Center of the World

Quick (?) update on my life.

I spent two weeks in Kunming, reading, researching, writing, and happily coffee shop bumming. My main concern has been learning all I can about Shaxi, the small farming village where I harvested rice and became entranced by the town's ancient architecture. Shaxi is located in a valley that boasts a ca. 500 BCE bronze culture and a centuries-long tradition of international cultural and economic exchange with Tibet and India via a number of trade routes alternately named the Southwestern Silk Road, Tibet-Burma-Yunnan route, and Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan. I've been interested in Shaxi's history, as well as its developments in the 21st century, which have consisted mainly of sustained material heritage preservation efforts spearheaded by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Shaxi has an old market square which was a major hub for the Tea Horse Caravan; the square includes an old Confucian theater and a Ming Dynasty temple called Xingjiao, which was used until the last 100 or so years for the practice of Azhali, an esoteric sect of Buddhism based on Tibetan tantric practices but locally and culturally specific to the Bai ethnic minority of Yunnan province. The temple was converted into an administrative building by Communist officials during the Cultural Revolution but has been restored by the joint Swiss-Chinese Shaxi Rehabilitation Project and now once again enjoys pride of place in Shaxi's market square, a site of tourist visitation fronted by two imposing demonic "guardian king" statues (pictures forthcoming, if I ever remember my Flickr password).

I did have some much needed decompression time in Kunming, during which time I thought a lot about cultural heritage preservation. As an Art History/Archaeology double major, I study aesthetic objects in their ancient and modern contexts. Since I've been in China, I've realized that I am very interested in the contemporary uses that such objects are put to, the various "agencies" they reflect. China is development-hungry, and in most places where the Cultural Revolution did not totally destroy ancient art and architecture, these are being restored mainly to serve the purpose of attracting domestic and international tourists. In the interviews I've conducted with government officials and the head of the Jianchuan County Cultural Relic Preservation Institute, there has been no distinction made between "cultural relics" and "cultural heritage." Both are used to refer to the materials left from a history that is distant not only in terms of the time that has passed, but also the ideological turns that have made the Four Olds of Chinese antiquity an object to be destroyed for the Communists and an object to be developed by contemporary entrepreneurs intent on collecting tourist cash. Little attention is payed to the indigenous populations whose history this is, the minorities and rural people who have a direct lineal connection to these cultural artifacts but who are being displaced by the business-savvy urban immigrants who have swooped in on towns such as Shaxi, attracted by the economic prospects of development and at best only marginally interested in the cultural ramifications of heritage revitalization. I came to Shaxi two days ago, and I am in fact writing this on a laptop borrowed from Allen, a Chengdu native whose English skills were honed in Switzerland and whose bar in the market square is only the most recent link in the chain of non-Shaxi, non-Bai development of the town.

So that's where I am and what I'm doing. There is one other American here, a student on my program who is studying traditional Bai medicine (the Bai ethnic minority composes the majority of Shaxi's very poor rice farmers). Last night in this remote farm town we ate Thanksgiving dinner with our Chinese friend Nancy, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Hong Kong banker and a Taiwanese hotel owner. Afterwards, we enjoyed fine Chilean wine with a group of Swiss delegates and an Indian civil engineer who's been working in Zurich for five years. That's globalization.