Cultural Heritage Council Vice President and Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) President Leong Wai Man announced yesterday that the bureau’s setting-up of a centre to monitor the city’s UNESCO World Heritage sites will start operating by the end of the year.
Leong made the remarks during a press conference after this year’s fourth regular closed-door meeting of the government-appointed Cultural Heritage Committee at the Macau Cultural Centre in Nape.
According to Leong, the centre will be located at the bureau’s Cultural Heritage Department, and is being set up in line with the project designed by the China Academy of Cultural Heritage.
According to Leong, the centre is not a separate department nor is it a new one, while its monitoring work will be directly conducted by the Cultural Heritage Department, with its monitoring subjects covering 22 properties in the city’s historical area, eight squares and 72 streets.
Leong noted that the centre will collect, analyse, manage and record data on World Heritage buildings, with the aim of applying digital technology to fine-tune conservation and improve the conservation mechanism for Macau’s World Heritage.
According to the Cultural Heritage Department, the monitoring centre will focus on 22 immovable properties by installing external monitoring equipment, including CCTV cameras and settlement gauges inside the buildings.
Leong added that the squares and the streets will be photographed to detect any abnormalities, with the meteorological data from the Macau Meteorological and Geophysical Bureau (SMG), travel data from the Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) and monitoring data from the Environmental Protection Bureau (DSPA) to be accessed altogether to monitor the sites.
During yesterday’s meeting the bureau also presented its intangible cultural heritage management guidelines, which will regulate the criteria for nominating items for Macau’s intangible cultural heritage list, conservation units, the respective inheritors, as well as their rights and duties.
According to the bureau, the conservation units and the respective inheritors are expected to fulfil their duties and if they fail to do so they will not be penalised but their name would be removed from the intangible heritage list.
In addition, Leong quoted the committee members’ consent on starting the restoration work at one of the buildings that make up Pui Ching Middle School, which was formerly known as the Lou Lim Iok Mansion, due to the deterioration of the building’s façade, roof, ceiling and structure of the immovable property as well as water seepage, taking into account the historical value of the building.
For the old city wall damaged by a landslide in June, the government initiated emergency work to demolish the damaged part of the wall in July. Leong said that the decision was jointly made by several departments, and given that the landslide had entered a residential building at that time and the situation was very dangerous, there was no concern that the demolition would set a precedent. Leong said that the public should not be concerned that the same predicament would automatically apply to other immovable properties.
Cultural Heritage Council Vice President-cum-Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) President Leong Wai Man looks on during yesterday’s press conference after the Cultural Heritage Committee’s regular meeting at the Macau Cultural Centre. – Photo courtesy of TDM
