The sustainability of sacred mountains has attracted the attention of both international communities and scholars. However, few studies have focused on the sustainability mechanisms of sacred mountains in the cultural dimension. This article presents a case study of the Wu Yue, i.e., five sacred mountains in China, which is endowed with the highest status and has been a sustainable cultural heritage for more than two thousand years. Drawing on the approaches of structuralist geography and semiotics, this article seeks to systematically interpret the inheritance mechanism of the Wu Yue. Two major conclusions are drawn. First, based on the approach of structuralist geography, the spatial structure of the Wu Yue can be viewed as a surface structure that is determined by a deep structure: the Five Elements Philosophy. Despite the relocation of the South Yue and the North Yue, each mountain of the Wu Yue has almost always been located in the five cardinal directions of the territory in accordance with the Five Elements Philosophy; this fact shows that the deep structure is crucial to maintaining the sustainability of the Wu Yue. Second, based on the semiotic approach, the sign of the sacred mountains has three levels. It is the third level of the sign, consisting of the spatial pattern as signifier and the Five Elements Philosophy as signified, that distinguishes the Wu Yue from other sacred mountains and has allowed them to be inherited for many generations. Poststructuralism can explain the Chinese semiotics of sacred mountains, but it is difficult to interpret the sustainability of the Wu Yue.

The notion of place has raised great concern within weaving tourism studies in recent decades. Nevertheless, dialectical indigenous considerations of Edward Relph’s phenomenological concepts of place and placelessness are still insufficient, particularly in non-Western countries. Phenomenology, as an immersive approach, provides an open and descriptive examination of the diverse perceptions and constitutive meanings of a place. From a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to explore the dynamic grasping of place and placelessness in tourism experiences. Twenty-four tourists participated in the research in Marco Polo Plaza in Italian Style Town, a concession for a particular historical period, in Tianjin, China. The findings suggest that tourists’ experiences could be ordered into three themes: (1) encountering a place labelled recreation and entertainment, (2) encountering an exotic heterogeneous place, and (3) encountering a lived place in the lifeworld. These results emphasize that place and placelessness are intertwined paradoxically beyond the binary, and such a nonlinear, dialectical, and subtle dimension is the possible inspiration that the phenomenological perspective brings to tourism research. Drawing on the inevitability of tourists’ diverse perceptions, we advance that an open multi-sensuous engagement and inclusive geographic practices offer an insight into the understanding of sustainability.

How do people evaluate the transformation of a local music scene under tourism? Using Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory, Manuel Castells’ identity theory and Erik Cohen’s authentication theory, we build a framework to judge the authenticity of Naxi music in Lijiang, China, based on interviews, literature analysis and performance analysis. The conclusions are as follows. First, there are significant differences in authenticity among the three stages of Naxi music, as defined by Lacan’s theory. Second, we modify Erik Cohen’s authentication concept from the perspective of Lacan and read the spirit of persistence and innovation as “hot” authentication in the postmirror stage. Naxi musicians have clear project identity, as defined by Manuel Castells. Project identity means that they do not follow the mirror image of tourists blindly and pay attention to music and their own development. This research contributes to the sustainable development of intangible cultural heritage in tourism.