MCLC: fake ancient city in Kaifeng

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: fake ancient city in Kaifeng
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Source: South China Morning Post (8/13/12): Pg. 6

Kaifeng's ambitious plan to build fake ancient city;
Historical city may spend 98 billion yuan to clear slums, create replica
Song dynasty town for tourists
By Alice Yan ting.yan at scmp.com

A historical city in Henan province is planning to spend the equivalent of
20 times its 2011 fiscal revenue to demolish slums and build a replica
ancient town that it hopes will be a tourist hot spot, local media say.

Kaifeng , one of China's ancient capital cities which served as the seat
of power on seven occasions, will spend 100 billion yuan (HK$122 billion)
over the next four years to relocate about 80,000 households - one-third
of the population in its old district, the China Business Journal reported
on Saturday.

The sprawling 20 sq km tourist attraction will be built in the
architectural style of the Song dynasty (AD 960 to AD1279), when the
then-capital reached its peak of urbanisation and prosperity.

An official was quoted by the newspaper as saying that public transport
kiosks and tourist information centres would be decorated in similar
fashion.

An official at the Kaifeng Communist Party Committee's general office, who
declined to give his name, confirmed to the Post yesterday that slums in
the old district were being bulldozed, but said he was not sure what the
project was for.

Professor He Yunao, from Nanjing University's School of History, told the
Post that Kaifeng was a cosmopolitan city with more than one million
residents during the Song dynasty, and was even known abroad.

It was visited by the 13th-century Italian explorer Marco Polo, and even
had a small community of Jews who came to the city along the Silk Road in
the 10th century. The Jews reputedly built a synagogue there.
The daily life of the Kaifeng people was also depicted in one of China's
most beloved scroll paintings, Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival by the
12th-century artist Zhang Zedun.

In the past few decades, however, Kaifeng has developed at a slower pace
than many mainland cities. Kaifeng party boss Qi Jinli recently said
turning Kaifeng into an "international tourism centre" was one of the
city's two development priorities. The other is to open an industrial
zone, the Journal reports.

In the first half of the year, 28 million people visited the city, fewer
than other major cities in the province. A government official said
tourists have long complained about the lack of attractions in Kaifeng,
other than an ancient iron tower.

Local authorities are planning to issue debt or use bank loans to fund the
demolitions, which will cost exponentially more than the city's fiscal
revenue for 2011, which was 4.9 billion yuan.

But He, the professor, said the plan to build a copycat Song dynasty town,
if true, was a "crazy and bad idea". "Maybe it will be attractive to some
people, but this tourism hype will only last a short while. Only tourists
with low-level taste like to see these replicas."

He said many of Kaifeng's ancient buildings lay buried beneath metres of
mud brought on by frequent floods over the past few hundred years.

Professor Yao Kunyi, a tourism researcher in Shanghai, said more
historical replicas were cropping up nationwide for tourism, but they
tended to be in the wrong styles as the builders had a weak or "distorted"
understanding of history.