Cultural Landscape: Marching on the Way of Exploration

The paper illustrates thinking on the frontiers of cultural landscape by reviewing explorations and pilot cases in the world and in China in the recent two years. The paper has identified the difficulties in understanding UNESCO's new Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape and provided an interpretation. The paper has also interpreted the significant contributions of the listing of the West Lake in Hangzhou to the World Heritage. Based on the existing and potential contributions of China's scenic and historic interest areas to the World Heritage, it is asserted that there is an urgency of basic research on cultural landscape values of this protected system. Further, the paper introduced the application of cultural landscape methodology and exploration of research methods in the research of Slender West Lake in Chinese contexts. In the end, the paper emphasizes the capacity building on heritage sites is essential for sustainable heritage conservation and management.