Open House
Just fun it’s nice to get dressed up a little and go visit an open house way out our price range. Rare views of a city from the sky for future home owners. I did that with my girlfriend this weekend, we were escorted into a building still under construction. I stood over the balcony while workers were balancing on the scaffolding, perspective tenants looked at the view. The inside of each apartment had fake furniture, fake pictures, and bowls of wax fruit. A museum of future rich, or future empty apartments.
Shan Cun, Guangzhou’s Next Major Demolition
Here are several photos of a massive demolition project going on in Guangzhou. While one village is destroyed another strip of villas is under construction along the water. This contrast is right by the the Liede bridge with a beautiful view of the Guangzhou tower. For more on this visit George McKibbens Travel-Blog.
My Adventures at Gongyuanqian
Gongyuanqian is one of the most congested and busiest metro stations in Guangzhou connected with an underground shopping mall. Above ground there is a major development project which is seemingly frozen in time. People living in semi-demolished homes. Nothing going up or down, just a half finished demolition surrounded by high rises. The village is Shaomazhan, in the intersection of Beijing Street and Zhongshanwu Street. The photo I took is from a shopping mall across the street.
Some houses have holes knocked in the walls are filled with cardboard and plywood. The few people I spoke with shrugged their shoulders when I asked questions. 2012 will be remembered for semi-demolished villages. With a 40% drop in housing in 2011 developers are going bankrupt waiting for rich people who aren’t coming. Business insider and CNN have headlined as China’s housing bubble. Half of shaomazhan village is destroyed while the other is not. A few houses away elderly couples playing mahjong. On the other side of the wall people are shopping.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
My purpose of the visit was to locate the original Chenliji Medicine Factory. Earlier in the day I visited the Chenliji museum and wanted to see the original building site. The buildings have had numerous facelifts, but the street plan dates back to the Ming Dynasty. The style of the building in its place was intended to be a replica, only it’s hard to tell because it’s not a giant KFC.
A crowd of police were standing around a group of people sitting on benches holding up signs and wearing white t-shirts claiming that they were being cheated in a land dispute. The village they claimed to be from was Tao Mei. I had never heard of the village, I asked if it was near Guangzhou. It was further north in Chaozhou. I then asked if it was OK for me to take a picture of their T-Shirt, a young man agreed and as I raised the camera a cop waved his hand in front of the camera nearly blocking the photo. This is the white glove waving at the bottom of the photo. The T-Shirt reads “Tao Mei Villager.”
I asked what the problem was the police didn’t respond in words but asked me to leave with a waving motion of the hand. Like swatting a fly. As I turned to leave the woman reached in her bag and gave me several pieces of paper. I took them and walked away. Several officers were fallowing me. I turned and asked if the paper I was holding was important? I told the officer: she gave me a flier, is that illegal? (Ta gei wo chuen dan, shi fei fa de?) Again no verbal response. I handed a cop the papers and they went away. Now I was really curious.
I continued walking, moments moments later a girl ran to catch up with me. She looked about eleven years old, whe handed me four hand typed sheets of paper. Then an elderly villager handed me two color photos printed from a web site. They papers indicated that in Meitao displacing villagers to build an illegal mine. Weather or not that was true, the Meitao villagers were not favored by Guangzhou police.
On the way back to the subway I saw a cop take a juicer from a juice vendor. I was able to make a video of the vendor asking for his juicer back and the officer leaving away in a van. The vendor was stuck pushing a wagon of oranges. I caught the end of the argument on video.
video: juice vendor and police
The heavy police presence reminded me about everything I started disliking New York. The police presence is really for the large number of scam artists.The area does have some fascinating characters. Many mutilated beggars with accents from all rural parts of the country perform begging routines and count their money with stubby arms. One guy balances a bicycle on his head with a large stick of bamboo. Amazing time to live where I live.
The Guangdong Folk Arts Museum and Long Yuan Xi Village
It’s a rare moment when a village is destroyed for the purpose of historic restoration. It’s happening right now in a village located next to Guangzhou’s Chen Clan Academy. The Chen Clan Academy is home to Guangdong Folk Art Museum, a reasonably priced museum that shows some of the best tile sculptures, wood carvings and one of the few protected Lingnan style buildings in the country. It’s one of the first protected cultural landmarks in the short history of the PRC.
The Chen family were not local to Guangzhou, but spread out over 72 counties in Guangdong and in 1888 pooled their resources to build an anchesteral hall completed in 1894. This hall has proven resilient enough to survive a revolution, civil war, world war, reform and even today’s era of rapid modernization.
This became the home of the Guangdong Folk Arts Museum in 1959, and during the cultural revolution it served as a printing factory. The wood carvings, ceramics, brick sculptures all depict Chinese myths and legions which contradict early values of the modern China. However, the red guards never laid a finger on this place. The structure reflects the decadence of the Qing Dynasty and would be a prime target of Mao’s death of the four olds. The survival of the building is in it’s versatility.
Long Yuan Xi village does not have the same versatility as the Chen Clan Academy. Within the next year the Folk Arts Museum will begin a renovation and expand North to house several jade sculptures, this will be the demise of Long Yuan Xi village. Of course it’s not pleasant to see another village destroyed, but it’s great to see a development which isn’t high rise apartments or shopping mall. How is it possible a neighborhood to be gentrified in the promotion of art and history?
The Museum’s Curator, Li Zhouqi is a member of Guangzhou’s municipal people’s congress. A lesson learned, instead of fighting the government it’s better to join the CCP and make positive changes within. The complex situation of destroying a village to enhance a museum coensides with Premier Wen Jiobao’s lip service to China’s cultural preservation. He was quoted by Macau Daily times as charging developers across the country as “Destroying the real and building up the fake” this past September.
The restoration of many historic districts in Guangzhou began two years ago during the preparations of the 2010 Asian Games. If we compare the Asian Games with the Shanghai Expo and the Beijing Olympics, Guangzhou has done a much better job capitalizing on it’s historical landmarks than Beijing or Shanghai. Such as the restoration of Shamien Island and Daling Village.
Right now a plaster wall separates the bus stop and already separates the village from the main street and once walking behind the village you can see many of the buildings which were literally split in half. I spoke with a family whose home will be destroyed, they are receiving adequate compensation for their property and are very proud of the quality of the Guangdong Folk Arts Museum has given to the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Some of the most amazing features of the Chen Clan Academy are not in it’s exhibits but the wood carvings, lime sculptures, and ceramics.
Glass Confetti, The Develpment of Pazhou Park.
If you want to know where glass bottles in Guangzhou meet their maker, take the 764 bus over the Pazhou Bridge and fallow the smell of burning plastic. Guangzhou is a city where you know your rent will increase when the air gets too clean.
Last year Pazhou village was filled with people. Now it’s a field of broken glass and smoke. This field of broken glass and remains of brick houses has a view brand new skyscrapers. The view is hideously beautiful. A must see for urban explorers.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The restoration of the Pazhou Tower is a fallow up on a 1981 preservation project done by the Hong Kong History Museum. An extension of Guangdong Greenway will fallow around the Pazhou Park linking a bike path to University town. The renovations will be fantastic for anyone who likes to cycle or jog. At the moment Pazhou park is designated for glass and scrap metal recycling.
The assortments of bricks you’ll see in the photos are stubs of the former Pazhou village, which was occupied only last year. It’s like visiting the crater where the meteor landed killing the dinosaurs. It’s the smoking gun of urban renewal.
When you walk through wear good shoes because little pellets of glass will crunch under your feet. Also bring a dust mask because near by there is an over whelming smell of burning rubber and plastic. The are is undergoing a transformation so it’s like showing up to a dinner party when the cooks are dropping things and shouting at each other. Though the area seems deserted there is evidence of regular visitors. The tower steps lead to a shrine where someone is continuously leaving offerings of food to religious deities.
Of course this won’t be an industrial junkyard forever. The entire region is in the hands of a Chicago architectural firm named Goettsch Partners. Click on this link to view the master plan. As always historical landmarks in Guangdong are completely random. An entire village can be removed making way for the ideas of American architects, while one single Ming Pagoda is designated as ‘historic.’
In two years tourists visit this pagoda they will talk about it being hundreds of years old, when it’s actually 31 years old, it was rebuilt in the approximate location, not nearly as old as Pazhou village. See it now, and don’t be afraid of the dog when you climb the steps. The 1981 paint job is chipping. Proof that history is an ongoing creative process which changes every generation.
The Last Village of Jida
If anyone over 31 tells you they were born in Zhuhai, they are lying or just very confused. Zhuhai did not exist before 1980.
The city is comprised of former villages of Zhongshan city creating the second Special Economic Zone after Shenzhen. However, the villages within Zhuhai date back several hundred years. Such as NanPing, the home of Yung Wing. Hong Kong Court translator and Qing Dynasty diplomat who traveled to America and became the first Chinese graduate of Yale in 1854. Part of Nanping Village is now known as Hua Fa, literally translated as ‘development.’ Villages like this are disappearing. When villages disappear they are given new names by real estate companies, which gives Chinese history a very long and scattered paper trail.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Jida is one of the more expensive neighborhoods in Zhuhai, though most new highrises are located on the main streets like Shui Wan Lu and Jiu Zhou Lu. The side streets of Zhuhai are made up of industrial communities.
Zhuhai apartments are marketed to wealthy people who don’t like big cities. The selling points are clean air and low population. The value of an apartment depends on the view of the ocean. The villages that last the longest offer no ocean view, and sometimes take years to be destroyed. Villages in big cities like Guangzhou are destroyed quickly.
Jida’s Da Lau Chuen (local nickname, ‘big old village’) has been in a perpetual broken state for several years. I lived in Zhuhai in 2009 and remember when the demolition started. It hasn’t finished. This neighborhood is hard too hard to sell.
Three days ago I photographed this village and saw a child playing in a stairway of an abandoned building, I asked if his parents were around and he said they were just next door. They were. In fact, a majority of the village is still living all the rubble. Zhuhai is an expensive city, and this is a very affluent neighborhood.
Imagine being a child exploring the remains of your neighbors home, while rich people in surrounding high rises can watch you from their balconies.
I talked to one resident who’s home had been marked for demolition for several months, he hasn’t been given an actual date. People here have to be ready to leave at any given moment, keeping their fingers crossed for a large sum of cash from the government.
This village faces a field of weeds that have grown around the walls of partially demolished houses. Some of these homes are covered in weeds and look like a 19th century Irish grange. Only 20 yards away from Jiuzhou Cheng shopping mall and the Zhuhai museum. Jida is decorated with high rises while people living in fields of rubble are the back yards of gated communities. Wrapping a semi-destroyed village in fancy apartments is like bleaching a decaying tooth.
It’s an amazing contrast. To see it, take the public bus, 3, 3A, or 40 and get off at Jida bus station. Walk through the parking lot on the north side of Shui Wan Lu.
Keep in mind that these remains are very expensive. Click on this link to see exactly how expensive.
Rubble Tourism
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
This is a new writing project which is self explanatory, rubble tourism. Documenting rubble.When built spaces are destroyed, preserved, or rebuilt it shows what that society views as important.
Most of my posts will show places where I live in Guangdong province. Two weeks ago I visited the city of Foshan and photographed the destruction of several Lingnan style buildings. Most of those photos are on my travel blog.
Right now cities are becoming ambiguous. If its possible to travel the world and see the same building, eat the same fast food, while speaking only one language, traveling become obsolete.
If not disappearing a better word is recycled. Materials that once served a purpose are smashed, they evolve into something else cities remain in a state of physical contortion.
Sometimes the destruction is widely protested b the community and developers, governments, and residents butt heads. Sometimes the destruction is welcome.
Many places have too many bad memories live for anyone to miss them. Some buildings only hold shame, and when the sledge hammers arrive the community feels a detox. Like the removal of a tumor.
The question that should be asked is how do people get the message that their culture is not worth preserving?
When I talk to people in many of these disappearing villages I get mixed reactions to what’s going on. Some people feel helpless against the nations race to modernize and lost in a futuristic world they don’t understand; while others see the destruction as a mark of success, pumped with adrenaline addicted to everything new. This will all be shown in my writing and photography.
Subscribe and receive all of my posts.
