Producing a Heritage Campus: Heritagization and Recursive Spatial Governance of “Jiageng Architecture” at Xiamen University

Research on historic campuses explains how heritage values guide change, but rarely how the categories that authorize intervention are themselves produced and transformed through spatial practice. This article examines how “Jiageng architecture,” a heritage category named after Xiamen University’s founder Tan Kah Kee, came to govern land, space, and building in the university’s historic core. Through archival analysis, thematic coding of the founder’s writings in comparison with later texts, morphological analysis, and process tracing, it follows the category from its naming through five interventions: the conservation of a listed complex, the reopening of the original sports field to the sea, the façade adaptation of three later buildings, a new complex beside a lake added later, and a new Science and Arts Center. Heritagization condensed a heterogeneous building history into a founder-centered style, and later attributions of intention outweighed the founder’s recorded reasons concerning cost, use, and materials. The built results were absorbed back into the category by attribution rather than by resemblance, with the visual canon returning more readily than relational continuity or the founder’s rationales, and one completed intervention could also become a model for later planning. The article conceptualizes this loop as recursive spatial governance, arising where a university interprets, builds, and recognizes its own heritage. It provides an observable account of how a heritage category is remade by its own products, and a basis for keeping that process open to outside judgment.