Friday 3 November 2023

The Golden Tour - an odd sort of alchemy

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The clothes have arrived so I'm playing around with costume and sound. This is usually more of an afterthought but with this tour I want to embrace style above content so this comes first. It's clearly a dumb look. This offers me some cover and is entertaining too. Next is sound and the dumbest obvious sound I found so far is this:


Along the way a quite decent image also popped up by accident. I might just have to use this sun reflection in the mirrored shades effect somehow. It's rather good.


In all of this madness I did also manage to make a site visit and work out the locations where I will stop. It will be of a hit and run guerrilla style tour. Loud and tasteless and gone before anyone has time to stop it. In many ways it's a collection of many of the things I hate, but when you string them together in a deliberate way it becomes something else. You could almost call that a form of alchemy - the ancient art of turning base materials into gold. Let's see if there's still magic to be found in Nantou Ancient Town.

Wednesday 25 October 2023

Back into Making Tours: The Golden Tour


After a long break, I am making another tour and it will get its first outing next month in Shenzhen. I will try to make it as bad a tour as possible from the content point of view while, at the same time, turning it into a spectacle. The Tours of Tours, which I was previously busy with, was smart and ironic; this is much more gonzo in style. The Golden Tour is going to be flashy, loud and in Chinese. My aim is to reduce the tour guide to being a colorful moving sculpture that spurts out unreliable information. 

There is a space of critique in here all the same. I am going to be using descriptions of the area culled from the internet which contradict one another. In this way the official narrative will be dirtied simply by association and the shifts in the narratives that come from using out-of-date information will only make it more layered.

This is the sort of typical text that you can find in Chinese about the place:

Only by putting roots into the soil can one survive. Chinese people pay attention to the "root system". People on the loess land have their desire for a sense of belonging engraved in their bones and flesh, and they are inherited from the same origin. On the north side of the bustling Shennan Avenue, a four-column, three-door, double-eaves archway separates Nantou Ancient City from the outside world. It is like a door of time, inviting people to step in to see this ancient city with a history of thousands of years, and to discover the culture of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. of root system.

Nantou Ancient City, also known as Xin'an Ancient City, was once the administrative center of Lingnan coastal areas, a coastal defense fortress, a distribution center for maritime transportation and foreign trade. It has witnessed the cultural accumulation of this land for more than 1,700 years.

Over the past 1,700 years, the jurisdiction, county names and administrative offices have changed several times, but the people of Shenzhen and Hong Kong have never wavered in their feelings for this land. After the Opium War broke out in 1840, Hong Kong was separated from Xin'an County. Although Shenzhen and Hong Kong faced each other across the Shenzhen River, they did not let go of the brotherhood and kinship between them. After Hong Kong's return to the motherland, many compatriots returned to the ancient city for a walk. With the support of their roots, they no longer looked like a piece of duckweed.

Date: 25-26th November

Place: Nantou Gucheng, Nanshan District, Shenzhen



Wednesday 9 February 2022

The Historiographic Tour: one for the future


I was back in Beijing to perform a show and in the evening was going out to have a drink. I decided to ride a bike to Gulou as that is more fun than taking a taxi or subway. Somehow the riding took over and I never made it to the bar. That is liable to happen here as Beijing is both an inspiring city and it's too damm big so it takes forever to get from A to B.

The ride took me past several stations on the number 2 metro line. This brought me back to an idea I had some time ago about making a tour of the old city wall which was brought down to make way for the metro line. That would end up being a history tour and these can be interesting if the history is a vital enough one and the storytelling top quality. Usually, however, history tour bore the pants off me and that is probably why I never got round to making it.


Something far more interesting struck me as a topic for a tour: a historiographic tour. That is to say, the topic of the tour should be not so much the history itself but the telling and the re-telling of the history. In this way, the history may be made far more current as it invites people to see alternative histories and to deconstruct the version that they are familiar with. 


To be consistent with this theme in this location would be impossible: it would probably be deemed illegal as the control of history is a matter of state. In any case, it is not my tour to make; this is a tour for a Chinese person deeply engaged with this specific history. It would probably have to be made incognito and if it were to become popular would cause trouble.


The principle, however, is one that I certainly can take away from this frozen cycle ride, it was -8, and thawing out in the hotel afterwards I already began thinking of places ripe for such a tour. The time will surely come!

Thursday 13 May 2021

The Flying Tigers Tour of Changting


This tour started off as something quite different to what it became: a domesticated cat that turned into a tiger. The group I was visiting the town with were to be shown the historical town centre of Changting but as it was raining and the organizers simply said, if you want to see it,  walk to your left seven minutes and look around for yourselves. This did indeed bring us to a brightly lit building that sat over the remains of the town wall.


Few seemed keen on braving persistent rain so my group was just three European guys. We had the idea of looking round the old town and seeing if there was an Irish Bar or something similar. We traipsed up and down sodden historical alleys and stumbled across a distinctly 21st Century toilet. Outside it has a screen that shows how many cubicles are inside and which are currently in use. In spite of this, there was still no toilet paper.


More or less giving up hope of finding that mythical Guinness we dropped into an insipid cafe then hit the street again. This sign caught my attention. I had known there was an American airbase in Changting and had even asked about it previously but our guide answered vaguely and changed the subject. Now we had stumbled across some traces of this history. 


Next to the banner were some pictures of the steely Claire Lee Chennault. A retired Texan airman, he was in China in 1937 doing a three-month air surveying contract then was propelled into the rank of colonel, aviation instructor and procurer for Chiang Kai-Shek's air force. His is a swashbuckling war story. Working basically as a paid mercenary for the Chinese, he formed a volunteer air corp known as The Flying Tigers which recruited in the US and fought very effectively in China. They were later incorporated into the regular American air force which he re-entered as a Major. He emerged as a war hero, finished an honorary Lieutenant General and is buried in Arlington. In all the accounts, however, he comes over not as military brass but instead as "one of the boys." He is even meant to have opened a brothel in Guilin for his men with the justification "his men needed sex and it was better to have his "boys" visit a brothel that was regularly inspected to reduce venereal diseases."


As we were lighting up the pictures with our phones and studying them a man stepped around the corner and ushered us inside. We walked through a restaurant and into the 'museum' which was closed. He turned the lights on and showed us around. This was not really a guided tour, it worked more on the level of, here are some things, take a look.


One interesting thing that the pictures made much of was Claire's second wife Anna Chennault and the couple's two Chinese American children. There is an interesting history here: after the war the family returned to Chennault's home in Louisiana, where there was still a law forbidding marriages between whites and non-whites, and to a town where there were no non-whites. His status as a war hero apparently silenced any objections to his Chinese wife and mixed-race family. Little of the detail of these stories was conveyed in the exhibition itself, what came over more was a sense of gratitude for help in time of war and pride in connection to the outside world. The other feeling I got was that the exhibition did not need to happen and nobody in authority was going to make it happen. This was one person's passion project. 


This history is one that is not celebrated today, indeed it is more or less written out of the official script as history is viewed as a resource to draw lessons from, and there are no useful lessons to be gained here. This suppression of the history was very clear in the official tours of the town. We were told about the bombing of the town by the Japanese but it was never mentioned why it might have been bombed: it had an American airstrip. Later I even asked our guide, "where was the American airbase?" She said it was very far, a town four or five hours drive away. When I showed her these pictures from the museum she corrected herself and said it was just outside Changting. This conspicuous silence is due to the deteriorating political relationship with the US and it is manifested at the micro level up and down the country. This Flying Tigers collection was, therefore, surprising to find as it was clearly out of step with current policy. That might explain why the place felt it necessary to include some red references so nobody was in any doubt about their patriotism.


We had not forgotten our original purpose of finding an Irish Bar and by now it was woefully clear that was out of the question. Since the guy from the restaurant had been kind enough to show us around the collection, we ordered beers and settled into our Tsingtao. The place was dry, it had a warm wooden feel to it and they brought out a plate of complimentary peanuts. I was definitely warming to it then down the stairs came a Chinese colleague of ours, also on the trip. His group had found this place too and they were upstairs eating and drinking. He giggled and brought down a brown 1.5 liter bottle. He invited us to try "Red Army Coca-Cola." It was sweet, dark rice wine. It was quite easy to drink but between the bottle looking like an oversized hand-grenade and its earthy taste, I was sure it was perfect hangover juice. So, while we didn't find Michael's Blarney Stone, we did enjoy a stroke of luck and got both a nice place to drink and an unexpected tour of the Flying Tigers Museum of Changting.