The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall Tour

Situated in central Taipei, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall is one of, perhaps even, the most important monument in Taiwan. It is dedicated to the Chinese military commander and statesman who was leader of the Republic of China from 1928-1975. I had already visited the monument as part of a Taipei audio tour during a previous visit to the city, today I had the opportunity to be shown around the memorial hall itself. What's more, not one but two tours were being offered. Since they were given by the same guide and were just covering different parts of the same building, I'll lump the two of them together here. 

We were taken down to meet our guide who was waiting at the visitor desk. A smartly dressed, older gentleman, he was the main man around whom a small flurry of staff circled.

Ascending up to the main monument, a colossal bronze of a seated Chiang Kai-Shek, we waited for the changing of the guard. While standing there, our guide talked enthusiastically about the wooden roof being constructed without any nails. This seems to be a running theme: in Longshan Temple the guide was also keen to make a similar observation. What have they got against nails? Whatever it was, he seemed mighty happy. 

Next we looked out over the gardens to the National Theatre and National Concert Hall. He stressed how the area was open to the public and democratic. To illustrate this he said people come to dance and run around the park and, right in front of us, there was a huge Disney tent. Quite how Disney equals democracy is a little bit of a mystery to me unless it is simply that Walt Disney was rabidly anti-communist and, following the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' logic, that makes him a good democrat. A surprising omission in the commentary was the fact that the memorial hall was, between 2007 and 2009, renamed The National Taiwan Democracy Hall a divisive move in a politically polarised Taiwan. It still bears this name on Google Maps some seven years later. He was more keen to stress unity than division, however, so Walt Disney and Chiang Kai-Shek it was.

Down in the exhibition hall, we got to see what Chiang Kai-Shek typically had for lunch. This is one of those, only in China, sort of exhibits, a culture where people casually ask "have you eaten?" instead of "how are you?" It turned out to be rather simple. We also learnt about his wife and Christian faith which had a lasting influence on a national level. It was interesting to hear how the personal and political spheres elided.

The second tour was the more overtly political one. It was a temporary exhibition on the Sino-Japanese War, put up last year to commemorate the 70th anniversary of its ending and still on display. It pays to know the basic history when trying to make sense of exhibitions showing this period in Chinese history as the mainland and Taiwanese versions of the story diverge significantly. Indeed, it is not so easy to find terms to talk about either the history or the current situation of Taiwan without saying something that one side or the other will take objection to. Even the very names of people and places are written and translated differently. I therefore tread carefully.

The rest of the group had returned to the conference and so it was just the unlikely pairing of the elderly guide and I walking around the paintings and looking at the maps. I began to realise his English, which was previously fine when he stuck to his script, broke down somewhat when I asked questions off topic, which is what it is most fun to do when on a one-to-one tour. Somehow we got onto the topic of wars today and he was of the opinion that mainland China and Taiwan would not come into conflict. I hope he's right. He thought muslims were more inclined to war and while I tried to dispute this blanket judgement we both realised we were straying a bit too far from the exhibition and moved onto the next painting. 

This brought us to probably the most bloody episode in the war: Nanjing or Nanking, as it was written here. This was the site of mass executions, rapes and looting that resulted in an estimated 300,000 deaths according to both this exhibition and the Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing. Where the two differ is in how they interpret and present the events. In Beijing I felt it was still held up as a major sore and source of continued anti-Japanese sentiment whereas here it was more a dark passage of history that people have emerged from. I wondered if that was in part due to Taiwan being a former-Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945 and then having been thrown into a post-war military and economic block with Japan under the Americans.

The paintings presented Chiang Kai-Shek as leading the Chinese war effort. Here he is in a conference in Cairo. In Beijing his role was seriously sidelined with the KMT painted as collaborators with the Japanese and the Communist party as the liberators of the country. He said Shek had studied Sun Tzu's Art of War and was a gifted military strategist but not such a great peacetime leader. He said Shek had, like Mao, gone on to become leader for too long. He never mentioned it but I'm guessing he was referring to the protracted period of martial law in Taiwan that was only lifted in 1987 and which included the persecution of political opponents. In any case, the guide ironically thanked Mao for the cultural revolution as, he said, it let Taiwan get economically ahead while the mainland stagnated. 

There was then my favourite moment of the tour. We had already witnessed the changing of the guard upstairs, an hourly ritual that involves three purely decorative soldiers stringing out something that should take twenty seconds into a six minute routine. It features a lot of heel clicking and turning abruptly at right angles which the, predominantly mainland, tourists seem to lap up. Perhaps because it is so decorative and yet insists upon being taking seriously, the whole effect is slightly camp. Downstairs in the exhibition hall, the soldiers have to enter the lift to ascend to the monument. They face the problem that the lift door is too narrow for more than one of them to enter at a time and the lift too small for them to continue doing their military drill in it. This necessitates the one loose moment in their routine. When they approach the lift they stop five meters from the door, drop the pretence of being made of iron, jog into the lift then reform while the door closes behind them.

Like the Beijing museum, pictured to the side, the exhibition finishes with the Japanese surrender. The scene is depicted quite differently, however. In Beijing they add a life-size recreation of the table. The actual site of the surrender seems to have been more similar to the Taiwanese painting in that it was relatively humble and without the trappings of state that the painting on the left depicts. That said, both of them seem to take more than a few liberties.

The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall is a quite definitely a site worth visiting and does have a lot more to it than just the monument and changing of the guard. It is a site made much more rewarding when visited with a guide but you would do well to do a little reading before you go so as understand why the history here has been written the way it has been written. If, as is commonly said, history is written by the victors, then it should come as no surprise that an unresolved civil war is written in at least two, very different, ways.

The Melbourne Parliament House Tour: citizen tourists on the loose.

This rather grand building is Parliament House, Melbourne. I was excited at the prospect of taking a tour of it as it would give me something to compare my tour of the Scottish Parliament with. The Edinburgh tour was interesting as much for what it did not say as for what it did. It was, in many respects, like a political campaign that sidestepped uncomfortable issues and 'took hold of the narrative', as current news-speak would put it. With that tour I was aware of a number of the issues that were being glossed over, such as the delays and serious overspend on its construction. However, I know next to nothing about the politics of Victoria and very little about Australia either, except that Prime Minister Tony Abott was pretty widely despised and regarded as an idiot by pretty much everybody I met. This, then, was necessarily a more superficial tour of a parliamentary public relations exercise.

I was in a hurry to catch the 1 PM whistle-stop tour and would never have thought it would have taken me so long to enter the building. The security screening by the team of misanthropic guards took longer than some airports I have travelled through and resulted in the confiscation of my 8cm long flexible camera tripod for reasons they alone will ever know. I stepped into the elegant reception room where a smattering of tourist/citizens were scattered awaiting the tour's imminent start. The man in the loud blue shirt was to become my favourite: true to appearances he made a string of blunt jokes and observations throughout the tour like, "how much? crikey!"

Our guide emerged on the stroke of one, had us leave our bags in a safe storage room, then beckoned us through the barrier. He came over as a smart guy doing a simple but comfortable job. He carefully chose his words so as to avoid sounding as if he favoured one political side or another, yet he also sounded as if he was very aware of the debate and disagreements that characterise a parliament like this. His was a conspicuous neutrality that goes with the job and he gave the impression of someone who had been doing this long enough that it had become second nature to him. Indeed, he managed to sound relaxed and human in this role and even managed a dry sense of humour. 

The first room was being rearranged and didn't look its best. We began with an introduction to the architecture, always a safe bet, unless you the Scottish Parliament, that is. The queen looked down on us as we listened and we also heard how they do weddings here, though it was admittedly expensive, not to say dry as a choice of location. 

This building is divided into an upper and lower chamber, a system directly modelled on the the British parliament. Our guide explained how this lower chamber functions and it basically seems to work tribally with each side closing rank within an oppositional style of government. The sand timer is a nice touch and I am minded to get one for practicing speeches myself. It is so much more visually effective than a digital clock; there is a palpable sense of time slipping away. That was the case with our tour as well: we were up against the clock as this was essentially a 30-minute photo opportunity tour with only time for brief explanations.

We got a look at the gold-leaf clad speaker's mace in the library, the same mace that is featured in this photo and which our guide told us a spicy story about. The story goes that the speaker's mace went missing in the 1891 and rumour had it that it ended up in a nearby brothel that was frequented by politicians, used in mock parliamentary procedures/sex games. To what precise purpose the mace was put he did not elaborate further. It is a nice story, far enough removed from the present to be amusing more than scandalous, and he obviously enjoyed telling it to give the tour some light relief. I have noticed that with dry and potentially boring tours like this one, it is a good strategy for the guide to have one or two tricks up their sleeve like this to inject some life into the tour. The sex theme, in fact, popped up again a little later when we got to the upper chamber. In the discussion of the political affiliations of the members of the legislative council, our guide noted that the upper house is far more welcoming of independents than the lower house. With a slight smile, he seemed pleased to tell us that the State of Victoria elected Fiona Patten of the Australian Sex Party in the last round of elections. Naturally, my new friend in the blue shirt had a lot to say about her!

I was able to take the tour today because the parliament was not sitting. On these off days the building is not completely dead, however, it still forms a backdrop for political interviews. Here the media were lined up waiting for the suit to take the stage in front of the building which grants an air of legitimacy and gravitas to those who stand before it. I remember on the tour of the Scottish Parliament we stopped beside some pretty plain modern concrete steps which our guide told us were often used for interviews. Concrete, I suppose, speaks to the technocrat and in this the aesthetic differences between the two buildings are very significant in building different public impressions of their representatives as individuals and as a whole. Given the choice, if I were a politician I'd take this door any day, but that, I suppose, betrays my soft spot for theatre: the theatre of representative democracy.

The Scottish Parliament Tour

I am in Edinburgh this week giving some performances as a part of the Forest Fringe programme. Whilst here I have had time to look around and I noticed the Scottish Parliament offers free hour-long tours of the building. It is possible to just show up, pass through the security and take a place on a tour. That is precisely what I did and I only had to wait 10 minutes for it to begin. An ideal start, but what of the rest of the tour?

We were asked to assemble by this picture of the queen. Our guide then asked us not to take pictures whilst on the tour; the images which feature here are either ones I took afterwards or else 'stock imagery' (i.e. google image searches) grabbed from the internet. In general, I find that places that want to control their appearance in this way are generally A) projecting a neurotic public face B) fighting a losing battle and C) have something to hide. Was that true of the Scottish Parliament?

Our guide turned out to be a Portuguese lady who spoke English reasonably well and with a noticeable Scottish accent. I thought about the choice to have her as the public face of the parliament and it struck me as very progressive pro-European casting. She explained the architecture to us, pointing out features like the boats in the roof design, and then outlined how the parliament functions. We learnt who the MSPs are, how they are elected, how legislation is drafted and then we got to see their debating chamber.

We were led through security doors into one modern space after another and given the hard sell over how good a building this was. It struck me, however, that it was not quite as stunning as she was making out and that she massively downplayed the public outcry over it coming in three years late and ten times over the original budget. She also said that it had a projected lifespan of 100 years, yet I would be surprised if it lasts half that. In short, the tour included a healthy dose of spin.

Be that as it may, she had a nice self-deprecating humour and held our attention. That said, I had something else going on during the tour which diverted my, and finally, the group's attention. I had made myself fried cabbage, lettuce and dried tofu for lunch. It was very tasty but by mid-afternoon when walking these corridors of power it came back in the form of a stream of very powerful silent farts. This was not just one or two leaking out but a veritable gas cylinder on slow release pumping foul smelling farts into the parliament. I could not leave the tour as we were inside the security doors and so I simply had to try and step aside from time to time and let them out stealthily. They were however bigger and more powerful than me and this odorous cloud hung over the tour, unacknowledged, but far from not unnoticed. This made for a delightfully British situation.

This was the first parliament tour I have gone on and it should be interesting to take another, so as to have something to compare this one with. Something tells me that they will mostly follow similar lines, politics being so much about the management of appearances, though I could be completely mistaken. Next time round I'll probably have something safer for lunch, though I should admit this quite alternative agenda did elevate the experience into something more playful which revealed a strong capacity for avoiding the elephant in the room. Finally, then, this was indeed a political tour. 

An additional thing worth mentioning is that the tour I have been giving here this week in Edinburgh for the festival has used the following tours as templates: Loop Beijing, the Amsterdam Free Walking Tour, the City Sightseeing Bus of Bath, the Avebury Earth Mysteries Tour, the Anti-Japanese Museum of Beijing Audio Tour, the Queen Mary University East End Tour, the Chinese Bus Tour of Stonehenge, the Bath Ghost Walk and, last but not least, the Scottish Parliament Tour.  

The Dalston Conservation Tour: a tour with two guides

This was a free guided-tour that was offered as part of Dalston People's Festival. It was advertised in this way: 

Respecting our heritage. Guided walk and discussion. Ray Blackburn of Dalston Conservation Area Advisory Committee will talk us through the history and merit of buildings we take for granted, the recent Design for London, Dalston Heritage Scoping Report and the work of the CAAC to protect that heritage and implement the report’s recommendations. How can we protect our history and keep Dalston unique?

About 15 of us assembled outside the new library at 6.30PM and while waiting for latecomers some of the characters of the walk became more evident. Ray our tall, knowledgable guide took a supporting position while the man on the right outlined some of the other tours that would feature in the festival and the objective of using the event to make proposals to the council. Another man identified himself as being part of the council but attending in an unofficial capacity, while Vincent from the planning department seemed to be mentioned in his absence more than once. I realised that this was not only an architectural tour but also one deeply involved in local politics. 

Our guide Ray got going by introducing the tour which worked on the (largely correct) assumption that  we were interested and even engaged citizens and definitely not tourists. He then explained that the tour would focus on what could be seen rather than telling us about what used to be there, as many historical tours do. He did however make one exception, mentioning the demolished station and how architectural features from it that could have been preserved were lost. He did this in order to introduce the question, "what should be done with architectural fragments?"  

We moved on to the old library, a rather undistinguished construction where we were told about its history and present use and about its architectural features. This was to set the tone for much of what followed: description of the building with particular attention to architecture followed by a question about conservation principles. The somewhat dull and unloved ex-library was described as a 'good example' of post-war modernist public architecture and important to preserve in order to be able to tell the story of Dalston from an architectural point of view. This is an interesting argument and one that appeals more to professionals in the architectural field; that things can be mundane even ugly yet of value to the narrative of the space.

Here we came to Kinetica the new 14-floor tower block that can be seen in the background. The question that he got to was how do these significantly taller buildings effect the appearance of the area that was previously built to just 3 or 4 floors. This format of beginning with an architectural description and using it as a lead in for a question of principal was his way to connect his expertise in architetural history and guiding with the political objectives of the tour's organisers. Although it was generally very clear what the answer should be, such as this tower is too tall, it was a soft sell that allowed the listeners space to consider it as a question. On balance this was quite a good approach as an overtly partisan tour would have probably turned some people off. Still, it was not difficult to read between the lines, what was offered were not genuine planning dilemmas, this was quietly working at convincing you of the value of increased conservation.  

Speaking of quiet, Dalston Lane was anything but. There was a continual stream of buses passing back and forth which proved a problem for our quietly spoken guide. We had to crowd close to hear him but inevitably things got lost in the hectic hum of engines, steel and rubber on asphalt.   

With our discussion of architecture it was inevitable we'd take in Dalston House, though greater attention was given to the Pentecostal church behind it and the issue of architectural continuity in street regeneration.

Dalston being Dalston there was a bit of action with the police so we had to find a quiet spot and here we learnt about the past of the Chinese restaurant Shanghai. Here the Dalston Heritage Scoping Report was circulated, a thick, well researched document on local architectural history. It was roundly praised and we admired the restaurant's former pie and mash exterior. 

Throughout the tour there had been a gentle tension between Ray, our guide, and the man who had organised the events on a wider level. He often added details to the commentary and particularly talked about the processes and politics of conservation. He wore his activist colours very overtly and was looking to come away with an action plan and recommendations while our guide (who really is a professional guide in his daily life) was more focussed on the architecture itself and on conservation principles. It is this double interest that gave the tour its unique flavour, a split focus that was quite literally personified. 

At the end of tour we were invited to the pub where a room was reserved for us and where the political side of the tour now took the dominant role. Most of those taking the took attended and gave their thoughts and suggestions on how to improve the conservation of Dalston. We got into the local politics more directly yet at the same time there was also a chance to meet some of the others taking the tours who included Hackney Tours guide Simon, who told me about the book, The Tour Guide a study of New York City tour guides that sounds very interesting and about his own tours that will, I hope, find their way onto this blog in the not too distant future.