Bridging Experiential Disjunction: Heritage Reconstruction, Visitor Engagement, and Sustainable Tourism in Chinese Classical Gardens

Although heritage reconstruction can effectively restore physical form, the regeneration of living cultural experience remains theoretically underexplored in heritage tourism scholarship. This study introduces the concept of post-reconstruction experiential disjunction (PRED)—the structural misalignment among reconstructed material form, historically embedded cultural scripts, and the embodied practices of contemporary visitors—and develops the Material–Script–Practice (MSP) framework around it. Taking Yuyuan Garden (愚园) in Nanjing as an empirical case, a mixed-methods design combines online discourse analysis, field observation, and a questionnaire survey (N = 300). Findings reveal that Cultural Script most strongly predicts disjunction mitigation—a four-item scale capturing visitors’ holistic sense of experiential connectivity (α = 0.832), followed by Material Form; Embodied Practice contributes comparatively little. Photographers show significantly lower mitigation levels than other groups, owing to structural conflicts between professional visual practice and the cultural logic of classical garden space. The MSP framework reveals a weighted hierarchy among its three dimensions: a finding that extends and empirically specifies the theoretical insights of Lefebvre’s spatial triad and Edensor’s heritage performance theory, neither of which typically foregrounds differential explanatory weight among their constituent elements. When cultural scripts offer accessible meaning pathways for visitors of diverse backgrounds, heritage spaces can move beyond formal reconstruction toward experiential reconstitution, sustaining the conditions for long-term heritage preservation.