Spatial Narrative and Ethical Cultivation: Symbolic Construction and Contemporary Reconstruction of Traditional Door Plaques in Pingyao Ancient City

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-569-0_45How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Pingyao Ancient City; Traditional Door Plaques; Spatial Narrative; Symbolic Capital

Abstract

Traditional door plaques are not only the artistic carriers of architectural decoration, but also the visual expression of the social governance order of traditional Chinese society. This paper breaks through the previous research perspective of single calligraphy appreciation or literature textual research, introduces “spatial narrative” and “social semiotics” theories, takes 278 existing traditional door plaques in Pingyao Ancient City as the research object, and through field investigation and quantitative statistical analysis, explores their symbolic construction mechanisms in different social spaces. The research finds that the Pingyao door plaque system is not an isolated textual existence, but through “power discipline of official space”, “credit contract of commercial space”, and “micro-cultivation of residential space”, jointly constructs a rigorous ethical narrative network. This finding reveals how traditional urban space participates in the reproduction of social morality as a medium, providing a theoretical basis for contemporary ancient city protection to turn from simple material repair to deep contextual activation, and based on this, proposes a cultural tourism development path based on narrative reconstruction.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jinke Hao
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/01
TI  - Spatial Narrative and Ethical Cultivation: Symbolic Construction and Contemporary Reconstruction of Traditional Door Plaques in Pingyao Ancient City
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Educational Development and Social Sciences (EDSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 361
EP  - 369
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-569-0_45
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-569-0_45
ID  - Hao2026
ER  -