

Amid the frenzied development of cultural tourism, conservation is something that's relatively new to the region.

"The winning projects serve as valuable models in the development and application of rigorous conservation methodology. This systematic approach is particularly significant in the Asia-Pacific region where conservation is a relatively new profession. International norms are not widely understood or practised and localised modes of operation are still evolving," says Richard Engelhardrt, chairperson of the awards jury. Bangkok-based Engelhardt is also Unesco regional advisor for culture in Asia and the Pacific.

The judges' concern with the need for adequate and efficient conservation work in Asia is highlighted in Unesco's "Asia Conserved", edited by Montira and launched at the awards. In the book, Engelhardt illustrates the benefits of conservation by referring to the restoration project on Thailand's Wat Srathong, which became "the common focal point for a small community in Thailand's Northeast, where young and old worked side by side on their precious derelict Buddhist chapel, creating a common bond increasingly rare in a rural area decimated by the emigration of youth to the cities".

Conservation fosters the recovery of traditional building and decorative skills, part of the intangible heritage of local communities, writes Johannes Widodo, a Singaporean architect on the panel of judges. He also points to the Wat Srathong project, where all the work on the temple's ordination hall was voluntarily undertaken by the villagers after on-site technical training by the local university. In the process, they learned traditional construction and finishing techniques that they will be able to use for future repairs, besides gaining a strong sense of ownership over the project.

 A similar story can be found at Indonesia's Virtuous Bridge (2003 Award of Merit winner). The restoration there inspired a joint civic effort from the city's Malay, Chinese and Indian community. The project has strengthened the sense of mutual goodwill and has become the basis for renewed cooperation, notes Engelhardt.

Elsewhere in Asia, heritage restoration can be turned into a viable vocation, giving local residents the skills for ongoing renovation of historic structures in their neighbourhoods," says Budi Lim, another judge, and an architect involved in major restoration projects in Indonesia.

Above all, conservation articulates "the spirit of the place", according to Laurence Loh, a jury member and a leading conservationist in Malaysia. In historic sites, that spirit "encompasses the meanings of a place accrued through time and through its past and present uses," Loh notes in "Asia Conserved". "Spirit of place comes alive not just in the ways a site is conserved and presented, but in the ways it is used and valued by people," he writes.

 Unesco is hoping that the awards programme will provide impetus to the region's emerging civic conservation movement "by reinforcing technical know-how, social momentum and political support"," says Engelhardt.

To order a copy of "Asia Conserved", available in book form and CD-rom, visit www. unescobkk.org/culture/heritageawards.

Manote Tripathi

The Nation