Layers, Palimpsests, and the Weight of a Billion Footsteps

I had a five day vacation this week, in honor of China's National Day on October 1st. As the many red and gold banners around town remind me, this is the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. It seems so small an age, 62, for a country with such a long history.

Now, five days off, you'd think I would have many, many stories of wild travels to tell. However, I chose to stay in Guangzhou and get to know my city a little better. That is how I found myself, Monday afternoon, walking down Beijing Lu, a pedestrian shopping street. Let me give you an idea of it's age: it's been a paved road for 1,000 years or so. How can we know this? Ah, well, that's the neat part. In the middle of the street is a display of an excavation of the road (you are literally looking down into the excavation), showing the different paving layers of the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties.

On Tuesday, I actually left the city and went to Foshan. Now, the fun bit about Foshan is that you can actually ride the subway all the way there. There is an inter-city line, and the round trip only cost me 12.5 kuai. Foshan is currently a city of just under a million residents, and is a lovely place known for the Foshan Ancestral Temple, a few very picturesque Ming-Qing gardens, and as one of the ancient pottery centers of China. I visited the temple, where I saw a lion dance and a bit of Cantonese opera as well as some lovely architecture (and posed for a picture for a tween-aged girl and her sister, like the celebrity foreigner I am). Then I caught the bus out to the Nanfeng Ancient Kiln. This is a dragon kiln that has been in continuous use for 500 years. There is quite the nice area built around it to explore the history of ceramics.

Ancient streets and ancient kilns. Ancient temples and ancient culture. China is ancient! But China is also modern. I can see three high-rise construction sites from my window. I can catch an inter-city subway. I can watch Jet Li star in a re-imaging of the White Snake story at the cinema on a millenia-old street, in a city that has been continuously occupied for two thousand years.

This is what fascinates me about China: not so much the juxtaposition of old and new, not modernity with Chinese characteristics or the exoticism of the Chinese past, but the the fact that China is layers upon layers. The current "layer" might be 62 this year, but we don't have to dig very far (or at all) to find more history than you can use. At Nanfeng Kiln, there was a mural made of broken pottery shards from the last four dynasties. On my way to Beijing Lu, I found a Buddhist Temple full of intricate and beautiful sculptures and murals, and it wasn't even on my map.

China has, and has always had, a careful relationship with history. New dynasties were always sure to begin by writing a new official history (which clearly showed their right to power, incidentally) and then destroying the source materials, so that the official history was the only history. Modern China is careful to acknowledge their grand history, but equally careful to disavow the destructive nature of feudalism.

The way China treats historical sites and artifacts can be shocking, at first. Sections of the Great Wall have been re-paved to be easier (safer) for tourists. The Three Gorges Dam project permanently flooded historic sites. Beijing Lu was partially excavated and a little exhibit made, but there is still a McDonalds thirty meters away.

This is the way it is, and I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. China is a living, breathing, constantly evolving place. This is home to more than a billion people. They are aware of their historical legacy (how can they not be? it is, as we've seen, all around them) and every day, they are adding to that history. Oh, but it's a heady feeling to be part of this world.