“Collective memory” emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century. The scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory and Pierre Nora’s introduction “Between Memory and History”. Each of these texts identified memory as a primitive or sacred form opposed to modern historical consciousness. In recent years, scholarly attention has been shifting to the cultural processes. It has become increasingly apparent that the memories that are shared within generations and across different generations are the product of public acts of remembrance. In this essay, the author attempts to distinguish four layers of cultural identities in the 150-year-old history of China since 1840, by having recourse to the transformation processes of the Western material and cosmological beliefs, with two central questions in mind: (1) how are these layers transmitted or preserved? (2) To what extent have they been accepted in that time society?