October 22, 2005 Kunming, Yunnan, China
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I rode a bike around the city. Kunming is big (population four million), but not huge like Chengdu (population 11 million). There are many skyscrapers, but they are not everywhere. While a nice enough city, it isn’t as polished as Chengdu.
What strikes me about these big Chinese cities is their newness. New wide roads, new bridges, new tunnels, new skyscrapers, new shopping centers. They feel as if they’ve been designed from the ground up to be modern cities, which I imagine they have been. The urban planners did well, but because everything is new, there is no sense of China’s thousands of years of history. Almost everything of historical significance was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so practically everything you see today is post 1976.
I rode to Yuantong temple, which was a nice surprise, as it was an active Buddhist temple, with pilgrims burning humongous joss sticks (joss logs is more like it). It was refreshing to see a temple that wasn’t an artificial tourist attraction in secular China.
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I can’t help comparing mainland Chinese to their ethnic Chinese counterparts in Bangkok, who do not live under a Communist regime that tried to stamp out religion (“the opiate of the masses”) and tradition, and who did not experience the self destruction of the Cultural Revolution. There tradition is still followed, and you can see it just walking down the street. Big houses, which are invariably Chinese, have a shrine room for the Buddha, and a room devoted to the families’ ancestors, and both rooms remain lit at night, making them visible. Shops and restaurants, which are often owned by ethnic Chinese, have a Chinese shrine on the floor. Grocery stores have an aisle selling joss sticks, candles, hell money, and other “hell paraphernalia” such as cardboard mobile phones. Yawarot, Bangkok’s bustling Chinatown, has busy temples full of monks and pilgrims. After one month in mainland China I haven’t seen any of this, besides the active temple today. It’s amazing that if you want to see traditional Chinese culture, China is the worst place to go. Your local Chinatown is much more Chinese. That’s Mao’s legacy.
People may not go to temples anymore, but they do go to parks, which provides an outsider with a glimpse into contemporary Chinese culture. I observed people playing mahjong and cards, groups playing musical instruments, and old men flying kites.