Introducing cultural schema into heritage tourism map design: the case of ‘Suzhou Classical Gardens’ Narrative Map, China

Heritage tourism has been booming all around the world during the recent past. However, current heritage tourism maps have been locked into the traditional cartographic paradigms in standard formats and are thus incapable of exhibiting the local cultures and the stories behind them. To address this issue, this paper introduces the cultural schema theory into narrative cartographic design and proposes a novel theoretical framework for making heritage tourism maps. We use a typical ‘Suzhou Classical Gardens’ Narrative Map to demonstrate the usefulness and practicability of the proposed theoretical framework. We finally summarize five cartographic design guidelines for making heritage tourism maps. This study is believed to shed fresh light on cartographic design research.