Shared Heritage: Early Modern Colonial Forts in the South China Sea (SCS) bordering communities

Forts of the South China Sea bordering countries built between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries are a notable remain of the long and complex history of encounters and exchanges with European powers.

Practically forgotten by scholars and local administrations, it is time to enhance their value with a new discourse as a Shared Heritage between European and local communities.

This project aims to: 1) show how the local practices in the South China Sea bordering countries mingled with the European theory of fortifications; 2) raise the value of the shared fort heritage to create joint forces to preserve it; 3) digitalize forts to make them publicly available as captured memory of current state.

It is planned to begin with traditional methods of study, among which are: a historical analysis using archival documents and morphological analysis.

Also, the TLS methods will be used for digitalization as it allows a continuous recording of objects with a high level of accuracy for further analysis and modeling.

Then an entirely new interdisciplinary research methodology will be introduced, namely, the transcultural interpretation of shared heritage that involves HBIM, novel typomorphological analysis, finite element analysis (FEA), material analysis, and statistics. The main foreseen results are the change of societal views on colonial forts.

The new shared view on the valuable structures and their digitalization for universal public access during centuries to come.