Patricia Yu takes notes during a lecture as she takes part in the 2016 Visiting Program for Young Sinologists. [Photo/Chinaculture.org]

This group photo is taken in front of hanging scrolls in the Cahill collection. They are attributed to Lin Liang, Muqi Fachang, and Shen Zhou. Prof Cahill found many of these paintings in Japan; these were styles and subjects that were not valued by Chinese literati, but were valued by Japanese collectors. So I'm actually very interested in how cultural artifacts move around the world and acquire different values over time.

That leads to my own dissertation research on cultural heritage preservation and conservation in China. When I was here in 2014, I noticed the conservation of architectural monuments in the Forbidden City and Chengde. I participated in a workshop sponsored by international conservation agencies; you can see here that we used the Yuanming Yuan ruins as a fieldwork site to demonstrate the uses of 3-D laser scanning.

From my experience in China, I decided to work on the Yuanming Yuan as my dissertation topic. It encompasses many of my research interests: Qing imperial spaces, cross-cultural exchanges (we can see this exchange happening throughout the Yuanming Yuan's history: these European Palaces were constructed by the Jesuits in the Qing court, whether or not to reconstruct the garden is also a matter of differing approaches to heritage preservation), the preservation of ruins, and expressions of cultural heritage.