The City is a Journey: Heritage and Memory in Zhu Tianxin’s Novella ‘The Old Capital’

Zhu Tianxin’s novella The Old Capital narrates the process of slowly losing contact with the past through forgetting, loss and material erasure. Instead of completely eradicating the past, this process prompts a renewed interest, and, in a sense, a renewed presence of that past in conscious remembering, literary evocation and narrative attendance. Inspired by David Crouch’s conception of heritage as a journey, this paper looks at how the protagonist’s physical and mental voyage in The Old Capital incorporates several spatiotemporal layers of cultural heritage to help her – and the reader - understand the complexity of the living historical city of Taipei.