Home » China » Field of Dreams

How Tourism works in China

Field of Dreams

Steve_t
2007-05-11 08:40:26

Displayed times (last time: ) Rating 4/5

Rating: 4.00 out of 5.00. 1 members have rated this article

car park. Walking round them revealed what looked more like a construction site than a tourist sight. The original stupas, now neglected and wildly overgrown, were surrounded by barbed wire, and obscured by several ramshackle wooden corridors containing Tibetan prayer wheels. More, larger stupas were in the process of being constructed, and the whole complex was surrounded by dozens of Tibetan prayer flag tents. The photograph I'd been entranced by was simple, elegant, stunning. This was just a mess.

Chinese tourism is very regimented. No, it's unbelievably regimented. In my first three months there, I met precisely two young, independent travellers. The rest go on organised tours, wearing identical baseball caps, or t-shirts, or wearing huge name tags advertising the travel company they're with. Sometimes they have all three. Led by a guide with a flag, they dash from sight to sight, stopping barely long enough to have their photograph taken in front of whatever it was they came to see. Then they go shopping. If there are four sights on the itinerary, there will be at least five shopping stops. And the guides get BIG commissions.

Chinese tourists don't walk the breathtaking, mostly unrestored ten kilometre stretch of the Great Wall between Jinshaling and Simatai, for example. Because all there is to see is the wall. Instead, they go to the completely reconstructed, less than fifty year old stretch at Badaling, with its cable car, amusement park, restaurants, cinema and shops. They walk maybe one hundred metres along the wall, have their photograph taken, buy the obligatory "I climbed the Great Wall" t-shirt, cap, key-ring, pen, mug, pencil case etc, then go off to a jade factory.

In one of the few English conversations of this part of my trip, the custodian of the stupas explained that the Chinese tour groups now stopped there on the organised trips from Aba on the way to Chengdu. They wrote on the monuments, and broke or took the mani stones. Hence the barbed wire. And the more there was to see, the more there was to have their photograph taken in front of, the longer the groups would stay. Which explained the frenetic construction.

I half expected Kevin Costner to poke his head from behind one of the stupas, saying "If you build it, they will come".