They can build on a massive scale, unthinkable by other cultures, but they can also tear it all down again at frightening speed. I know it’s a crass generalization, and not my first, but so little of China’s long history is still standing I can’t help but make the assertion. Often when it is standing, you find it’s just a replica of something that was destroyed earlier, often several times, and always for no apparent reason. The Cultural Revolution and the vandalism of the Red Guards is just a recent, and comparatively mild, example of the China’s periodic lapses into a destructive insanity.
This is not the same the world over. When the Goths sacked Rome, they left most of it standing; the Egyptians may have stolen anything valuable from the pharos’ tombs, given half a chance, but they left the Pyramids standing; the Burmese, Thai’s and Cambodians never flattened the temples of Angkor Wat; the Spanish conquistadores would do anything for gold, but they saw no need to flatten Aztec and Maya cities, for the most part; Tsar Peter the Great may have hated Moscow, but he didn’t flatten it and start again, he went off to build a new city and left Moscow alone.
However, I’ll stop here, as I really am talking through my nether regions, so to speak, but it seems that to me. Let’s get back to the great Qin.
Fortunately, for the emperor, the peasants couldn’t find the entrance shaft to his tomb, hidden in a mountain, so they never laid their hands on his most valuable loot. We went to a replica of the tomb, which modern archaeologists have seen, and it makes Lenin’s Mausoleum look like a pauper’s grave, but I suppose Lenin would be glad to hear it. His coffin is in the centre of the enormous circular vault-like tomb, and the coffins of his favourite concubines are buried into walls around him. These lucky beauties were allowed to swallow poison rather than being buried alive. Bloody favouritism, eh? There are jewels everywhere and more gold than you could shake a stick at. There are also rivers of toxic lead and mercury, which is why tour groups can’t see the original, or that what they told us.
I’ve always felt cheated by replicas, but the Chinese in the group didn’t seem to mind at all. I’ve noticed this before about Chinese-they seem to see no difference between a replica and the real thing. China is littered by parks where you can see replicas of everything. Near where I used to live in Zhuhai, there’s a park with replicas of famous structures in China (the Great Wall, the Summer Palace etc.), and nearby there’s another park with replicas of famous foreign buildings (the Louvre, Buckingham Palace etc). My students told me once, without a trace of irony or sarcasm, that it’s more convenient this way, as you can see all the places at once without having to travel around a lot, and you only have to pay one entrance fee. As if to prove their point, near the tomb of Emperor Qin, there’s even a replica of a pyramid and a sphinx, so you don’t have to bother going to Egypt!
The nearest you can get to the real tomb is to stand on the hill which it was dug into. From the top of the hill, upon the mausoleum’s completion, you could once see all 25km of the great emperor’s magnificent mausoleum complex; an eternal necropolis, walled in and an eternal reminder of his greatness. Today, you can see absolutely nothing, because nothing survived-just a small dirty factory of two and some pig farming peasants.
It reminded me of a poem by Shelley, one of the few poems I’ve ever really liked. I think Shelley was traveling around Libya, and he came across the stump of a once-great statue with only half a leg left over it. Inscribed on the statue, he read the following:
“ ‘I am Ozymandius
King of Kings
Look on my Works
Ye Mighty
And Despair’
Nothing else remained
On the lone and level
The sand stretched far away”
I suppose I could have spent more time in Xian. There were tombs aplenty left to visit, and temples galore, or perhaps they were just replicas, but I was anxious to get to Beijing. We visited other places in Xian, but as I write this two week’s later, back home in Bangkok, I can’t even remember what they were. I suppose this shows how little impression they made on me.
I do remember my cold was getting worse, and rivers of phlegm were turning my sinuses into volcanoes. The dry and dusty air, and the truly awful Chinese cigarettes and fake Western cigarettes (one Marlboro packet’s health warning read ‘Smiking dimages your hill’) were making me cough like a moose. I wanted to move on, believing for no sane reason, that I’d feel better in Beijing. I felt like a shark, which like all fish, must keep moving to breath.
“If you don’t keep moving, you die,” I said to Sandra out of the blue on the way to the train station, trying to sound enigmatic.
“Don’t forget your bag again,” she replied.
Beijing
Beijing was, I must admit, a disappointment to me. Capital cities are normally where I orefer to be, as they usually contain both the best and the worst that any city has to offer. However, Beijing failed to impressed. If I had to choose one word to describe the place, it would be ‘grey.’ From the weather, to the buildings, to the people, to the ‘sights.’ They’re all grey, or at least, that’s how it appeared to me, but maybe that’s just the mood I was in. A whopping ten million people call Beijing home, and no doubt they would be pretty outraged by my one-word adjective description, but I refuse to wax lyrical about a place that did nothing for me.
The municipality of Beijing covers an area the size of Belgium. I know Belgium’s a pretty small country, and fairly grey too, come to think of it, but having a city the size of a country is no small feat. The train took a long time to get from the suburds to the centre, and passed row after row of tower blocks, each one more faceless than the last. I have read the Beijing used to be a lot grimmer, but the city government have been sprucing it up in preparation for the 2008 olynpics. I don’t want to imagine what it looked like before, but they’ve still a long way to go before I could describe the place as beautiful, or even pleasant.
Even Tiananmen square was a disappointment. From here Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic in 48, and for Mao’s funeral, a million people crammed themselves into this square, and many were crushed to death in the streets around it. It enters the western mind as the place where the democracy protesters were brought to heel in 89, and learned how fragile democracy is when confronted by the power of a tank. “Power,” Mao proclaimed, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The barrel gun of a tank, therefore, must be extra powerful.
I had expected something equivalent to Red Square in Moscow, where a sense of history seems to seep from every cobblestone, but Tiananmen was just an enormous slab of concrete, like an enormous empty car park, devoid of any feeling. Troops of Chinese tour groups waddled around it, each group wearing a different colour baseball cap, and led by tour guide leaders waving small rectangular flags, armed with tiny quacking electronic megaphones, leading their pack around the square, like a mother duck leads its chicks, in a V-formation. Near the centre of the sqare, things got too crowded for a classic V-formation, and the tour groups took on the air of penguins; huddled into each other for protection against the cold wind, all looking in this Antarctica of Tiananmen for somewhere to lay their eggs before Winter set in and the snow started to fall.
The grey drizzly sky was the same colour as the paving slabs, and I wondered if you could get ‘concrete blindness’ in the same way you can get ‘snow blindness’. Even the enormous Great Hall of the People, a Stalinist classic and home to the rubber-stamp parliament, failed to arouse my interest.
Being of a morbid disposition, we had wanted to see Mao’s embalmed corpse in his Mausoleum, but he was not receiving visitors that day, so we went back the next day. We got there fairly early, but there was already a queue the length of the great Wall, snaking around the square like a giant Python, and controlled with difficulty by guards armed with those omnipresent electronic megaphones at 10-metre intervals, using them like whips to stop the queue from disintegrating into a heaving mob, which is the natural state of any ‘queue’ in China.
We were about to join the queue, nonetheless, but we were not allowed to bring our backpacks in. I guess Mao had a phobia about backpacks, or something. In the spirit of ‘fang bien’ (convenience), your bags must be checked in at a building off the square. I couldn’t see a queue outside, but it was so far away, I could hardly see it at all, and I was sure there was an queue somewhere, or even worse a heaving scrum of barking dingos, and I just couldn’t face it. We wanted to come back the next day, but ever anxious to please and make things as convenient as possible, the authorities had decided not to put him on view the next day either.
The contrast between the massive lines of devotees for Mao and the couple of hundred tourists and aging die-hard communists who had gone to see Lenin when I visited him was striking. Indeed, I have heard that Lenin may even be removed from Red Square and sent to somewhere anonymous in his native Petersburg. First he lost Leningrad back to its founder, Peter the Great, and now he might even lose his mausoleum. In the league of ex-communist dictators, Mao is streets ahead. Unlike Lenin, Stalin and the other once great communist leaders in Russia, Mao has never been officially discredited and is still a hero of the party and the people in China. His ‘Great Leap Forward’, which was supposed to transform China into a first world almost overnight, but only succeeded in causing a 100-million dead famine, and destroying industry, are rarely mentioned here, and if they are referred to, natural calamities are to blame for the ‘serious food shortages’ (i.e. famine), and obscure references are made to excesses of revolutionary zeal to explain the Cultural Revolution, usually blamed on Mao’s wife and the other Gang of Four. The official party line is the 70 per cent of what Mao did was good, and 30 per cent was bad. The 30 per cent that was bad is never expanded upon. The Party needs to give the people a hero, and Mao is allowed to occupy that role posthumously. Dead, at least, there is a limit to how much harm the middle class son of a money-lending kulak can do. In any case, we didn’t get to see him, and I can’t see him crying over it.
Although mao was playing hard to get, we had no problems entering the Forbidden city, pleasure dome of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The price was 10 dollars, but a century ago, the price would have been decapitation for me, if I was lucky, and prostitution for Sandra. The ‘Son of Heaven’ no longer exists, so I was safe from the chopping block, but I did fear for my life a couple of times, as surging tour groups threatened to squash me as the collided, meshed into one, and later reformed.
The Forbidden City is full of temples, and the ornate Chinese roves, the stone lions guarding the entrance and the courtyards are beautiful, I suppose, but I’d seen so many of them already by this stage that ‘temple fatigue’ was beginning to set in, and I didn’t appreciate them as much as I should have. You can’t enter any of the temples, but you can peer into their dark interiors from a railing at the front entrance, and I think I made out a throne or two. To win this prize, however, you really have to fight like a warrior. Around each front door, a surging mass of Chinese tourists push, elbow and snarl at each other for prime position. They fight first to get to the door, and then they fight to stay there. A weak, weasel-bodied westerner with the instincts of a rabbit, like myself, has little hope, but I was carried on the wave of a tour group or two past some of the doors. I held my camera above the wave and wondered if my health insurance police covered being trod underfoot.
The Forbidden City that stands today isn’t that old-about 150 years, for the most part. The Palace was repeatedly damaged and rebuild, or just destroyed by the emperor so he could refashion it in his image. Often it was burnt to the ground by powerful court eunuchs eager to get rich on kickbacks from awarding the reconstruction contracts.
On the day we visited, scaffolding was everywhere, and there was so much renovation work going on that I wondered if they had decided to rebuild it from scratch again. I suppose they were just making it look newer, as the idea of old historic building actually looking old is anathema to the Chinese. Even renovating (as near as damn it to replacing it, as far as I could tell) an old building is unusual in China. Usually they just rip it down and stick a faceless office block in its place. This is progress. Old=bad; New=Good. If an alien was to do a whistle-stop tour of Chinese cities, he might be forgiven for thinking that the whole place hadn’t existed until 1950, that it had all sprung into existence out of nothing. In a society that boasts the longest uninterrupted history on the planet, I find this saddening.
The following day, we paid a visit to the Great Wall. Surly this, I thought, had to be old. We were determined to avoid another trip to Tour Group Hell, so foolishly believing our sadistic guide book, which I was coming to believe had it in for me, we spend well over an hour getting to a bus station in north Beijing, using Beijing’s run-down metro, where we had hoped to simply hop on a bus and hop off near the wall.
In the event, this proved impossible. The 937 bus drivers simply would not let us get on, and the more we tried, the more vigorously they waved us away to a nearby bus station. Once there, we were quickly ushered into a nearby and almost full coach. It was full of Chinese people, with not a foreigner in sight, so there was still a small hope I hadn’t been abducted into Tour Group Hell. However, my hopes were dashed when the bus pulled away, and the yellow electronic megaphone came out. An over-excited guide began blabbering into it, and kept it up all day, careful not to let a moment’s silence allow any form of conscious thought. My only consolation was that this running commentary was in Chinese only, which somehow make it more bearable, and when the batteries were wearing down on her megaphone, almost ignorable.
The tour went on all day, from 10 to 7, and only about two hours were spend at what we had actually come to see, The Great Wall. The rest of the trip was spend in shopping breaks, restaurant breaks, toilet breaks, and some more shopping breaks for good measure. Many compulsory shopping trips are cleverly disguised as something else, such as the educational visit to the ‘Alternative Chinese Medicine Institute for Well-Being and Inner Harmony,’ which was basically just an excuse to try to flog over-priced old roots to the witless. We managed to escape the lecture/sales pitch on the grounds that we wouldn’t have understood a word of it, and were allowed to go off and play in the courtyard instead. On the way there, we passed a cigarette stand, which made me chuckle- a cigarette shop in a health food store. I smoked a couple under the non-smoking sign in the courtyard while waiting for my flock to finish the lecture. No-smoking signs are where many Chinese men choose to smoke, indicating a healthy disrespect for authority otherwise lacking in the Chinese.
And, of course, there were other ‘attractions’ To be enjoyed. One of these was the Tomb os the 13 Ming emperors. Everything, except for a replica of a coffin, had been removed and was out of sight of prying tourist eyes, so the tomb was about as interesting as a trip to an underground metro station, except there wasn’t a train to get you out of there. We were also shepherded around a wax museum, in which wax figures, as life like as an action man, depicted important historical scenes from the Ming dynasties; such as Emperor Ming the Merciless interrogating and personally beating General Treacherous *******, or Emperor *** Maniac consorting with common prostitutes, or savage barbarians slaughter Emperor hapless and rape his concubines. These were the highlights of the exhibits, and it might have been interesting in a dull sort of way if we had been on our own, but we were just herded like cattle from one room to the next, and our guide repeatedly reminded us to read the English translation at the side of each exhibit, which appeared to have been translated by a machine with the aid of an ill-educated monkey, while she megaphoned the Chinese tour group in an ecstatic frenzy. In the other viewing rooms, immediately behind and in front of us, other megaphones could be heard directing fellow flocks of sheep around the well worn hills of the Ming Wax Works Extravaganza. We had to spend longer than really necessary in each exhibit while we waited for each sheep to have their picture taken with Emperor What’s-His-Name. In an uncharitable moment, I toyed with idea of using my cigarette lighter to torch a couple of minor figures, and hoped the fire alarm would bring the trip to a premature end, but I realized this was the right way to vent my frustration at always being stuck in tour groups against my wishes.
As for the Great Wall, which we eventually reached, I’ll have to disagree with President Nixon, who was escorted here by Mao in his ‘We Hate the Russians too, so Let’s be Friends’ tour of seventy-something, and academically commented that “it sure is a great wall.” It is not, I plainly state, a great wall. It is a mediocre replica of what was once a great wall.The real wall, which you can just about make out when the Disneyland reconstruction ends, is little more than rubble. It’s a complete mystery to me how you can see this structure from space. I could barely make the real thing out with the help of a powerful video camera zoom lens. Like so many other ‘historical’ sights in China, it is a new, tour-group friendly replica and frankly uninteresting.
The scenery around the wall, however, is quite interesting, in a bleak sort of way. I tried to imagine Ghengis Khan and his Mongolian hoerdes sweeping over the hills and attacking the wall, with loyal imperial troops doggedly defending each inch of it tooth and nail, to protect the motherland from the barbarians. In reality, however, it didn’t happen like that. The wily Khan simply send emissaries to different parts of the wall until he found some corrupt official he could bribe to let him over unmolested. “Any wall,” he saw, “is only as good as the men defending it.”
Walls, it seems to me, from the great Wall, to the Maginot Line, to Star Wars, to the walls the American middle class have taken to building around their suburban castles, are not an effective means of defense. The effort required to build, maintain and defend them greatly exceeds the force required to overcome them, and those behind the wall become complacent and inward looking. China itself was to become inward looking, and as the Qing royal court amused itself behind the walls of the Forbidden City, believing it had frozen time, the West progressed and moved through enlightenment and then an industrial revolution. Centuries of self-enforced isolation had left it unprepared for Western and Japanese aggression, and it is only now regaining its position as the world’s number one country.
To return to our trip, it had come to an end. We had intended to finish in Shanghai, but we just couldn’t face it. No doubt this decision will haunt us each time we see Shanghai on the TV, and we remember that we had enough time and money to go there, but didn’t. We were tired, plain and simple, and longed to return home to Thailand.
The three words which most characterize Thai society are ‘sanuk’ (fun) ‘sabai’ (comfortable) and ‘saduak’ (convenient). I wanted to return to this world. If I were to choose three words that characterize Chinese culture, they would be diligence, family and conformity. I had started this trip as a sinophile, and while I had not finished it as a sinophobe, I had definitely seen the darker side of China. I did not want to be part of world in which unstinting hard work and adherence to social norms were values prized above all others. As the plane left Beijing airport, I was filled with a sense of foreboding about what the 21st century, China’s century, had in store, and how I was unlikely to fit into it.
It is tempting to believe that Western cultural dominance in the world is permanent, that history is an evolutionary process and that the western concepts of liberalism and freedom have defeated all others, and are now set in stone, immutable and victorious. This is not the case. In historical terms, the 200 years of Western dominance are just a historical blip. For most of the history of civilization, it has been China who led the way. The centralized state, gunpowder and printing, among many others, are Chinese inventions.
The return of China to global dominance, or Asian hegemony at the very least, is just a matter of time. The Chinese dragon is awake and coming out of its lair.
All hail the Might Han |
