Linguistic Landscapes, Hospitality, and the Making of Tourist Space at West Lake, China

Tourist destinations intersect language, space, and power in place-making. Drawing on social and cultural geography, this article examines how linguistic landscapes (LL) operate as relational infrastructures through which tourist space is made, governed, and experienced. Using Hangzhou’s West Lake—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—as a case study, it conceptualizes multilingual signage as material socio-spatial practices mediating hospitality, belonging, and state authority. The study comprises visual documentation, policy analysis, interviews, and a 15-year digital review corpus (2010–2026). The findings reveal that West Lake’s LL manifests as a contested “semiotic interface” driven by translation and interaction clashes between top-down power governance and bottom-up tourist agency. While authorities enforce top-down spatial ordering rooted in Chinese dominance, selective hospitality, and national identity, tourists exert active interpretive agency. International and domestic visitors counter rigid structural regimes by articulating practical multilingual demands, decoding typographic materiality and calligraphic intertextuality, and generating experiential narratives of cultural exploration. Ultimately, through the interface where official rigid standards collide with unofficial signage flexibility, these actors coproduce a multiscalar tourist place. The article reframes the LL as a relational infrastructure accommodating both macroideological scaling and microaffective productions of place.