MANY countries aspire to a place in UNESCO's list of world heritage sites, as it is a universal testament to their unique history and natural beauty.

At the 37th World Heritage Conference held recently in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Tianshan Mountain in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the terraced fields of Yunnan Province in southern China were admitted to the pantheon of natural world heritage, bringing the total of such patrimonies to 45 in China.

This news attests to the enthralling richness of Chinese topography, and should be cause for celebration. But it is also a mixed blessing.

If history is any guide, then one cannot but worry about the fate of the newly honored heritage sites.

In China, pursuit of world heritage status, whether cultural or natural, is not just about national pride. It is also an economic opportunity for localities that own heritage sites. Successful applications garner handsome payoffs in the form of tourist money, government funds and visibility. As such, the world heritage mania has gripped many local governments, with some zealously shelling out money on publicity and sprucing up their candidates.

Take Xinning in Hunan Province. The poverty-stricken county has an annual fiscal revenue of around 200 million yuan (US$32.5 million), yet it gambled 450 million yuan in 2008 on its world heritage bid for Danxia, a national reserve and geological park in Xinning's jurisdiction.

It succeeded.

Ticket out of poverty

A consequence of this desperation is that some relics and scenic spots, once designated as heritage sites, are not sufficiently protected according to UNESCO's stipulation.

The more unpalatable reality is that most are being ruthlessly exploited under the official slogan of "preserving heritage and perpetuating civilization."

For some, the world heritage title means a ticket out of poverty and thus it is worth putting in whatever they can come by, money - even if it's borrowed - strenuous efforts, mass support, and even faked relics.

As the motivation is tainted by pecuniary obsession, such applications put a disproportionate emphasis on recouping costs and generating returns, while protection is reduced to an afterthought.

Tourism booms naturally follow, featuring heavy advertising of the particular UNESCO heritage sites. Admission is so steeply priced that a travel agency manager is quoted as saying in Monday's Wenhui Daily that the money paid for a ticket to Jiuzhaigou Valley (a tourist attraction and world heritage site in Sichuan Province) can cover admission to Yellow Stone National Park in America, the Taj Mahal in India and Mount Fuji in Japan - and then there's still money left over.

Pride and glamour aside, official quest for world heritage is essentially part of an entire package of commercialization that boosts careers.

Although many officials like to bandy about the cultural significance of the application, their action betrays their true intentions. Culture and civilization for them is above all an engine of GDP, not something they cannot defile.

A host of tourist and property projects conceived in the name of culture have sprung up, some barely cloaked in their parody of true culture.

Xi'an City in Shaanxi Province recently stirred considerable controversy with its plan to rebuild Epang Palace from a heap of debris.

Epang, built in the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), is featured prominently in literature. Legend has it that the imposing imperial palace was burned to rubble by rebel leader Xiang Yu.

According to Xi'an's plan, authorities will teem up with Shouchuang, a Beijing-based infrastructure company, to invest an aggregated 38 billion yuan in the rebuilding job.

The city intends to construct an Epang Heritage Park on a parcel of 2.3 square kilometers, to be followed by a 12.5-square-kilometer "cultural tourism industry base."

To make way for the new Epang Palace, the existing Epang scenic site, 200 meters from the relics, will be demolished. Built 13 years ago at a value of 200 million yuan, it is destined to be surpassed in extravagance by successors.

The irony is that whether Epang was already completed or a work in progress at its time of destruction is open to question. Archaeologists are even divided over whether it was burned down at all.

With fundamental existential questions left unanswered, the folly of "rebuilding" the palace based on imagination, ancient literature or computer-generated sketches is titanic.

For a city that was once capital of 13 dynasties and boasts such wonders as the Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors, flirtation with ersatz relics reveals its leaders' blind attitude toward the past.

I have no doubt that after the "rebirth" of Epang Palace, its authors may seek to include their pet project in the world heritage list. Next will come the natural step to raise admission fees, and this could be justified by citing seemingly plausible reasons like controlling crowds for better protection.

To some operators of heritage sites, the only thing that will stand in their way of cashing in on patrimony is the possibility of UNESCO delisting the sites on grounds of their challenged status quo and lack of authenticity.

Six Chinese heritage sites including the Imperial Palace and Summer Palace were warned by UNESCO in 2007 for excessive tourism development.

Wudang Mountain in Hubei Province, a Taoist mecca, won its UNESCO heritage status in 1994. Since 2001, local cultural authorities, the very guardians of relics, began to lay waste to it with a lot of construction. The biggest uproar is over the conversion of a Taoist temple into a hotel.

A great number of China's places of historical interest have been commercialized beyond the point of no return, their ecology fatally compromised by human greed. It's no exaggeration to say that in some ways the acquisition of a heritage title is like the death knell for some relics, which otherwise would have been saved in a state of neglect.

Death knell

The protection and development of heritage is always a dilemma. Trade-off seems inevitable. Despite officials' pledges that relics will be "properly" developed, they are generally unable to strike the balance. Because of the irresistible prospect of commercialization, the balance is usually tilted in favor of capital.

Regarding the Epang controversy, the Xinmin Evening News editorialized on June 24 that we protect relics to protect our cultural memory. And the memory's value stems from its authenticity.

Artificiality doesn't last. But in a business context, it doesn't matter whether a relic is original or fake. Time and again real relics are removed, junked and pulverized to give way to ersatz ones, for the latter are considered more presentable.

In some provinces, land grabs are increasingly executed with the pretext of building culture-themed industrial parks.

In fact, land is hoarded in anticipation of higher prices. Culture, instead of a new growth engine, is manipulated as a license to cheat, speculate and rob.

The unsettling fact is that China's yearning for world heritage glory shows no sign of abating.

There are about 200 candidates prepared to submit their nomination proposals to UNESCO and it takes at least a hundred years to screen them for qualifications, said Wang Fengwu, a Chinese delegate to the World Heritage Committee and senior official with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

All this irrational exuberance may result only in more desolation.

While there is a chorus of calls to promote culture, we need to be critical, even cynical, for what has withstood the caprices of time will, ultimately, succumb to the power of capital.