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.

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way the official narrative will be dirtied simply by association and the shifts in the narratives that come from using out-of-date information will only make it more layered.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