t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Thursday 12 July 2007
It is common for India and China these days to be bracketed together as countries going through an "economic boom." Last Sunday, they found themselves in the same cultural league. Highly valued heritages of both won places on that date among the "New Seven Wonders of the World." That should provide at least two points to ponder for both countries.
The Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal of India won this recognition as a result of online voting conducted by the private, Switzerland-based New7Wonders Foundation. India witnessed a glitzy, countrywide campaign by glamorous personalities and media, asking the people to vote patriotically for a Mughal emperor's marble monument of love. Television channels subsequently hailed the victory as a tribute to India and as a promise of increased tourism. Not all Indians agreed.
I was in China on June 9, when the country officially observed its "cultural heritage day." Sure enough, the Great Wall figured prominently in public discussions on the occasion. But very few private individuals seemed interested in the subject and, certainly, the voting was not very popular with the TV channels.
Most Indians may not agree with either Mahatma Gandhi or Aldous Huxley on the Taj. The Mahatma seemed to see in the monument a squandering of slave labor, and the English writer described it as marble covering "a multitude of sins," mainly architectural. Many Indians, however, do think that the country should do something about the squalid surroundings of the Taj before celebrating its world-wonder status.
The Chinese, too, had similar, if not identical, thoughts. Preparing them for a possible poll disappointment, the China Daily of June 6 said: "The real cultural and historical value of a world heritage site is not determined by online voting results, but what they mean to us as human beings."
Recalling that only one of the earlier Seven Wonders (the Pyramid of Giza, Egypt) survives today, the daily added, "... the most important message from the selection is the disappearance of the other six old wonders, whose cultural and historical value exist today only in name. It should cause us to pause and reflect on the state of our own world wonder that sits in our backyard."
June is the cruelest month for the Great Wall, with the peak of Chinese summer drawing multitudes of tourists to it. With them, I, too, climbed the Badaling Wall (a section of the Great Wall in suburban Beijing) and could see what the Wall had withstood all these years - thousands of squeaking shoes, vendors of bottled water and snacks, and the inevitable graffiti.
The worst damage, we learnt, had been done elsewhere. Official China does not hide the fact that private developers had paid farmers in quite a few areas to prise stones out of the Great Wall for use in roadbuilding. In other places, enterprising peasants had usurped unguarded parts of the Wall, put up iron ladders, and were allowing tourists a walk on the "wild side" of the Wall for a fee. All of these culprits had been punished, but no one claimed that the crimes did not continue.
The damage, moan the officials, had been so great down the centuries that only about 2,500 km of the once-6,400 km-long Wall now stands in broken fragments, scattered through the country's nine northern provinces. That piece of statistics, however, suffices to show how well the relic deserves the World Wonder appellation. Where else in the world would you find so long (and broad) a fortification, a man-made barrier that had its origin 2,300 years ago?
The original part of the Wall, a rather primitive structure built during the Quin dynasty, centuries before Christ, disappeared long ago. What the tourists throng to today are the remains of the sturdier structure put up during the Ming dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to 1644.
As the brochure I reread (while sipping chilled beer at a kiosk after a little over 100m of trek on the Wall) reminded me, the original Wall was built to keep the Huns out. The Mings were trying to fend off Mongols. As tomes not meant for tourist consumption will tell us, the Wall was not a total success as a tactic.
The Great Wall, of course, was a greater success than similar walls raised in Western Europe - in Italy, for example, against Goths and Huns. In China, too, however, the Wall could not withstand forever, besides the ravages of weather, factors such as relentless "barbarian" efforts to barge into the country, often assisted by internal rebellions.
The Wall does not become any less of a wonder for all this. Even decades ago, I heard they used to claim that the Wall could be seen from outer space. That claim was abandoned after the first Chinese astronaut, Yang Lewei, confessed in 2003 that he could not see the Wall from out there.
China has other walls and fortification as well. The Ancient Wall (built in the 1370s) in the fabled city of Xian in the history-laden province of Saanxi, in fact, is an even more impressive site and a more interesting experience to the average tourist. Right from the drawbridge to the city-encircling terrace, with rooms preserving relics and even presenting a live, lute-playing female attendant, this wall is indeed a small wonder.
The Chinese, however, do have reason to be especially proud of the Great Wall (claimed more credibly to be yet another Chinese invention like paper or paint brush or fireworks or the jigsaw puzzle) on which heavily armed Chinese soldiers once stood vigilant against the northern tribes and their chieftains, such as Chenghis Khan, constantly eyeing the Middle Kingdom. But the Chinese have no more reason to think of keeping out Mongols, assimilated long ago into the country's history and culture.
From the Great Wall of China to the Limes of Italy and down to the Berlin Wall, no brick-and-mortar barrier has ever succeeded in keeping peoples away or apart for ever. That brings us to the second and the more important point for India and China to ponder at this moment of celebrations the inclusion of their monuments in the New 7 Wonders of the World.
The Great Wall of China was not intended to keep its southern neighbors out. No wall ever, in fact, separated the Chinese and the Indians. the Himalayas were the only natural barrier between the two, but the mountains did not deter Chinese monks from making pilgrimages to the land of Buddhism's birth.
But, as noted in a previous article (Making Buddha and Confucius Meet, July 2, 2007), an invisible wall, an almost impregnable barrier, has, over the past four decades or so, come to divide the two Asian nations.
It would seem to be high time that this other wall, which does neither of these countries proud, is brought down. All the more so for the frantic interest evinced by warlord George Bush in raising a fresh barrier between the two. The monuments of China and India alone cannot prevail against the machinations behind the missile defense scheme.
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