Research Projects

Delta on the Move: Tracking Nature and Culture in the Greater Bay Area 1800 – 2021

(Funded under Seed Fund for Strategic Interdisciplinary Research Scheme 202021)

Principal Investigator

John D. Wong, Professor, Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Total Fund Awarded

HKD 229,700

Project Duration

36 months

Project Description

The “Delta on the Move” project offers humanistic explanations of the global rise and significance of the Greater Bay Area (GBA) as China’s special economic zone, and provides clues for its future directions. The project highlights human efforts in shaping nature, crafting institutions, and fashioning culture in the historical and ongoing processes that turn the water-based ecosystem of the region into “land.” Generations have built cultural, social, political, and economic networks within and beyond the region forging identities that have been simultaneously diverse and unifying. The project studies the intertwined processes of “becoming” the GBA through four research themes on human ecology, business institutions, religious circulations, and cultural heritage and refashioned identities.