Research on a Sustainable Protection Model for Jingdezhen's Cultural Heritage Across the Entire Region

Abstract

Against the global digital economy and cultural heritage sustainable governance background, cultural heritage protection has shifted from traditional passive salvage conservation to comprehensive, dynamic and sustainable ecological governance worldwide. Jingdezhen, the world-famous porcelain capital with over 2,000 years of ceramic civilization, boasts integrated whole-region cultural heritage covering tangible kiln ruins, ancient architectural clusters, handmade intangible porcelain craftsmanship, porcelain specimen relics and porcelain-related folk customs. These precious heritage resources constitute a complete industrial and cultural chain of ancient Chinese ceramic manufacturing, bearing unique historical, artistic, scientific and social values. For a long time, scattered departmental management, insufficient long-term fiscal input, continuous outflow and aging of inheritor groups, as well as single protection and development paths have seriously restricted the sustainable inheritance and innovative development of Jingdezhen’s all-round cultural heritage. The traditional protection model that overemphasizes physical relic maintenance while ignoring dynamic inheritance and industrial activation has led to the gradual marginalization of folk ceramic craftsmanship and the waste of massive heritage resources. The construction of full-chain digital industrial chain opens up a new sustainable development path for cross-regional integrated heritage protection, realizing the organic integration of cultural preservation, digital innovation and industrial economic circulation. Centered on upstream standardized digital resource archiving, midstream intelligent conservation and immersive content development, downstream cultural creative industrialization and digital cultural tourism operation, this study adopts literature research, field investigation and case empirical analysis, sorts out the practical achievements and prominent drawbacks of Jingdezhen’s existing digital heritage construction represented by the Ancient Ceramic Gene Bank and Taoyangli digital scenic project, and constructs a four-dimensional closed-loop sustainable protection framework integrating whole-domain data integration, refined intelligent protection, industrial value feedback and institutional guarantee from the perspective of digital industrial chain construction. Empirical analysis shows that the industrial closed-loop mode of “heritage digitization – intelligent protection – industrial realization – profit feedback to heritage maintenance” can effectively break the over-reliance of traditional protection on financial appropriation, resolve resource fragmentation and insufficient inheritance problems, and realize the virtuous cycle of heritage protection and industrial development. The research conclusions can provide operable practical references for Jingdezhen’s holistic heritage conservation and deliver replicable digital protection experience for global historical and cultural cities with similar handicraft heritage resources.