Developing a Pre-Audit for Public Representations of Chinese Tea Heritage: A Pilot Study of Selective Recordability

Public-facing heritage representations do not make all dimensions of living practice equally locatable. This pilot method-development study treats selective recordability as a theoretical proposition rather than a validated mechanism. It develops the Tea Heritage Representation Pre-Audit (THRPA), which distinguishes explicit evidence, analyst inference, source-level non-evidence and questions requiring situated validation. The purposively selected framework-development corpus comprises six heterogeneous sources serving normative, official-descriptive, historical-textual and practice-oriented functions; five adjacent sources test coding boundaries. These sources are evidence inputs, not equivalent forms of primary documentation or a representative sample of the literature on Chinese tea heritage. The nine-field pre-audit was applied to UNESCO’s 2022 public-facing tea element page. Separately, an independent university academic classified 27 fixed evidence units using a dated working codebook. Five codes met the final pragmatic within-corpus summary rule. The external exercise matched 24 of 27 reported unit configurations and 73 of 76 recorded status assignments under the dated instrument; the remaining three discrepancies involved two assignments concerning adverse mediation consequences and one concerning practitioner/community agency. For the UNESCO page, the baseline comprised four field-complete, three partial and two absent fields; the evidence-linked specification comprised seven field-complete and two absent fields. Published evidence strengthened the material, sensory and variation fields but did not supply use-specific authority or page-specific evidence of representational limits and a responsible revision route. The findings indicate a descriptive pattern consistent with selective recordability rather than a general mechanism. THRPA is a source-transparent pre-audit prototype for researchers and heritage professionals preparing public-facing representations. Further evaluation requires matched-genre comparison, independent extraction, practitioner review and prospective institutional use.