8th century Luoyang must have been astonishing. To the west of ruined older Han and Northern Wei capitals, the Tang built one the world’s biggest metropoleis. Rivalling Baghdad and Constantinople, a million people thronged a city host to Sogdian traders, Nestorian Christian missionaries, Arab and Byzantine envoys; while artisans expanded the awesome Longmen grottoes to its south, built soaring pagodas and palaces, and ringed with massive rammed earth walls.

As with many of China’s imperial capitals, Tang Luoyang has long been submerged beneath the calamitous waves of China’s blood soaked history, its wooden halls incinerated by fire, before the silt and flotsam of years of re-inhabitation and construction levelled its walls – reducing the southern suburbs to low fields occasionally rinsed by a shifting Luo river, and lesser cities reinterpreting and remapping the royal palaces and wide boulevards. But today’s visitor is not met with the level sands of a Shelley-like lost kingdom; and only partly by identikit modern urban sprawl. Mirage like, massive Tang simulacra rise from Luoyang’s city centre – a huge wooden tower, the Tiantang 天堂; next to it, the squat and heft Mingtang 明堂 throne hall; to the south, imposing palace gates; and, across the river, a full Tang city gate – the Dingding gate 定鼎门 – flanked by intact walls and que 阙 towers.

Of course these are not miraculous survivals of history’s vicissitudes, but modern projects by the Luoyang government to resurrect the city’s Tang heyday – tourism sites with hefty admission fees, offering punters the opportunity to swan massive concrete squares while donning rented Tang-era mantles. Concrete and steel has replaced the short-lived earth and wood long since obliterated – in some cases only decades after their original construction.

A personal intrusion to the narrative – and driver for today’s blog: I have an instinctive disdain for these projects. There are practical issues; under Luoyang’s centre are eons of archaeology, tentatively excavated but now irreparably marred by concrete foundation piles and modern superimpositions. More abstract concerns also trouble me. Historical reconstructions are rarely perfect – absent a blueprint or drawing (almost never available for pre-modern remains) the modern architect imposes interpretations which may vary widely from historical reality (Arthur Evans’ concrete reconstruction of Minoan Knossos a particularly notorious example). Secondly, choosing what – and how – to reconstruct is unavoidably synchronic – choosing one moment in time to privilege for posterity and erasing its complex, layered mutability. Wu Zetian’s pleasure palaces were but a flash in Luoyang’s millennia-long narrative; and politics inevitably creeps into which society or civilisation to prioritise in the rebuild.

My prejudices aside, there are lots of reasons to support these reconstruction mega projects. In many parts of China, the original they ape has been so utterly lost there is little archaeological cost to a fit of creativity. Take the Northern Song capital at Kaifeng – once mighty Bianjing before its sack by rampaging Jurchen Jin. Wars and, regularly, apocalyptic floods from the Yellow River have left very little of the Song city – two pagodas in the north and south of the city, and tattered Ming-era walls around its former inner city. Here, resurrection of the years immediately preceding its sack – before it faded into relative obscurity – is understandable, even if the execution can be seen as gauche.

Elsewhere, modern history’s darkest days bear responsibility. Many of China’s finest religious structures were irreversibly broken by rampaging Red Guard in the 1960s and 1970s, their ‘Cultural Revolution’ targeting the ‘four olds’ of pre-Communist China. Amid the shattered wreckage of China’s heritage – the looted temples of Confucius’ hometown, Qufu; the toppled spires of cathedrals in Beijing and Qingdao; the Cantonese ancestral halls turned into printing presses and grain stores – rebuilding was a vital part of the healing and reconnection with an assaulted national identity, reaching back across the lacuna of the Mao era. In particular, as China’s Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and other faiths brushed off their hidden scriptures and rescued icons, arguments around heritage authenticity would be extremely churlish when set against smouldering lamaseries (Tibetan areas were particularly badly hit) and whitewashed shrines.

Lastly, standards of preservation and repair differ in places where wood – rather than stone or brick – was the primary architectural mode. While not quite the ritual reconstruction seen elsewhere (e.g. the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan), replacement of rotten architectural elements is usual and necessary and gives real headaches dating wooden structures – and allowing fewer ideological issues when contemplating full-scale reconstruction. Further, reconstruction was de rigueur for many historical dynasties as a legitimising act of sacral euergetism and piety – hence the number of much older foundations in China now almost exclusively filled with buildings from the energetic Qing Qianlong and Kangxi eras (both Emperors massive temple builders over extremely long reigns in the 17th and 18th centuries).

And sometimes this is done extremely well. The thesaurus of Chinese history, dusty and dry Shanxi, has astounding wooden survivals from the Song and even Tang era – lovingly preserved in recent years, with leaning or collapsed elements consolidated or replaced as minimally as possible, leaving the ancient timbers and artwork to be viewed for generations to come. Elsewhere, gaudy reconstructions can also serve as excellent museums of the (excavated, subterranean) ruins of their forebears – including in Luoyang, where the reconstructed Dingding gate covers the opened remains of the Tang original; or in Xi’an, where work to ‘restore’ the Tang Daming palace has involved exposing and preserving the foundations of its palaces and walls.

Moreover, historical snobbishness runs the risk of occluding why these projects have been done. Tourism is one of the greatest development engines for poorer parts of China, bringing investment and tourist cash to post-industrials cities in the interior chafing under declining industries and pollution, stimulating a shift to a service-orientated economy. The most famous – and controversial – must surely be the Shanxi coal capital of Datong, the transformation of which by ambitious Mayor Geng Yanbo was shown in an (excellent) documentary – and involved the clearances of tens of thousands of families in order to rebuild Ming-era city walls almost entirely from scratch. While methods are rightly criticised, modern Datong is lifting itself from a notorious reputation and bringing more visitors to its extent (and ‘real’) Liao temples and world-class Yungang grottoes.

But sometimes this can go disastrously wrong. China is littered with examples of terrible and destructive ‘renovation’, but for me (perhaps arguably) the most tragic is the Tang bell tower of Kaiyuan Temple 开元寺钟楼 in Zhengding, Hebei. When architectural history Liang Sicheng visited in the 1930s, he found a sagging, decaying building, but one that was unmistakably 8th century Tang Dynasty in its structure – a unique and (for wooden buildings) almost unimaginably old survival from China’s fêted imperial heyday. Liang noted the motley assemblage of external features – a Jin or Yuan lower course; rebuilt Qing upper story – but ranked it as one of only two buildings he found with original Tang wooden structure (the number is now 4 or 5, depending on ultimate identification of a few recent finds). The building surely needed saving – and this was done in the late 1980s, when the Zhengding government commissioned a renovation programme that involved tearing down the original structure, replacing most elements, and rebuilding it in a fabricated ‘Tang’ style obscuring and destroying its heritage, including the rich collage of later restylings which are as much part of the building’s tapestry. Today few original elements – resin coated door, a bell – survive from the original build.

So where does this leave us? For me, travelling around a decent chunk of China and its archaeology, there is an all pervading sense of epistemological uncertainty – an unstable and uncertain irreality of whether what you are witnessing is new, old, authentic, or the imagination of an urban planner or construction baron in the late 1980s. The philosophy of whether this matters – questions of the ship of Theseus (or Trigger’s broom) – lie beyond my ken, as to questions of how a historian or archaeologist should respond to it – an endless search for the orientalist-fetishised ‘real China’? – but it remains an inescapable question if one chooses to act as connoisseur of China’s heritage.

All photographs my own