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 Longshan Temple Tour: a fortune teller predicts more of the same

I was in Taipei attending a conference on urban heritage and on day four, once we had all got a bit tired of listening to one another speak, a tour was laid on to break things up a little. We took a bus ride out from the conference centre to Lungshan or Longshan Temple, it seems to be spelt both ways.

We were divided into three groups each led by different guides from the Institute of Modern History. My group's guide's approach to guiding us round the temple was to first point at things and ask us what we thought it was and to then go on to explain it if, as it often did, her questions drew blanks. This made for a more interactive tour than that of the stereotypical "on your right is..." style of guide. She was trying to awaken our curiosity rather than dampen it.

We would have been guessing a long time, however, around some of the features of the temple. She needed to explain how these two red blocks of wood could be used to tell your fortune.

She was keen to point out the depictions of the Dutch on this incense burner. Compared to  the guide who showed me around Nanputuo Temple, the closest equivalent space I have been guided around to this, she was a far more secular sort of guide. She did not present herself as a believer and try to convert us, she presented herself as an expert in the customs and architecture. This was all fine but it took the edge off it.  

There were a number of different gods in the temple, or statues of them in case, and a busy throng of people circling around, stopping in front of one or another, depending on what they were praying for. I recognised one of the gods as Mazu, a sea god also popular in Xiamen, and here we stopped in front of another, where she showed us a fertility offering that had been left. This was a working temple that people came to, first and foremost, to pray and a tourist attraction, only secondly.

The tour became more interactive again when we came to a god who you could pray in front of in order to meet your future love. It was mostly popular with the young women but a few guys were busy tossing red blocks of wood too, and an older lady as well. Hope springs eternal.

After the inevitable group photos on the temple steps which I read to be the end, the tour unexpectedly sparked back into life. One of the other two guides led the lot of us to an adjacent alley that sold Chinese medicinal herbs. This being a Sunday afternoon, there was little action so we heard about what we would have seen if we had come any other day of the week. In this case it felt like a second best but there are places I can think of where that's not the case. The City of London, for example, is bustling and contemporary during the week but like a ghost town on Sundays making the multiple layers of history more visible. As it was, we looked at a lot of plastic sheets and imagined exotic items arranged behind them.

We walked round the corner and into a gallery that proudly displayed this poster sporting an  unfortunate piece of English as a second language typography. The exhibition was a student show of paintings and design. If I had tried to explain, they would probably have thought I was a pervert, so I simply said nothing.

The final leg was led by the other guide which gave me the chance to compare the three of them. They all wore the same id tags and were employed by the same institution meaning there were some similarities in their basic tone and content. However, I realised that my original guide was the most talkative of the three. While it is often thought that the location is meant to be the point of interest and the guide simply there to bring it to life, I rather feel things are the other way round in reality. I'd rather listen to an incredible guide in a boring place than a boring guide in an incredible place. Of course, in reality things are rarely so polarised and it is easier to build the brand identity of a location or institution than that of an individual tour guide. The best guides tend to rise through these systems, anyhow, and the freaks get weeded out yet, it does also mean that the status quo is often what is most rewarded. That indeed was my enduring feeling with this tour: there was nothing wrong with it, it was perfectly professional and even friendly yet, it was also entirely predictable. It was, finally, a tour of the temple not of the guide's learning, imagination or personality, even if I did catch a glimpse of all of these. If I could use those two red wooden blocks to read the future of Longshan Temple, I rather suspect their message would be that nothing much was going to change anytime soon. 

The Taiwan Viewed From The Sea Tour: a teasing boat cruise for mainland Chinese tourists

My experiences of going on tours organised for mainland Chinese tourists has been pretty  consistent: infuriating, ridiculous and, with the benefit of some distance, highly amusing. When I learnt that there was a boat tour from Xiamen that sails rights up to to Taiwanese island of Kinmen but doesn't land on it because the trip is designed for mainland tourists lacking the necessary visa, I needed no further convincing. The tour began with ticketing confusion: the times were not those listed online and the ticket office had been relocated a kilometre down the quayside. Hawkers on the waterfront tried their best to sell us alternative tickets but finally, after a phone call, we located the ticket office and paid our 136 kuai each. We were then escorted back the way we'd come and onto the boat by a jolly man whose breath smelt of alcohol. It was, in fact, completely unclear whether this actually was the original boat we had been trying to take or whether a competitor had snapped us up somehow but it made little difference: we were getting a trip to Kinmen, the sun was shining and we were departing immediately. So far so good.

The boat consisted of a large and loveless cabin lined with narrowly packed rows of hard wooden seats facing a small, tacky stage either side of which an over-powered PA relayed the guide's commentary at an uncomfortably loud volume. We were then urged to go upstairs where, for just a little over 100 RMB each more we could have a small room to ourselves. We were escorted upstairs and when we seemed unconvinced they added we could instead have an outside table with tea for two for just 150 RMB. They were really doing their best to maximise the return on each passenger by squeezing extra money from us. Indeed, throughout the rest of the entire trip there was a sustained effort to make us part with as many RMB as possible. The staff seemed incredulous that me, a Westerner, could possibly choose to remain downstairs and kept on pestering me to change my mind but no, the cabin was where we could watch the guide tell her story and besides, the trip was already over-priced and I wasn't going to encourage them any further. 

I had discovered from the drunk man earlier that this tour had benefitted greatly from the cap on visitor numbers to the island of Gulangyu. Gulangyu is Xiamen's holiday mecca, a once beautiful cluster of colonial villas that has become a tourist trap. Visitor numbers are currently being kept down in an attempt to improve the island's environment and gain UNESCO world heritage status. As a result, a lot of visitors have to wait two or three days before they can make it onto Gulangyu and while waiting they sometimes choose to take this boat tour instead as an alternative. This trip, which used to also include a stop on Gulangyu but no longer does so, is something different. It is a tour that plays with the idea of international travel without ever actually leaving mainland China. It might well be the nearest that a good many of the tourists taking it ever get to going abroad. While looking out over the seaways and watching the constant flow of vessels (Xiamen is the world's 14th busiest port) the staff came back to try and get me upstairs again. Now there was a special offer: just 50 RMB each to go upstairs. I stayed put, I wanted to see if they would come lower still.

Our destination, the Taiwanese island of Kinmen came into view. When we were approaching it the guide said we had passed a line in the waters that marked the sea border. She then got us to check our phones and look for the Taiwanese network we were now attached to. This seemed to raise a lot more excitement than it should, seeing as our phones didn't actually work on these networks and there was no danger of us watching Youtube or connecting to Facebook, just some of the websites blocked in China, including this blog.

Next came the option of having your picture taken with Taiwan in the background. This was an offer too tempting to resist, particularly as the price was a modest 30 kuai. What's more, when we headed up and out to the bow of the boat for the photo, the staff said we could just stay above decks afterwards. So, finally we got up there for 15 each and were to receive a memento as well. Little victories are often the sweetest.

And here are the results. Three of the images are ready-made with the fourth stuck top left and the lot of them, then laminated. The meaning of the images is quite interesting. They frame the tourist excursion as a military manoeuvre. The title refers to this site as the frontline between Taiwan and Mainland China and the pictures are of army lookout posts, Taiwanese flags, a black plume of smoke, presumably the result of a Chinese bomb or missile, and a gun boat scrambled to repel the invaders. Since we were actually making a subtle incursion into Taiwanese waters and our guide repeated a number of times that we all wished to be reunited with our brothers and sisters across the water, I read this image as a way of banalising an ongoing conflict by reframing it as tourism but still maintaining the PRC's territorial claim to Taiwan, nonetheless. This was, quite probably, the most nationalistic tour I have ever taken but what was striking about it was that this was a very casual form of nationalism. There was nothing strident or hectoring about it, it was all delivered in a friendly matter of fact tone.

Photos done and dusted we could then sit outside and enjoy the fine weather. That's when the sales promotions started in earnest: cigarettes, pineapple cakes, knives made from cannon balls, an endless litany of products, all with a Taiwanese twist. We got stories about the products too, such as how President Xi had been given one of these famous knives by Taiwanese President Ma during their recent historic meeting. Unsurprisingly, the newly elected and less Beijing friendly President Tsai, was not mentioned.

We were finally lured below deck, once again, by the knife show. It featured a long-haired man who, it was claimed, was from a Taiwanese ethnic minority. He stood barefooted on top of two knives while the compere, a vulgar young lady in a short red dress, talking up the act into a microphone perpetually on the brink of howling feedback. He then proceeded to put another man on his back and bounce him up and down, all the while balancing on two thin metal blades. It would have been best if he'd have stuck to that but he got dragged into yet another sales promotion. He wanted to give us all 'presents' from Taiwan and the compere then added a price and asked him how much they would cost 'back home'. This prompted some very fake acting and, I was told, a rather dodgy accent too. In any case they managed to shift a few more trinkets on the back of this before we finally arrived back in Xiamen. 

The tour reminded me a little of a bus tour of The Great Wall I once took which also featured endless promotions, the only difference being that that time round we did finally get to see something impressive. This was like the Great Wall tour without the Great Wall. It was as if they had extracted everything of interest and were left with the residue: a floating sales promotion and nationalistic commentary. This trip to go and look at Taiwan and the Taiwanese is, I think it's fair to say, one that will appeal to an almost exclusively mainland clientele. It can be interesting for all of us, albeit for different reasons, to see how the other half lives.

The Taipei City Government Tour: a robot is haunting Taipei

There's nothing like setting off on an unusual mission, in an unfamiliar city, in a country you've never been to before. It was with this spirit of embracing the unknown that I set out to make an exploration of Taipei using Drift, an app designed to assist you in getting lost.

The day had other plans for me. I had to enter some information and was then asked to register. Being in a place where I don't have a data-plan, indeed where my regular phone wasn't working at all, this was not going to happen. Taipei City Centre does have a free Wifi service but you need a Taiwanese phone to access it or else a number from one of the ten listed countries, a list that includes neither the UK nor China.

Dis-connected but still with a desire to explore, I set off from the bamboo clad Museum of Contemporary Art. Rather than deciding in advance where to go, what to look for or how to  go about doing this, I just started walking so that I'd gain some momentum. 

I went to cross the road and, as I was waiting for the light to change, remembered what I had read about many traffic lights having no causal relationship between the pushing of the button and the traffic stopping. You press the button and, because the lights operate on a fixed cycle, it changes nothing except it now displays a red light telling you to wait. I find this use of placebo buttons annoying as it betrays a condescending attitude to the the pedestrian and only encourages in me the very thing they try to suppress: the very natural instinct to jaywalk. I crossed the road.

With no app to guide me, I tried a time-tested strategy instead: I pulled out a coin and decided to let it decide which way I should walk at each junction. A head and I'd turn right and a tail would spin me to the left. Setting off in this way I realised I had downloaded the Taipei City Government's Audio Tour and so I began listening to it as I slowly navigated my way around the city centre.  

The recordings are, quite frankly, unlistenable. The woman narrating them sounds one step away from a computer-generated voice and to make matters worse, infuriatingly cheerful plastic music accompanies her robot-like voice. It's the sort of well-made trash you might expect to come across on a hard-sell corporate video but voluntarily listening to it is not something I'd recommend to anyone. For the purposes of the tour, however, I subjected myself to it, and, an hour later when she/it finally stopped, I was none the wiser. My head beaten into submission, I came to Ulysses Hotel which set me off thinking I really should reread the novel as it can be understood as the record of a day walking around Dublin.

The coins had a habit of creating their own story. I came to this enigmatic white building bearing the sign 'WAITING ROOM'. The place gave nothing much away: it was not obviously a gallery and, whatever it was, it was shut so I had to stand outside and dutifully wait during which time nothing very much happened. The waiting, the blank time, was the point of it, I guess. To compound this, I set off and the coins took me in a circle right back to the WAITING ROOM, however this time round, a woman had emerged from a building opposite and was burning ceremonial paper money, the type that gets burned in the belief that it can help deceased family members in their afterlife. I then imagined some grandpa in the next life gratefully receiving this money and using it to buy things.

Who knows, if the next world is a mirror image of this one then this grandpa may have used the money to buy a train ticket in the Taipei Central Train Station, where a large number of people were sat directly on the floor WAITING.

I zig-zagged a path through the city and stumbled across an Indonesian fashion show on a large open-air stage at the back of the Taiwan National Museum that seemed mostly of interest to a small audience of Indonesians. I'm not entirely convinced that this sort of display of traditional costumes exactly works as a fashion show, this looked to me more a cultural identity gig. That said, for all I know this might be a radical departure for Indonesian fashion. A slim man, also in traditional costume, stood at the side of the stage and intoned into a microphone over a gamelan soundtrack. He introduced each of the models and the only thing I could make out was that each introduction finished with a flourish and the word, "Indonesia!"

Continuing through the city centre, I came across a Falun Gong manifestation. The last time I saw them was when taking a tour around Bath City Centre where they play the part of the oppressed. Here it was a different story. The most striking thing about it was being in the presence of so many people in a deep consuming silence. I heard birds for the first and last time this day.

It was inevitable that I should pay a visit to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, it is a part of the audio tour after all. Walking around the imposing architecture, the robot voice came back to remind me who the bronze figure was and somehow made his achievements sound less than what they really were. That didn't stop the question of national identity from being very present however, this was a constant theme I kept encountering during my tour and stay in Taipei as a whole. I found it curious how much people wanted to stress how Taiwan was completely unlike mainland China, and while yes it was clearly more clean, wealthy and orderly, it also seemed to me more similar than different. On the other hand, looking at this young boy gazing up at the motionless guard in the presence of the elder statesman I thought about what my Taiwanese hosts had told me earlier, namely that they had grown up all their lives in Taiwan and felt no connection at all to the mainland which they were more than a little wary of. How this unfinished story of nationhood will unfold in this boy's lifetime is hard to predict and this sense of the uncertainty seemed to me a feature of this city that took solace by embracing its present.

The day wore on and I knew I would be neglecting my tourist duties if I did not follow conventional wisdom and head to a night market. It was almost precisely what I imagined it would be: an oversized, noisy, leisure shopping hub teeming with neon food stalls and fashion accessories. In a sense then, it did not disappoint. 

Returning back to my temporary accommodation I took the metro and as I was constructing my narrative about the city, namely that it aspires to be bland but actually manages to be quite interesting, I noticed this 'only in Taipei' advert on the Metro: anti-spy camera detection in restrooms. Seeing as I have never seen this sort of advert anywhere else in the world it made me wonder if Taipei had a particular problem with perverts placing concealed cameras in toilets and then uploading their videos of ladies on the job onto the internet. I guess that is a question I will probably never find the answer to but, rest assured, at least if you use the Taipei Metro restrooms you will, probably, be safe from electronic eyes.

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.