This paper analyses urban entrepreneurialism in relation to the commodification of urban heritage in the context of China. The case study is Lijiang Old Town in Yunnan province. It is found that there are three markets through which profit is extracted from urban heritage: the tourist market, the real estate market and the capital market. These markets, ranging from simple to complex, reflect the Lijiang local government's innovative efforts to deepen the commodification of urban heritage and enhance local competitiveness. By discussing how profit is distributed, I argue that Lijiang's local government and its ruling elites have benefited more from tourist revenues than any other groups. An analysis of Lijiang's demographical displacement demonstrates that urban heritage is implicated in the complicated choices made by ordinary individuals in the face of political control and capital accumulation.

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Tourists have long been neglected in the literature on home and mobility, although they constitute a massive mobile population within and across national borders. Addressing this gap, this paper advances geography's critical engagement with home in relation to mobility and modernity, and questions the binary distinction between home and unhomeliness in tourist mobility. It focuses on the alienation of Chinese modernity and how one group of domestic tourists negotiates this alienation through their imagination and consumption of home in a popular tourist site (i.e. Lijiang, a World Heritage site in Yunnan province) within the context of China's transformation, which started in 1978. This paper has two objectives. First, it examines why home is woven into the touristic imagination of Lijiang; and second, it links tourists' personal experiences with China's broad sociospatial transformation in order to explore individuals' resistance against and compliance with modernity. I argue that the imagination and consumption of home generates intensely contradictory configurations of struggle that simultaneously push tourists towards an ideal of home for inner freedom and premodern paradise, yet pull them back into the whirling vortex of ‘modern’ life and commercial forces. The paper sheds light on micro‐geographies of people's lives in the context of China's rapid transformation.

ABSTRACT. Although “home” is an established topic in the literature, what home means for an in situ, non‐travelling population that nevertheless is confronted by the influx of great numbers of tourists and migrants is an important question that has not been widely researched. This article examines the construction and practice of home in a highly mobile world, in the case of Lijiang Ancient Town, a World Heritage site in Yunnan, China. Situating Lijiang in the context of China's emerging consumer society, this article has two objectives. First, I will sketch a conceptual framework within which to address the construction of home in relation to mobility, displacement and socioeconomic changes. The second objective is to examine the multiple ways in which Lijiang's town residents dwell in displacement. Even as Lijiang ancient town largely falls into the hands of migrant businesspersons, town residents employ spatial strategies to maintain a public–private boundary, reconcile themselves to living under the same roof with tourists, or forsake their homes for economic benefit. Hence, this article contributes to the geographies of everyday life by illustrating individuals' multiple forms of strategic rationalization in handling socio‐spatial transformation.