A New Challenge (8)
Chinese New Year and Ghost Cities
Reading time: 8 minutes
Green and Red Dragon in the Lantern Festival Parade in Wendeng
Saturday February 10th marked the start of the Chinese New Year and where we in Holland believe to set off a lot of fireworks, the Chinese top us on all sides. Fireworks on Chinese New Year's Eve began at five in the afternoon and lasted until about a week later. However, these are mainly decorative fireworks and in terms of bangs it is especially the long strings of firecrackers which are popular; yet that finds its origin in Chinese mythology.
The Chinese calendar is based on the lunar calendar and every time at the end of the year, people were plagued by the horrific monster Nián (年).[1] Normally it hid in the deep sea, but it took malign pleasure in harassing the people in the villages and towns at the end of each year by coming out of the water to kill and destroy.
Until, towards the end of one particular year, one of the villages was visited by an old man dressed in rags. A little old lady from the village saw the newcomer and warned him about the impending disaster. She tried to persuade him to flee from Nián with the rest of the villagers, but he said that if he was allowed to spend the night in her house, he would ensure that the monster would never return. The little old lady did not have much confidence however and continued to persuade the man to flee with her, but without success. So she fled with the rest of the villagers, leaving him behind in her house.
At midnight, the monster burst into the village, but felt a subtle change in the atmosphere. Where in the past the whole village was shrouded in darkness, now light burned in a house in the east. Slowly, Nián approached the house, but then, to his great horror, saw that all the doors and windows were pasted over with bright red paper, and thousands of candles lit up the house like a bonfire.
The monster Nián making an appearance in the Lantern Festival Parade
The Beast trembled and screamed as he stared at all those ominous things. Overcome with anger and frustration, he jumped to the front door, but at that moment a fierce crackle erupted in the courtyard, scaring Nián and preventing him from coming any closer. Then the front door was opened in a flash, and the old man came out in a bright red robe and roaring with laughter. The monster was so startled by this and became so frightened that it fled head over heels, stumbling over its claws, and never to return from the deep sea again.
The bright, blood-red colour can therefore be seen everywhere in the public space in China around the New Year. At the village market everything can be bought in red, including underwear and socks. Each house is plastered with red strips of text and bright red balloons, and the crackling of thousands of firecrackers can be heard continuously everywhere. Anything to keep the monster away!
Funny was my observation of the “coincidence” that the Chinese New Year's day coincided with new moon. In all fairness, until recently I was not familiar with the lunar calendar phenomenon and only later did the realization come that the coincidence was not a coincidence at all. Did anyone say: ignorant?
Anyway, that same lunar calendar indicated that the first full moon in the new year would fall on February 24, and on that day the Chinese celebrate the lantern festival. This marks the end of the festive period and also symbolizes the beginning of spring. Part of this was a parade that was full of agricultural and mythological symbolism: all kinds of vegetables, fruits, livestock, seafood and fish pass by, but also the monster Nián and lots of Dragons. In the Chinese zodiac we have entered the Year of the Dragon and therein it’s the only mythical animal. Unlike Western Dragons, these are good-natured creatures whose purpose is to assist and protect the population. I was fortunate enough to see the lantern festival parade in Wendeng.
In addition, I was allowed to visit an area that is currently being developed on the South Bank of the Shandong peninsula. Near the campus of a large university I arrive in a residential area consisting of residential apartments in a neatly landscaped and cultivated area. It is equipped with all the amenities of the city: shopping centres, cinema, eateries, sports center, everything you can think of. In addition, this neighbourhood is completely protected by a fence and there are entrance gates with barriers in all directions of the compass. The atmosphere is friendly and I can pick up my bike in an open bike shed where the bikes are unlocked. Try that in Amsterdam.
Towards the beach we cycle on a wide and brand new four – lane road with separate cycle lanes, on which we are pretty much the only traffic except for the odd car or tricycle. Then we come across the so-called “English neighbourhood,” with replicas of Big Ben and Tower Bridge. This neighbourhood is also fully cultivated and equipped with all comforts, except there are hardly any people to be found here, and that makes the whole thing rather creepy; as if we are walking around in a scene from The Walking Dead.
Towards the beach, the landscape becomes even more surreal. Now we ride past abandoned construction sites where only the hulls of residential towers, some with glass and some without, are eroding. In addition, they are accompanied by numerous building materials such as cement mills with piles of bags with cement, cage lifts for the construction workers up to and including completely intact cranes. Also, all the barracks for the construction workers are still in place with some beds even holding some bedding. These places seem to copy the story of an event that took place almost a century ago, when The Wall Street Crash caused construction sites to be abandoned headlong.
However, I had already heard reports of these brand new cities without residents. It is extraordinary to be able to admire such places up close, but I was also curious about the scale on which this phenomenon can be found and to what extent it is considered a problem; and by whom. To stay balanced, I hereby share two articles that consider it from both a sunny and a less sunny side.
Upon arrival at the beach, there is a vague resemblance with the boulevard in Scheveningen, Netherlands. Before the beach is reached we cycle through landscaped dune area with low afforestation and another neighbourhood with residential towers. The entrance to the beach is a cultivated square with statues of children playing and a working and clean toilet building (which I enjoyed a lot, especially because there was a ‘normal’ toilet instead of the more common hole in the ground). The beach itself was a lovely, wide beach that fanned out endlessly to the left and right and where hardly anybody could be found. Just behind the boulevard, two large hotel towers seem to be waiting for guests already for a long time.
Next to the hotel was a wide piece of broken ground, but in the distance we saw some blue roofs looming. In my naive enthusiasm, I had hoped to score a cup of coffee or tea there, but the lack of souls should have been a hint of the opposite. The buildings we encountered were dilapidated and just as abandoned as the construction sites. They were part of what looked like a replica of Coconut Beach, complete with wicker parasols and a crab that could have carried me if it had lived. The parasols, however, had clearly been subject to erosion for some time and the crab had probably looked Medusa in the eye, because it was completely petrified.
Another surprise awaited a little further on, because there were indeed a number of statues that remind us of Easter Island. No idea why these replicas were placed there, but at least they made a nice contrast next to the wicker parasols.
The catering-like buildings of what seemed to have been a boulevard had been abandoned and were on the verge of collapse. This part was clearly intended for entertainment, as evidenced by a merry-go-round and some other playground equipment and toy trains that were part of it. Upon closer inspection, the play equipment turned out to have been electronic toy excavators and the trains were already rusting in peace.
However, really creepy was a statue of Minnie Mouse, who seems to be looking at the clear blue sky with a cheerful face, while her eroding face and sawn-off arms tell a completely different story. That story is shared by the merry-go-round; not only has the canvas already disappeared, making the skeleton visible, but above all the facial expressions on the merry-go-round horses seem to wonder in pure horror what just happened.
With a little historical awareness these images might be called prophetic, foretelling the end of the entertainment age. Not such a crazy idea when we look at the creative poverty that has plagued Hollywood for some time now, and the state of many of us who have been forced-fed with entertainment (not to mention advertisement and ‘news’, which today amounts to the same thing) to the point where foie-gras geese actually begin to feel sorry for us.
Entertainment nowadays usually involves being passively entertained, rather than actively entertaining ourselves. The latter, as a rule, makes us happy, while the former promises something it can never fulfil, namely that we become happy if we are continuously and exclusively entertained by others without any effort on our part. I simply don't believe that will make us happy and energetic in the long run. To be sure, I am not suggesting that we should all now go to China to learn tai chi or kung fu, but I wish for everyone to dispose of TV and newspapers and spend the abundance of newly available time on one or more activities from which real energy and pleasure can be extracted. Because, let’s face it, isn’t it much more fun to sing, dance, and make love ourselves, than merely watching how others do it?
Jolly Greetings,
Erik Stout
[1] 年 (nián) also means: ‘year’. The term xīnnián kuàilè (新年快乐) literally means: new year happy, which becomes our Happy New Year.