Yunnan-Vietnam Railway Heritage Corridor: construction, evaluation and application

In the current period of rapid development in China and Vietnam, the pressure from urbanization has posed considerable threats to historical railways and other kinds of industrial heritage, especially those heritages with large scales and extents. As a representative historical narrow-gauge railway in Southeast Asia, Yunnan-Vietnam Railway related to China, France and Vietnam, is selected as the research object in this study from an international perspective. From the literature review of Chinese railway heritage and site survey on Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, it is known that this old railway is of historical, technological, social-cultural, ecological, landscape and tourism values. But some of its sections have already been closed or destroyed, waiting for further protective solutions, along with crises, challenges and opportunities. With an increasing perception of railway heritage and railway tourism, a comprehensive and cooperative protection strategy is in need to document all the related relics along the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, to assess its heritage value quantitatively and to support the tourism activities for its future redevelopment. Meanwhile, spatial technologies have been evolved rapidly since their birth, connected more closely with history and archaeology, and applied to more practical cases and fields. GIS combined with RS and GPS is proved to have adequate supports in the protection for both cultural and natural heritage, for its advantages in spatial processing, analyzing, managing and information interpreting and sharing. This research, from a geo-historical perspective, mainly utilizes Historical-GIS as methodology based on the historical and geographical backgrounds of CFY, which integrates spatial technologies with multiple disciplines, especially the concept of heritage corridor. It discusses a solution for the protection and management of large-scale heritage through multi-level geo-analysis and applications. The original historical documents conserved in archives (historical photos, maps, etc.), along with other open spatial data, big data and fieldwork data were collected, systemized and used to build a heritage database. These movable documents are considered as a part of the CFY heritage, and the application of historical images into CFY study makes it groundbreaking. After building a geodatabase in form of GeoPackage, GIS is combined with Analytic Hierarchy Process, Delphi Expert Method and Minimum Cumulative Resistance Model as a spatial integrated method for the construction and evaluation of CFY heritage corridor. Some objectives are fulfilled, including effective heritage management, regional coordination under various authorities, data shareability with other users and researchers and the supports for heritage tourism. Besides, an assessment tool for railway heritage corridor is introduced and updated based on previous research, discussing the indicators influencing heritage value of historical railway from five aspects: technology, social-culture, ecology, landscape and tourism. In this built heritage corridor, all the dedicated heritage resources are classified, and a spatial pattern of the corridor is also analyzed. As a result, more spatial applications are fulfilled on basis of the built heritage corridor and the calculated heritage value of the whole railway area, which refers to basic mapping of the heritage area, heritage visualization with WebGIS, geo-historical changes along the railway and data sharing through the ArcGIS server. At last, some suggestions based upon the study of CFY heritage are discussed and proposed for the future research on the protection and management of railway heritage in China.