Overview

This pioneering book unlocks the political economy of language inside Beijing's 600-year-old palace--the Forbidden City. Through photographed signs, visitor questionnaires and ethnographic interviews with tourists, guards and multilingual guides, it demonstrates how every English plaque, menu and narrative script functions as a dual asset: an explicit commodity priced for sale (guides, audio tours, bilingual catering) and an implicit semiotic resource that converts imperial heritage into globally consumable experience. By rigorously distinguishing ""language as commodity"" from the processual ""commodification of language,"" the book advances sociolinguistic, tourism and heritage theory while offering a concise, classroom-ready analytical framework. Libraries and scholars of global English, Asian studies, cultural economy and language policy will welcome this empirically rich and accessibly written volume, which reveals how China's most iconic monument repackages its imperial past through the global medium of English as a lingua franca.

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9781036477646

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Rong Xiao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the National University of Defense Technology, China. She specializes in the sociolinguistics of tourism, focusing on how English is used, displayed, and commodified within Chinese heritage and tourism contexts. Drawing on fieldwork at major heritage sites such as the Forbidden City, she examines the discursive construction of national identities and the symbolic economies of language in global tourism.With a background in both applied linguistics and discourse analysis, Dr Xiao brings an interdisciplinary approach to her teaching and research. She has designed and taught courses on General English, Academic English, and Discourse Analysis, integrating real-world tourism and cultural data into her pedagogy. Her scholarship has appeared in international journals and edited volumes, contributing to critical debates on language commodification, cultural representation, and the political economy of tourism discourse.

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