Heritage sovereignty : Authorisation, territorialisation, engaging the making of Silk Road

The gaze towards the silk road was first directed by UNESCO's heritage project in tandem with its new category of cultural routes. The process of heritage nomination, featured with rule making by international organizations and its applications to the cultural route that transcends national boundaries, triggers the concern on state sovereignty and international knowledge. What has been found unconformable in such studies is not confined in applying western theories to China, but the concepts of sovereignty and territory premised upon Westphalian political reasoning. Emerging are conceptual effort to attend to the changing nature of sovereignty that is exercised in networks across space with distributed nodes. Using the heritage nomination process of "Silk Road: Chang'an-Tianshan section", this study interrogates the politics of assemblage, knowledge and territory. Following the concept of Authorising Heritage Discourse that reads heritage as social construction, we argue that, cultural route offers space for international and local experts, political and economic organisations to collect, compare, categorise and reassemble sites/places, historical episodes and technical knowledge, so as to legitimise an imaginary territory with new power relations. Two points we tend to make through this study: first, the nature of assemblage is politicized. second, interest of a sovereign state and that of networked authorities are not exclusive. Whilst territory is subject to demarcation, division, merge, and re-imagination in heritage conservation; the reconfiguration of territory well serves both China's agenda of emergence and rule-making by transnational authorities, though the new power relations are always contingent.