Malaysia is a developing nation of Southeast Asia. A few of their famous slogans reflect the diversity of its present ethnic groups in terms of language, customs and traditions inherited from past generations, ‘One Malaysia‘ and ‘Malaysia Truly Asia‘. Malaysia’s cultural fusion is the result of immigration, trade and cultural exchanges over many centuries with Arab nations, China, and India, where the arrival of the first foreigners brought along with them their wealth as well as their cultural heritage and religion. Presently, these ethnic groups still maintain their cultural traditions, but managed to come together to develop Malaysia’s unique and contemporary diverse heritage.

A great challenge for sustaining intangible cultural heritage is in finding appropriate forms and methods to document and communicate its inherently ephemeral aspects. Globalization in tandem with rapid political, social, and environmental change around the world is placing both cultural and material heritage at risk in ways that societies, governments, and global institutions could not anticipate nor prevent. Recently, however, digital recording and display technologies have opened up powerful new possibilities for the representation, preservation, transmission, and exhibition of immaterial experiences, including the reconstruction of lost places, vanished objects, and embodied and ephemeral practices, signaling a new way to imagine and transmit the memory of the world.

Trần Thương Temple Festival in Nhân Đạo Commune, Lý Nhân District, Hà Nam Province\nTrần Thương temple - one of the three largest and holiest temples in the Red River delta is dedicated to worship Trần Quốc Tuấn or Trần Hưng Đạo, a supreme commander of Viet Nam during the Trần dynasty and his army to defeat the Mongolian – Yuan invaders in the 13th century.\n

In 1995, pangalay dance guru Ligaya Fernando-Amilbangsa stopped teaching. The lack of diligence among students of traditional dance had caused her to lose her enthusiasm. Hopeful dancers requesting lessons at first failed to convince her to change her mind. But in January 1999 she decided to teach again, having collected a long list of applicants in the intervening years. Thus began a weekly community dance workshop in her suburban home in Antipolo City, Mega Manila. For those who joined the weekly sessions, learning from a dance master was exhilarating, especially on the eve of a new millennium. In 2000 the excitement over pangalay and other traditional dances of the Sulu Archipelago inspired the motley group of dance students under teacher Ligaya to formally establish the AlunAlun Dance Circle (ADC), with their mentor as company artistic director. ADC is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving, conserving, and propagating pangalay, which, according to teacher Ligaya, has “the richest movement vocabulary among all Philippine dances, and the living link to the dance cultures in Asia.”

The distinction between natural hazards (such as earthquakes or droughts) and disasters (which are the impact of these hazards on human populations and infrastructure) has been clearly defined since at least the 1970s. No disaster is entirely natural. Instead, hazards exploit existing vulnerabilities, including the ways in which people are exposed to their impacts, and the capacity of communities and states to respond to hazard events and to prepare for future disasters. Disasters related to natural hazards, or to anthropogenic hazards such as nuclear pollution, are classed as emergencies, along with epidemic disease and armed conflict. In the context of cultural heritage, all these emergencies share a dual aspect – the impact of the emergency on culture and heritage, and the capacity of culture and heritage to respond to and limit the impacts of the emergency.

Samarkand, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the oldest urban centers, has long storied relationship with music. Archaeological findings, such as the 3,000-year-old flute discovered around the old city, tell us that music culture has ancient roots in Central Asia. Additional studies provide evidence that the ud, a medieval variant of a lute, was spread throughout the orient much earlier than it was in Europe. One of the biggest influences on the music culture of Samarkand was its unique position as a crossroad of the Great Silk Road, a situation that allowed the melding of musical traditions from throughout Asia. In support and recognition of its ancient traditions in music and its position as a crossroad, President Islam Karimov of the Republic of Uzbekistan initiated an international music festival called Sharq Taronalari (Melodies of the Orient).

Pencak Silat is an intangible cultural heritage that allows a community to express its culture and, more importantly, is a vehicle that allows practitioners to manifest the best values passed to them by their teachers for the benefit of all in society. It is practiced in countries in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. However, not much research has been done on the history and culture of Pencak Silat in Singapore. The project entitled “Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage: Documenting and Recording the History, Culture and Memory of Malay Martial Arts Groups in Singapore,” led by Dr. Mohamed Effendy from the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, and sponsored by the National Heritage Board of Singapore, is therefore a timely one. It aims to safeguard the history and culture of Malay martial groups of Singapore by documenting and recording their past and cultural activities. Thus, the project provides the inspiration and backdrop for this paper, which will describe how Pencak Silat connects communities in Singapore to their historical origins. The paper will also analyze how Pencak Silat has contributed to the social and cultural success of the Singapore Malay community today, and lastly, it will examine to what extent Pencak Silat values can be used to further enhance the development of a community.

Co-orgarnized by ICHCAP and Hue Monuments Conservation Centre (HMCC), this year’s Asia-Pacific ICH NGO Conference was held in Hue, Vietnam under the theme of ICH NGOs towards Sustainable Development of Communities.

This networking program is based on experiences and achievements obtained from the collaborative work of UNESCO-ICHCAP in the living heritage field in Central Asia over the last decade.\n\nFor reference, the networking program comes on the heels of a three-party MoU signed by ICHCAP and organizations in Uzbekistan in 2019 and was followed by a Central Asia network meeting in Kazakhstan in 2019. In 2020, ICHCAP in cooperation with International Institute for Central Asian Studies (IICAS), conducted a survey project about ICH festivals along the Silk Roads, particularly with countries along the steppe route. Regarding the survey result, ICHCAP, IICAS and Korea-Central Asia Cooperation Forum Secretariat of the Korea Foundation (KF) held an online webinar and a strategic meeting to consider the need for realizing the multilateral values of Silk Roads-related cooperation

By applying an evidence-based approach, this paper seeks to share the case of the multinational inscription of Ong Chun Ceremony nominated by China and Malaysia through a fourfold “storyline” to sketch out how the joint action was initiated, developed, and finalized from the pre- to the post-nomination phases. It tries to provide a reflective narrative-interpretation of the community-driven nomination on vision, methodology, and pathway that helped to conceive targeted goals for sustainable effectiveness of joint safeguarding of ICH, including recent community interaction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside a discussion on the way forward to synergistic cooperation across the East Asian sub-region.

Intangible cultural heritage presents an important form of living cultural heritage. It covers fundamental, yet extremely vulnerable aspects of living culture and tradition embodied in the spiritual life, traditional knowledge, skills, and practices of communities. It presents one of the most vivid and colourful forms in which the world’s cultural diversity is expressed and preserved.