The Beijing Tour of All Tours: Video Documentation

 

There is not a great deal of video documentation of The Tour of All Tours: you had to be there to see it, basically. But, over time, some bits and pieces do come together and this is one of those. This video was made for the exhibition On Holiday (CEAC Xiamen 2022) which took critical tourism and performance as its basis. The Beijing tour was reconstructed as a video for the exhibition and here, now, is that video. 

One of the things that is quite obvious is the gap between text and image. This is the result of filming the tour five years after it was made. Five years is a long time in Beijing and many changes had taken place. This gap is not so much a problem as another layer and point of interest, as far as I see it.

One of the biggest changes is that the organization that commissioned and hosted the tour, Bookworm, had left Sanlitun. There was, therefore, an element of nostalgia for the recent past.  

 

The Scooter Tour of Beijing's Hutongs: just passing through

This scooter tour, given by Beijing Sideways, takes in Beijing's traditional low-rise neighbourhoods, or hutongs, that mostly remain in the centre of the city. The day I took it we started at 10 in the morning, just about the perfect time to get out at a unhurried pace but to still have most of the day ahead of us. It was an average gray, polluted day that passes for normal in Beijing, the Winter chill was just starting to relent and going outside for pleasure seemed like an option, not just plain madness.

These electric scooters are a new piece of hardware to hit the streets and while they look just like simple scooters, they have an electric motor concealed under the board that gives them a surprising kick. Balanced on it you can reach a respectable 15 mph, which is about as fast as you'd want to be propelled on a metal plate through the low-level anarchy that is Beijing traffic. There is some danger riding these things, but the risk is low and I'm glad that this is China where health and safety doesn't trump all, closing down things that are basically fine. In any case, most of the time we snaked our way through the quieter hutongs where the greatest danger was not cars but the bengbengs, motorised three-wheel taxis. 

Hutong tours are a Beijing speciality and while I do see Chinese people taking them around Nanluoguxiang, an old neighbourhood that has been very consciously redeveloped as a tourist destination, this sort of more far-ranging tour of everyday life in Beijing's hutongs, seems to me to be something that would be more popular with foreigners. I can only guess that this is because in the hutongs you have a more palpable sense of historical Beijing and you can see far more how people live than you can in high-rise neighbourhoods where domestic life is largely hidden. The buildings are often in a poor state of repair and are nestled inside large courtyards. These courtyards are often crowed out with the semi-improvised structures mushrooming inside them and they can house as many as 10 to 20 families in total. Smart, renovated buildings do also exist in the hutongs too, so these are not uniformly poor areas, but I get a sense that for Chinese visitors they offer a vision of the China many have only recently extracted themselves from and which they are not so far removed from that they can view it with curiosity or nostalgia. Our tour then was not exactly slum tourism, as the neighbourhoods are more varied than that, but there was a big difference between our lives and those of the typical local residents we passed. Some looked on bemused at our motorised quartet, and one or two asked about the scooters, "How much were they? How long do they run for on one battery charge?"

The group consisted of an American woman who'd been living in China a while, a Chinese woman who was working for a tourism agency, our intrepid guide Cesar from Barcelona and I. It was a random but agreeable group brought together by tourism. As we were making our way around I did ask myself if we were the target group for this tour. I am not a big fan of everything being demographically targeted right down to the advertising that appears on web browsers based on previous search habits. I find a somewhat random mix of people and experiences healthy, but it did strike me that there would likely be a significant difference between first, what native Chinese and non-native Chinese visitors would look for, and second, what ex-pats and tourists might find interesting. I think I might have gotten more out of this tour if I had taken it when I first arrived in this city, which is a way of saying, I have already explored the hutongs on foot and on bike and taken guided and audio tours of them which explained much of what I heard. That said, I clearly still knew less than anyone else on the tour so there were things to get from it and, more simply, it was fun to ride a scooter!

We made a stop for a generously portioned cup of hot wine and found that we had stepped into the middle of last minute preparations for a singles party due to start shortly in the wine retailer's function room. Wine is something of a new and fashionable drink that people here are finally drinking, and not just giving each other as expensive presents, and this place seemed to be riding on this effervescent wave of Prosecco induced excitement. We finished up before the young, upwardly mobile crew arrived for speed dating to another Western import: Valentines Day.

Fortified, but still on the right side of tipsy to control a scooter, we hit the streets again. From time to time we'd stop and hear something about the neighbourhood. I had to compare how it was to be led by a Western guide to how it was to have a Chinese guide, such as the one I had when I was shown around Qianmen. On the plus side, communication with Cesar was very easy as his English was good and he had a good sense of the things that might strike visitors as interesting. On the other hand, his relationship to the city, its history and culture were very selective and mostly second-hand. When he talked about the people in the hutongs he talked about them as a sympathetic, but detached, observer. This is in contrast to Mark, the Chinese guide who showed me Qianmen, who talked about the people of the hutongs as one of them himself. The emphasis on this tour was not so much on going deeply into the life of the area, it was much more about taking a ride through it and enjoying the scenery.

The dumpling lunch stop at Mr Shi's was a good call. The proprietor, Mr Shi, who does bear a resemblance to his cartoon logo, was there to greet us. He too had his eye on the Western visitors: the menus were properly translated (i.e. not by computer) and a sign prominently informed customers in English that the food is made without MSG or industrial quantities of salt. What's more, the menu featured dumplings with cheese, something I'd expect to find more in Polish pierogis than in Chinese dumplings. We ate well, chatted and the meal felt like a reward for for the completely artificial task we had given ourselves of riding to Houhai and back. The tour was relatively long, running to well over 4 hours, and while that is not so long in itself, there was a lot of plain covering distance. This was an early version of this scooter tour and I expect there will be a bit of fine tuning of it over the Spring with more stories and stops added along the way, a more fluid rhythm and maybe a few tweaks to the route. That usually happens with tours once they settle into themselves. The essentials are already all there, however, and it works fine: it is a safe adventure on two wheels through the Chinese capital, a chance to see the city in good company, and to see, hear and taste a little of what makes old Beijing tick 

The Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression Tour

Beijing has its tourist sights, and I've seen most of the major ones, one way or another, by now. However, when I read that there was a museum I had not yet visited and that it had an audio guide, I needed no further encouragement. OK so the museum turned out to be the anti-Japanese museum which is more a political place than a standard tourist place but no problem, that's what this blog is for. I was hooked. Getting to this museum proved to be a minor challenge as it is located in an out of the way spot far from any subway stations on the West 5th ring road. Although Beijing is a capital city and has its international community, it's somewhat localised and this area was clearly well off that map.

Parked outside of the Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression were clusters of black cars, the type synonymous with Communist Party officials and 'don't give a fuck' drivers. The museum's name hardly rolls of the tongue but each part of it is there for a reason, as I was to discover. Passing through the airport style security at the entrance, I was asked to show ID and when the woman at the desk realised I could speak a bit of Chinese she was quite friendly and handed me a free ticket. I'm guessing they don't see many foreign visitors here outside of political guests invited for formal occasions.

I rented one of the audio handsets from the information desk where two ladies were drinking tea. The audio tour was very formal in the sense that the woman speaking gave absolutely nothing of herself. It sounded like the script had been written by an official historian and her job was simply to deliver the message over discrete Chinese elevator music. Her English was passable but she had a strong accent and broken rhythm which made for a monotonous commentary. Sometimes the accumulation of dates, names and numbers can have a hypnotic effect beating the listener into submission but this audio tour didn't even achieve that, it simply banalised the material. Once in a while new sentences had been dropped into the pre-existing recording but they had not managed to do this smoothly so these words popped out and drew attention to themselves.

There were lots of maps and displays of war memorabilia; the most popular items proved to be the guns.

A striking thing about the period photos was that there was one that looked quite unlike any of the others. Whereas the rest were grainy photographs, snapshots salvaged from the past, this one looked like it had been photoshopped just a little too energetically.

The staff, who outnumbered the visitors to the museum, wore a variety of uniforms: many of the men looked more like soldiers than museum attendants while the women looked like police clerks. What they had in common was they pretty much all looked utterly bored. I became interested in observing how the different members of staff seemed to cope with the challenge of working in such a sleepy environment. There were some who appeared bored in a very stoic professional way displaying a degree of dignity and gravitas. Others gathered in pairs and spent the afternoon stretching out a prolonged gossip while some sat alone playing with their phones their entire body sinking into a cloud of entropy. The lights in many of the rooms were set to a motion detector and only illuminated when someone entered. This got me playing with them looking for where the sensor was located and then sneaking up into the darkened room. I guess I was looking for things to entertain myself with and that is where the museum took me.

It was all too easy to switch off but then every now and then I'd see something that would jolt me back into the present such as this Japanese torture instrument put on display to show what life was like under occupation.

The translation of the audio tour and signage was neither good nor bad, it was simply heavy handed and while it had its Chinglish moments it managed to avoid any genuinely laugh out loud funny mistakes. For example, again and again the Japanese were described as wantonly doing this or that to the point that I could be pretty well be sure that she'd throw in at least one wantonly in each paragraph and I was practically waiting for her to say it. The texts more or less repeated the same information and expanded upon it with the odd spelling mistake and formatting error here and there but again, nothing drastic that took me seriously outside of the material.

20th Century Chinese history is anything but simple. The museum nonetheless offered an authoritative version of what happened. Not knowing the intricacies of it myself I had to simply wander around and soak up what was given. That said, I did notice a few things that left more questions than answers such as this photograph of Chiang Kai-shek with his wife and the American Joseph Stilwell. The commentary I had heard up to this point had stressed how the fight against the Japanese had been led by the Communist party and then, here was the a photo of the Americans who were assisting the fight against the Japanese, but they seemed to be closer with the other side in the Chinese Civil War, the republicans led by Chiang Kai-shek. Why were the Americans siding with them if they were the junior partner?

The narrative that was built up by the text was that the Republicans were in favour of compromising with the Japanese and some even formed a puppet state under Japanese rule. Other versions of the history exist, however, which counter this marginalising of the Republican role in fighting the Japanese such as that recently offered by Taiwanese Hao Bosun.

The issue I read underneath this was that the Civil War, interrupted by the Japanese invasion, was the defining period of the Chinese Communist Party and quite possibly the catalyst that brought them to power. The exhibition wanted to emphasise their legitimacy over the Kuomintang, who finally took shelter in Taiwan. The tricky thing here is that the issue of Taiwan is an ongoing sovereignty dispute with competing territorial claims and the exhibition was quite obviously laying out the PRC's official position on the matter. Looking at this I was reminded of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London as that's a museum that ostensively sets out to show the reality of war but inevitably shows it from a very British perspective without even seeming to set out to do so. In that sense the place is not so obviously trying to make you believe a certain line, it is itself a manifestation of an underlying national ideology. I used to sometimes visit the IWM with a friend and we'd walk around and laugh at how old fashioned it was and imitate the retired soldiers who worked there as guides telling their war stories to whoever would listen. It wasn't possible to extract that sort of ironic humour out of this visit as this was not my country's vanity on show and besides, the very real mass killing resulting from the Japanese occupation was too present in the displays. Still, the question remained with me throughout, what are the purposes behind the creation of this museum that opened only in 1987? 

The most prominent display was saved towards the end of the tour, the scene of Japan's surrender. The fact that this was life-sized and also featured as a painting was difficult not to miss.

There was a large notice on display reading "Chinese and Japanese People Should Be Friends Forever" and nearby it was this picture. This brought to the surface the second underlying tension in the museum: contemporary China-Japan relations. I have the impression that there remains widespread popular hostility towards the Japanese in China today, though that doesn't necessarily stop people buying their cars. While the government wants to maintain peaceful relations and restrict conflict to the realm of economics, peaceful relations are on certain terms and one of those is the full acknowledgment of Japanese culpability in the war. Alongside that are more worldly territorial claims, neither of which are currently being fully met. This museum was indeed the location for a presidential speech along those lines.

Anti-Japanese TV dramas are a big deal in China; if you switch on the TV at any time of the day and flick through the channels, chances are you'll find one. The wall shows many moments from these dramas, which most mainland Chinese visitors will be familiar with to a greater or lesser extent. I couldn't help but again make analogies with my own country which for a long time saturated itself in Second World War movies that reassured the British public that they were on the side of the righteous. I already felt that those movies were kind of stale to me when I was growing up in the 80s so I am surprised to see how prominent such movies and TV series still are here in China today. With such a long time having now elapsed between the war and our present day, animosities must be drawn mostly from movies and second hand experiences, rather than direct experience. As such, getting the story right is more important than ever as it is all too possible to stoke hatred for political expediency or even for plain entertainment value. With such divergent interests and narratives between China, Japan and Taiwan it is difficult to see where any sort of consensus can emerge. With this in mind I left the museum tuning over Nietzsche's line "there are no facts only interpretations". I later read the museum's website which claims it has received over 16.6 million visitors since opening, a number that I find hard to believe based on my visit where I saw about 10 visitors in the space of an hour and a half. I have the feeling they are quite happy to interpret facts very liberally here, and as such, a visit to this museum is most definitely educative, though I'm not sure the lessons I took away with me were those that were intended. 

London & Beijing tours Feb/Mar 2015

Some new dates for the calendar here. 

London

Thursday 5th February 7 PM start outside Richmix, Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA
Saturday 7th February 2 PM start outside Richmix, Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA
Price £8 
Duration 110 minutes approx. 
Bookings info (at) billaitchison.co.uk

Beijing

Saturday 7th March 2PM start inside The Bookworm, Sanlitun, Beijing
Price by donation
Duration 100 minutes approx.
Bookings info (at) billaitchison.co.uk

This will be the last Beijing tour for a while and it is being given on a donation basis so anyone who wants to see it can do so.

There are some new tours planned for 2015, details to be revealed in the new year. 

The Private Tour of Qianmen: the new old Beijing

Qianmen is a bustling historic district in central Beijing, a stone's throw from Tiananmen Square. It's many shops and restaurants make it a popular tourist destination but also a rather shallow one, as it lacks obvious attractions. It's special hook is that it comes over as 'Old Beijing' though paradoxically, much of the neighbourhood, though far from all, was given a heavy makeover for The Olympics and has been thoroughly modernised. The contradictory result is that it can, on first appearance, look like a theme park and then, if you turn some corners, look like a slum.

My guide Mark Hu is a genuine Beijinger who grew up very close to Qianmen. As well as being a qualified guide he is also a post-graduate linguistics student specialised in English. This made him a very suitable private tour guide. As far as I can see, there are relatively few public guided tours in Beijing of the sort familiar to people in Europe by which I mean a guide (or company) advertises that there will be a tour of a certain area at a set time, people gather there for the tour, take it then go their separate ways. Things work more according to groups assembled by travel agents which take in all the significant attractions in an area (i.e. tourist traps) and give you at least a full day of being led around in a crowd by a person with a stick, jumping in and out of a coach, eating together and having a proper group experience. It's either that or you hire a private guide or else simply do it yourself. I've done the group tour before, the DIY trip too, so it was now time to see how it is to have a more intimate tour experience with a guide. We headed into one of the most narrow hutongs (traditional style alleyways) in Beijing where I heard about its former life as a financial centre.

We paused in front of a historic cinema which, I learnt, was the cinema that screened the very first Chinese movie. Film posters from another era quietly faded in the pale Winter sun. Detached from the urgent bustle of the 10 kuai shops (pound stores / 1 euro shops) on street level, these grandparents' heartthrobs hovered over the scene like guardian angels. The new Qianmen would prove somewhat unfamiliar to them; even Mark said the place had been completely transformed from how he remembered it pre-Olympics. Back then it had been a place that local people used and few people from elsewhere visited. Nowadays, it is a major shopping destination. He also said that the majority of the shop people were not locals anymore, new people from out of Beijing had recently moved in to make quick money. As we were in search of the real Old Beijing, we kept on walking, heading over to the Dashilar area where there were more traces of it to be found.  

These rabbit statues that we stopped to look at were, I learnt, part of a specifically Beijing mythology. Inside the shop there were more Beijing curios stacked up high such as cicadas dressed as miniature monkeys. Mark told me that he had travelled quite a great deal, not only around China but also more widely in Asia and Europe and one of the things that travel had taught him was that he liked Beijing above anywhere else. He really is a partisan Beijing guide who wants to show visitors the best the city his to offer. It is easy to see the problems in the city such as the depressing frequency of lung blackening smog and the wilful destruction of historic quarters, but the attractive side of the city is less obvious. The genuine attractions are often mobbed with crowds and the quieter neighbourhoods like the one we were in, require interpretation to be made interesting. He saw it as his role to provide this.

A feature of the tour was the translation of street signs. Mark knew I am learning Chinese so made a point of explained some of the ways the history of the area could be read through the street names. Dashilar Alley was one such example, this common street sign another. As a result of this we sometimes stood in very ordinary locations looking at beaten up street signs taking the experience away from the conventional tourist one. 

We entered a small cluttered secondhand bookstore run by an old lady who lived in the hutong. The place can best be described as a communist era nostalgia trip. She had collected many of the more attractive books and objects from her past and stacked them up high. She knew where things were and there was an internal sort of order, but to the visitor, it was like seeing this lady's imagination externalised and turned into a living sculpture. I love these sorts of shops. She had some records and I am a collector of vinyl so I went through the slim pile and finally chose the red flexidisk that was on the record player when we entered. It's a collection of Chinese songs from the early 80s. Needless to say, it doesn't sound a bit like Duran Duran.

We spent a while talking with her and she picked up on Mark's idea of showing me the real Beijing and offered to take us around the private courtyard behind the shop. It was more or less how I imagined it would be, having seen a number of similar ones during Beijing Design Week, which takes place in the same area. What was different was this courtyard was not self-consciously arranged for visitors, and I was being shown it by people from the area not by newcomers who had 'discovered' it. This relationship of the guide to the place is quite interesting: when the guide is a part of the place they can talk about 'we' and when the guide is a visitor he or she will talk about 'they'. I was told that the wooden pram collecting debris was the type 'we' used to use, but nobody has a purpose for anymore.

There was a moment of confusion when, walking down the road, Mark asked me if I wanted to see a historic brothel. Everything up to now had been quite above board so I was unsure if he meant would I like him to take me into a brothel or what. Seeing as prostitution is rife in Beijing, I had seen some guys piling out of an upmarket foot massage club at 3AM the night before looking like it wasn't their feet which had just been taken care of, and I was aware that there was a part of Qianmen where it still existed, I was confused. I need not had been as Mark took me to what was a Qing dynasty brothel and was now a local communist party office that also plays a cultural role in the neighbourhood. He knocked on the door, entered and asked a man in the office about going upstairs to take a look at the former brothel. It seemed the right person to show us up there wasn't around so we had to admire it from afar. It struck me as an unusual thing to show me, seeing as it came out of the blue and the building we were looking at was old but rather nondescript. 

There were points of the tour where we did get more typical tour guide information. For example, here we stopped in front of this doorway and Mark explained the significance of the hexagonal beams. 

After an hour and half's walking in freezing conditions it was time to thaw. Tea houses can be expensive so, following Mark's suggestion, we headed to the Golden Arches. I generally use the place only for its toilet facilities but the coffee was acceptable and there was space to sit and warm up. 

Mark showed me a map of Beijing that he had designed. We started talking about how it could be read and used by foreign visitors. I had the impression the work was a real labour of love sustained by his passion for the city. Now that it was more or less complete he was faced with the problem of how to produce and share this map with actual people, which is to say, to be confronted with how the map is valued and used by others. He seemed a reluctant businessman who was trying to find a model that best suited him. I believe it all too often happens that it is the more profiteering sort of guides who become the most prominent and those who ask for less are valued less highly resulting in the public face of the city often being a rather off-putting commercial one. I hope for Beijing's sake, people like Mark get to be seen more.

I have to admit it: I'm a softy when it comes to Beijing's winter weather. At night it regularly drops to -8 and taking a tour in this sort of weather for me means sacrificing any attempts at style. Hell, it's not just when on a tour, it is stepping out anywhere in this fridge of a city. Mark, like a typical Beijinger, put me to shame and toughed it out. This tour of the new old Beijing was an interesting experience and a difficult one to pin down exactly. This was because it being a private tour it worked less according to a set itinerary and was instead more responsive to both me and to what, or who, we found as we made our way around Qianmen. This then made it feel a lot more like everyday life than standarised guided tours, which always have an echo of theatre to them working as they do with repetition on a regular stage of sorts. The tricky thing here then is that everyday life might be more recognisable from a somewhat theatrical position (and vice-versa) and here I was getting the everyday life of Qianmen in a form that was itself also quite everyday in presence. This is not in itself a problem for a guide to worry too much about but it is a question that can arise once you look at these tours with a performance eye.

The Time To Get Lost Audio Tour: drifting round Wangfujing

The Time to Get Lost audio tour is an artist's project by Jennie Savage. It is described as "an invitation to people all over the world to get lost simultaneously" and the designated moment for this to happen was 6.30PM on the 3rd October 2014. A list of suggested starting locations was published so people could chose to start their walk in a common location in their city, if they wished, and possibly get lost in company. The other twist is that there were not one but three, presumably different, recordings that could be followed, one titled 'wanderers' and the other two, 'idlers' and 'drifters'. I tried downloading one of these onto my phone but was thrown off by some technical issues which meant I did not manage to get this done on time. Trying again a few days later it worked fine so, even if a little late for the collective event, I  headed off to the suggested meeting point: outside the Beijing Dept Store 北京百货大楼 located on Wangfujing.

I figured that even if I had been here at the appointed hour, the chances of meeting someone else doing this audio walk in Beijing were slim to non-existent and, added to that, I was not sure if the proposed start time was 6.30PM local time or 6.30BST, which would have required me to have started at 1.30AM on October 4th, not a likely prospect, even with the best of will. So a week late, but round about on time, I went to Wangfujing. There was still a relentless flow of people and standing still for a moment I was approached by a not unattractive Chinese woman in a leather jacket who spoke to me in English and came on a bit over-friendly. Having witnessed this routine before, one which typically finishes in a tea scam as China Uncensored amusingly describe, I made an exit, pressed play and pretty much immediately heard a softly spoken woman telling me to turn left.

This quickly brought me into the night market. I've been here once before so knew what to expect: bright and shiny tourist tat China style. The voice on the recording was at times hard to make out as the crowds around me were loud, the C-pop and electronic toys louder still and the vendors the true volume kings. What's more, the recording itself also had background sounds that seemed to shift in and out of focus. At one moment I found myself in a silk store and the next jammed by the crowd beside a stinky tofu stall, and yes the name is well deserved. The woman described some things she could see: workmen eating their lunch and looking around I could see some half parallels in the tourists eating the weird and wonderful snacks from the market, which not only include stinky tofu but go as far as the infamous scorpions on a stick. Passing a small but aggressively amplified Beijing opera stage, I finally squeezed out of the market and could hear the voice clearly.

I was led back onto Wangfujing and where previously I had been noticing the correspondences between the place she was describing and where I was, I now started noticing differences. For example, I cannot imagine seeing large portraits of politicians proudly displayed in the window of a photography shop in, say, Bristol. A picture of Thatcher of Blair in the window there would almost certainly dampen sales and quite probably attract unwanted late-night fast food or even a brick.

Following the instructions proved to be more an art than a science; there was plenty of scope for interpretation. For example, the way the roads and paths were laid out around me did not permit such rapid twists of direction as those being taken in the recording. Faced with impossible instructions or old ones that were superseded by fresh suggestions, choices had to be made. Without ignoring the tour's suggestions I interpreted them in a way that allowed me to be spat out of the shopping area and onto roads behind the shops as a change of atmosphere felt due. Here, removed from the neon and bustle of commerce, other layers of the city presented themselves. Was this a map of the city and its six current ring roads or was somebody making I Ching doodles while on the phone? 

The basic premise of the walk is that you follow the directions given by the woman on the recording as she is walking elsewhere and describing her environment. This elsewhere turns out to be a composite location for whilst I was delving further into one location, the recording seemed to be continually expanding its scope. This basic premise of taking a walk parallel with someone else in another location is familiar. Last year I wrote about A Walk With Amy by Amy Sharrocks which I took in Stuttgart whilst she was on the other end of a phone walking, presumably, in London. In both that work and this the two walkers are paired and the differences and similarities of their observations make up a considerable part of the work's appeal. Where they differ is that Sharroks spoke live, one to one, from a single location whereas Savage's walk is pre-recorded, for multiple users and is not contained within any one real space.   

The audio tour often seemed to be referring to market type places and global business being what it is, it was almost inevitable I would encounter a shopping parallel. This came in the form of H & M. If not them then it would have been an Apple Store, Gap or Starbucks or some other global brand. Ten or twenty years ago that would not have been the case here in Beijing but the city is slowly becoming predictably normal in the sense of having designated shopping areas with global brands. I wonder if the potential walker in Baghdad, one of the other locations proposed, would be more able to escape the reach of McDonalds and KFC? 

I came across a man taking a picture of the city map and for a moment liked to imagine he was on a similar mission to mine, but his lack of headphones precluded him from being on the Time To Get Lost tour. Taking a picture of a map might indeed look like the opposite of trying to get lost but this map, one showing the city's ring roads and sprawling suburbs is all but useless for finding your way locally, such is the scale needed to contain the entire city on a single panel. Added to that, there is no 'you are here', so it really is more an emblem of the city demonstrating its size and showing all the recently conquered lands that make up the new far-lying neighbourhoods.

There were a section of the recording that featured many cars and this had the effect of inducing some nervousness that they might in fact be in my space. That is a real danger in Beijing as the lines between pavement and road can at times be very fluid with pedestrians often having to walk on the roads and cars driving and parking on the pavements. On at least one occasion I had to check behind me in case a car was rushing upon me. This blurring of the sonic spaces was quite pleasing, particularly as it was done by introducing something new into the area rather than doubling up the existing sounds, which is more commonly done on audio tours that appropriate the existing sonic space for the recording.

The recording then seemed to shift to a developing country and talk about shacks and stalls that had solidified into buildings. The closest equivalent I could see were these soft drink stalls doing bubble tea and what not. This shift in the recording from a British environment to a very different one made some sense given the global ambition of the project.

Although Wangfujing is one of the most developed shopping streets in Central Beijing, I almost never come here so it is relatively unfamiliar to me. It was, then, a surprise to stumble in front of the Foreign Languages Bookstore which I remember looking around the first time I came to Beijing in 1997. Back then I came out of it with absurdly cheap propaganda posters of Mao, Marx and Stalin as well as some translated Chinese literature. Not having seen the place in 17 years it seemed at first glance peculiarly similar, a Communist era time capsule surrounded by malls and tourist markets. This interruption of the tour with a strong personal memory span me off on another tangent while I was being urged to turn left by the insistent voice.

I was brought finally into one of the malls and went up an escalator. In my own Waylosing in Beijing Tour, which I took earlier this year, I found myself similarly putting aside my visceral dislike of malls and trying to get lost in one. The problem with using them for this purpose is that they are usually designed with these central atriums that help you find your bearings and the best that can generally be hoped for is to exit the mall into an unfamiliar space. 

I consciously avoided making any selfie pictures on this audio tour but when I arrived at a mirror it was clearly the moment to place myself in the frame. Looking at this picture of myself now, I am prompted to ask, 'what was I really doing there? What was I looking for?' Without getting too introspective about it, I think I was looking for a disorienting experience which might lead me to some unexpected locations and possibly new realisations. As such, I was bringing my own ideas about the value of getting lost and I rather think this audio tour was doing something else. With it only being 30 minutes in length and taking a circuitous path, it did not cover much ground and was never going to seriously disorient me. When leading a Waylosing tour in Birmingham this year, it took us four and a half hours of dedicated action to reach a location entirely unfamiliar to us all and to sense we were more or less lost. The Time to Get Lost Tour was instead for me an experiment in parallel indeterminate spaces that might result in a little disorientation. Taken that way the experiment worked.

The places I was moving through seemed in general a good deal richer and busier than the locations of the recording. This did not entirely surprise me given the neighbourhood.

The recording did not have a strong narrative line to it, it simply seemed to be about movement through different spaces which, at a certain point and without any climax, came to an end. My final location was this street. I don't know how the other two audio tours would have been different, maybe they would have brought me into more contact with people or to other places, I will never know. Knowing there was potential for the experience to have followed other lines is pleasing in a way, but I have to think back to Auto-theatre an experimental audio tour I made with a three way multiple choice of routes back in 2008. Knowing that this work already contained a healthy does of inherent indeterminacy in terms of which way the listener should walk, I now ask myself whether compounding that with two alternative tours was really necessary. With regards this Time To Get Lost Tour, I will of course never know the scope of the full work. If you are interested to know more about the walk there is an interview with Jenny Savage on Talking Walking in which she goes into the process of creating the walk and some of its intentions. It makes for interesting listening, whether sitting or walking. It is definitely a worthwhile experiment and fun to take, even if the name is a little misleading. I should not be surprised to find myself getting lost again with Savage in the future.

The Beijing World Park Tour: around the world in 80 minutes

Beijing World Park is one of a number of Asian theme parks that attempt to represent the world to the visitor. As such, a tour of this place is not only a tour around a corner of Beijing, it is also, in miniature, a tour of the world through its iconic tourist attractions. 

The front entrance has distinct echoes of Disney, which itself was modelled on some of the sites that await the visitor inside the park, such as Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. The references are jumbled but the effect is fine: it looks historic and Western. There's a further bit of history here too, I visited during the national day holidays which marked the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Visitor numbers were up because of the holidays and good weather but still the place was far from packed: World Park is a 2nd tier Beijing attraction located in the South West suburbs and doesn't have the pull (and crowds) of The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square or Great Wall.

The audio tour turned out to be broken and the machines were at the factory getting repaired. There were no guides offering tours and the only alternative was a land train that wizzed you round or an overly fancy horse drawn carriage designed to dazzle from a distance. Walking seemed like the best option, and this quickly brought me to a Thai Elephant and Crocodile Show. The Thai angle seemed to me slight; it is a type of show that is apparently popular with tourists visiting Thailand... but more to the point, with tourists in Beijing too. This show was the start of a tour then, that was not so much a tour of the world in all its raw vastness but rather a tour of the world's tourist traps and popular attractions. Happy hunting ground for The Tour of All Tours.

I had never seen an elephant show before and found myself warming to it when I put aside the question of the animal's welfare. The elephants managed to do all manner of tricks like kicking footballs and dancing to The Macarena. Around the side of the arena this man pushed a cart of bananas which he sold to the public. At certain points the elephants would approach the seating and those with bananas could feed them. This was a smart way of making a bit of extra money out of something that would happen anyway. Indeed there were quite a number of ways the show managed to make extra money: children were lifted up high in the elephant's trunks for photo opportunities, there were live photos for a price with the crocodiles too, which struck me as playing with fire. 

With the animal show over a new entertainment in the adjacent arena began. This was a dance show that I have never seen anything quite the like of before. They attempted to show the world through dance. They began with a Brazilian carnival display and moved onto a Spanish fiesta, an American Indian ritual and fire dance, a ballet cum acrobatics turn, an Indian Bollywood number and so on. At this point they arrived at Egypt with a pharaoh striding out of the set in the background followed by this team in blue and white. When the veil flew off this turned into a belly dance routine collapsing ancient and modern Middle East into one. The dancing was often far from good but that only added to the thrill of seeing this novel and slightly bad taste spectacle unfold. I wouldn't be able to see something quite as blunt as this in the UK, there would be too many objections from the people it depicts. Not here! They really went for it and gave their best shot at doing each of these dances in turn.

This immediately brought to mind the film The World (2004) of Jia Zhangke as it is set in this same theme park and begins with a scene featuring dancers doing routines very similar to those I witnessed. The film shows a backstory to this spectacle and the human cost of contemporary Chinese development. It is well worth watching and it hovered over the place as a parallel and darker narrative throughout this tour of World Park.

The apex for me was when we got to Chinese Riverdance. I had been warmed up already and this was an icing on the cake moment. That might be because, culturally speaking, Irish dance is more known to me than most of the other things I had seen so far, so there was the amusement of having the familiar made strange and not to say, slightly naff. All of the different routines were, in a way, familiar in the sense that they all belonged to the imagery of big spectacles. This was like a low-budget Olympic opening ceremony showcasing not just the host nation's dances but those of the whole world. I'm going to have to let this experience settle a little but I suspect there is an avant-garde remake of this lurking in the depths of the imagination. 

The section of the park behind me is called Grand Canyon and I am standing on a model Golden Gate Bridge. Yes, this is America. The big country made small. Alongside the sites there are stalls selling food and souvenirs and I was hoping that these would reflect the locations they were paired with but sadly not. I think it was a missed opportunity. That said, a McDonalds would be of little interest to me as I don't eat meat and when I come to think about it, the food is only part of the ambiance, the people are what really make a place feel located. Installing some representative Americans in a McDonalds who would eat and talk in an authentic way would be tricky as they would rapidly balloon in weight more or less replicating the documentary Super Size Me. Similarly, having a British drunk sitting under the model Tower Bridge drinking super strength lager would give it a more authentic edge but this feeling of being in the location is not what's really called for here. The point is to condense the world into a series of photo opportunities. 

The park shows its age by retaining the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in its Manhattan section. I suppose it would hardly do to knock them down in solidarity with the real ones following the 9/11 attacks, but standing there today they stick out like a sore thumb. It is ironic that these towers are probably the most contemporary buildings that are featured in the entire park and they are also the only ones that no longer exist in reality but only as these scale models.

Having recently covered Stonehenge on this blog, I was amused to find a scaled down version of it here in the park that was serving as a playground. I read that in 2008, World Park was one of the three officially designated protest sites and I tried to imagine a Free Tibet rally taking place on this Stonehenge model. I think the official who came up with the idea of making this one of the protest sites must have had a sharp sense of humour.

Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria was one of the spots favoured by the many wedding photographers that were operating in the park. When researching Chinese coach tours of Europe for the Stuttgart Tour of All Tours I noticed that this castle was a point on most tour itineraries. That may be because it not only is iconic but is also well located for transport routes, but nonetheless, it is quite probably the most well known castle in Europe to Chinese tourists. Wedding photography is a boom industry and no standard wedding is complete without some fancy images such as these. Somehow the preferred spots for these photographs are not the sites of the ceremony itself but are instead tourist locations at home and even abroad where the pictures are taken some time before the wedding day. In this way the tourist imagination spreads into all sorts of areas beyond the strict preserve of the holiday itself.  

Hello Brussels! The man who stood here after me underneath the Mannekin Pis managed to take a photo that would not have been possible at the real fountain as it is surrounded by a fence and is perched some way up on a wall. Standing on the far side of the fountain he squeezed his finger and thumb around the little statue's willy. It is probably for the best that the fence exists in Brussels.

I read that Chinese tourists are increasingly suffering from the affliction Paris Syndrome which was previously reserved to Japanese tourists only. Put simply, it is a psychological condition brought about in a small number of visitors who arrive in the City of Light and find it far from the city of their dreams provoking, in some, a state of mental collapse. No such problems here in World Park! You can stay well and truly in a Chinese bubble where no rude waiters or pickpockets are going to puncture the dream. Even if the visitor does encounter a problem, it is a Chinese problem that does not touch Paris, which exists in another world above and beyond that of raucous Chinese children or pushy groups muscling you out of the way.

Dressing up in period costumes for photographs is a bit of a thing at tourist spots in China and this normally means classical Chinese costumes. A few days ago a woman running one such stall in a park suggested I put on her emperor's costume and the incongruity of it nearly persuaded me to do it but, sadly for her, I thought twice and thought better of it. This being World Park the costumes are not just classical Chinese, they are Westerners' outfits like this dress here. Whether or not it really fits with St Peter's Square in The Vatican is beside the point, that's a technicality for historians of costume. It's all about dreams created by the movies and media and in this corner of Beijing it's possible to touch those dreams and have a little piece of them for yourself.  

Of all the sites I saw the most singularly underwhelming of them was The Pyramids. The real Egyptian structure is impressive, I am guessing, on account of its size, age and location. Here however, it was reduced to the size of a house, dates from 1993 when the park opened, and is in a nondescript suburb of Beijing. Of the five continents represented,  Africa and Oceania were the least prominent with Europe being the most featured.

Finally there was a corner of the park that depicted China. There was a copy of the Great Wall but then there was also this garden which was one of the more tasteful areas as it did not try to copy a famous site and end up scaling it down. My enduring feeling about the park is that it lacks ambition to be anything more than a mass tourist attraction. It succeeds in this basic function but I felt it could also potentially serve as an educational site helping to introduce Chinese people to other cultures in a more than superficial way. I also have the feeling that I will one day have to make a tour performance for a site such as this as they have such enormous potential to serve as art locations, so loaded are they with symbols and histories. I suspect that will come at a later point once I've been to a few more of the iconic sites themselves and made studies and performances of my own with them. That said, if someone turned around tomorrow and offered this as a set to play with I'd jump at the chance. Beijing World Park is a gift to the experimental tourist.

PS: this Saturday there will be a further performance of The Tour of All Tours in Beijing Sanilitun, starting at 2PM from The Bookworm. 100rmb.