Pingyao, A One Hundred Year Old Egg and Monks with Rolexes

01/05/02

Today we found ourselves on a seventeen-seater bus with twenty-five other people, the driver a madman, the conductor a psychopath with scary insect eyes. I was seated alongside a fat man in green camouflage jacket who farted continuously throughout the journey until the crowded bus smelt like a one hundred year old egg. This was the bus ride to the fortified town of Pingyao.

The original reason for this little town's existence was money: it was home to the first bank in China. The reason for its existence now is exactly the same, money, although this time the business is tourism. The surrounding wall was begun in 827 BC. The wall was to keep raiding bandits away from the money-pots, and for a long time Pingyao was such an economic centre of importance, it was nicknamed 'Little Beijing'. Now, the town is protected by UNESCO, and is considered an important historical site of cultural heritage. One wonders if the fortified wall during ancient times hadn't proved more efficacious than the town's modern form of UNESCO protection, as being an important cultural heritage site now means that the raiders are not violent tribes on horseback, but armies of tourists flooding out from coaches and storming through the gates.

Today is Labour Day, the first day of the weeklong May national holiday. The narrow streets of Pingyao are heaving with people, shopping, taking photos, pushing, shoving, laughing and spitting, tour guides whistling and clapping their hands, coach upon coach pulling up outside the main gates in a haze of exhaust fumes to spew out their unruly load. The attractive, authentic Han dynasty buildings, with their intersecting inner courtyards, well-kept wooden decorative latticework and carvings, separated by rough cobbled streets, are subjected to a rampage of looting and pillaging quite unlike anything that had once endangered it in the past. You could almost hear the small town creaking under the weight of it, just one more coach load perhaps being the final straw, whereupon the town would collapse, implode, descend into the pits of pandemonium, brought down by its own helpless greed. Once such a beautiful, authentic and ancient place has been officially declared beautiful, authentic and ancient, it's the signal for its surrender.

The surreal thing is, the workers just keep on working. Apart from the population of the town who are actually involved in the tourist trade, every other person just goes about their daily business, cooking, hanging out washing, fixing bicycles, as crowds of mad tour groups fall over each other to take pictures of them. Tourists creep down narrow alleyways for a quick peek, stare into doorways and windows, explore private courtyards, and even go into people’s houses, thinking them exhibits when they're really just homes. At one stage, trying to escape the madding crowd, Clive and I found ourselves in the middle of a wedding party in a secluded courtyard, feeling like skeletons at the feast. Instead of inviting us to join them, the people quite rightly looked daggers at us until we slunk away. It must be strange to live, work, love and die in this place, under the careless scrutiny of absolute strangers. It reminded me of Luss, the small village where they shoot the popular soap opera Take the High Road, in Scotland. When filming is not in progress, tour groups from America, Canada, England, everywhere, are shown round this quaint little Scottish village while the residents, not actors but real people who happen to live there, just carry on regardless as if it's perfectly normal to be ogled at by a bus-load of Australian grannies while you're chopping carrots.

Perhaps because each tour group has only a limited amount of time, allotted to them by their commander-in-chief, the guide, not many of them had managed to scale the fortified walls, so that’s where Nick and I headed. We met an old man up top who hired out bicycles and we cycled round the perimeter of the ancient town. It took us only about an hour, but the tranquility, the fresher air, and most of all the stunning views of Pingyao below us, huddled ancient rooftops like sheep clustered in a pen during a storm, set against the immense dusty yellow flatlands, with mountains looming to all sides in the distance like protective shepherds, proved to be the best part of the day. The wall itself is ten metres high and constructed in the shape of a rough square. It has 72 watchtowers (to represent the 72 sages of China), and 3,000 parapets (standing for the disciples of Confucius). Below you the town lies in higgledy-piggledy criss-cross fashion, and you can see people on the flat rooftop gardens feeding livestock, washing vegetables, throwing sticks to dogs, cleaning machinery. When they look up and catch your eye, you’re left with a choice: hang your head in shame and shuffle off, or brazenly take a photo like a true, unabashed voyeur.

We arrived back at the Railway Hotel in Tai Yuan to find it taken over by a convention of maroon-cassocked monks, each looking identical with their shaven heads, shiny fake Rolex watches and white sports shoes, some of them Reebok, Mizuno or Nike. A monk with a Rolex watch? Weren't they meant to reject materialism and devote their time to inner contemplation? And wasn't a watch pointless anyway, as the monk should surely believe time immeasurable, as he would be reincarnated again and again into eternity, thus time becomes negated, their very idea of it infinite and circular? Maybe he needed a watch so he didn't miss his train when going on holiday. But, aren't holidays in themselves just a materialist construct, and a deviation from the contemplation of... whatever.