Olympic flame casts light on cultural understanding
Cheng Yunjie
Half an hour’s drive to the southwest from the 2008 Olympics’ venue,
the Bird’s Nest, the Capital Museum is quietly stealing some of the
glamour from the quadrennial games. The Ancient Greek Olympics has
unveiled its curtain there, accompanied by four other exhibits featuring
ancient Chinese civilisation. One week after they were staged in the
run-up to the summer Olympics that opens on Friday, these exhibits are
promoting the blend of Western and Eastern civilisations.
Visitors almost tripled from the usual 5,000 a day to more than
13,000 on Thursday, forcing the museum management to consider providing
evening services to reduce daytime crowds. That could make it the first
museum in China to open in the evening.
Unlike stadiums teeming with cheering spectators, the ancient Olympic
Games exhibit, enlivened by 166 Greek relics, received only whispered
but frequent “wows”. The sculptures, pottery and coins, mostly being
shown for the first time overseas here, conjured up not only sports but
also the long-lost competitions in drama, poems and music.
In the exhibition halls upstairs, there’s a low murmur of admiring
gasps and camera clicks, attesting to the awesomeness of the more than
1,800 top-class art treasures on loan from more than 70 domestic
museums, including China’s oldest bone flute dating back 8,000 years.
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Chinese PM handing over the Olympic Torch |
Also on display: a gold-leaf sunbird 3,000 years old, jade burial
suits for royal families of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-24 AD) and
painted scrolls featuring 87 immortals of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).
“This is indeed a chance that comes once in a lifetime, as you might
visit every Chinese and Greek museum, only to see just a part of them.
Some exhibits, from China in particular, were not even open before to
the public,” said curator Guo Xiaoling.
That explains the endurance of visitors standing in a line that winds
for 300 meters, from the basement to the entrance of the exhibition
“Chinese Memory” on the first floor, and the regrets of foreigners on
package tours who could only stop for a while before rushing to the next
site.
“We are facing the increasing pressure of receiving large numbers of
visitors. As the exhibitions will be open till October, we encourage
Beijing residents to visit later,” said Guo. Amid the foreigners who
make up approximately 10 per cent of the daily visitors, Barbara Rendall
was lucky to get in.
She lives in Beijing, where she works as an English literature
professor at Beijing University.
She roamed around the museum, visiting one after another of the
lesser exhibits and even the book stores, happily relishing her new
understanding of China.
“It’s wonderful and exciting to move from one culture into another
because it helps you get rid of fixed ideas that are wrong,” she said.
When she first came to China to teach at Xiamen University in 1984,
Rendall was bothered by her inability to find the right food and coffee.
Her then 7-year-old daughter felt bad when older women came up and
touched her blond hair.
“The longer I have been here, the less have I seen differences in
culture, because we feel more at home,” she said about having returned
in 2004.
Noticing many Chinese impressed by the Greek pottery featuring a
variety of athletes, Rendall said with a smile: “Who knows? Maybe after
the Olympics, the Chinese would also paint athletes on their pots, bowls
and plates!”
Deciphering the real China
Though it’s hard to gauge what and how much impact the Greek relics
would have on the Chinese, curator Guo said the museum did try to bring
Chinese and foreign audiences some “genuine” cultural flavour from the
home of the ancient Olympics.
Greek Ambassador to China Michael Cambanis valued the timing of the
exhibitions at the opening ceremony, saying that the 2008 Olympics mean
a lot to Greek people because the event symbolises the Olympic torch
being delivered from the cradle of Western civilisation to that of the
East.
Of course, the torch relay from Athens to Beijing was anything but
easy. The trip, envisioned as a good chance for China, an Olympic host
for the first time, to reach out to the outside world turned
controversial amid protests, such as those by “pro-Tibet independence”
activists.
“It’s no accident that the torch relay has hit so many snags en route
because many foreigners know little about China.
Often times, the Chinese are stereotyped and sometimes
misunderstood,” said Guo.
For instance, quite a number of foreigners think China has a fondness
for the grandiose.
Some think Chinese are too concerned about ‘face’ and others wonder
why the Chinese people have shown so much patriotism when it comes to
the Olympics.
The key to deciphering these riddles lies in Chinese culture, Guo
said.
“If you can’t help gasping with admiration at the works on show,
which represent the pinnacle of world agricultural civilisation, you
will sense the long and deeply-rooted pride of Chinese nationality,” he
said.
This pride goes back for millennia and was eroded only in modern
times amid foreign invasion and China’s closing itself off from the
world.
As the country, comprising one-fifth of the world population, finally
makes its way to economic prosperity, it’s natural for it to pursue a
rejuvenation of national pride and culture, Guo said.
Tang Zhaoliang, the liaison officer with the office of the Beijing
2008 Environmental Building Headquarters, agreed that cultural
perspectives would straighten out many misunderstandings.
Critics say Beijing is splurging on electricity for dazzling Olympic
lights, although the country is suffering a power crunch. Considering
the Chinese tradition of Zhang Deng Jie Cai, meaning hanging up lanterns
for festivities, however, one may see the reason why the government has
spent so much effort on neon lights, flowers and streamers, he said.
The idea of building antique style brick walls along the sidewalks
outside vacated houses or unfinished construction sites, which some
foreigners viewed as a fig leaf to hide a mess, actually came from the
concept of tidying up one’s home before hosting guests, Tang said.
“We all know these projects can’t be completed overnight. The idea is
not to hide but to try to make our home as pleasant as possible to look
at,” he said.
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Rehearsals at the Bird’s Nest |
China’s new role
Increasingly aware of how it is seen by the outside world, China has
adopted a long-term vision to host the Olympics as not only a sports
gala but a feast for culture.
Exhibitions in the Capital Museum included, as many 3,000 cultural
exchange activities involving almost all regions and continents are
being staged in Beijing and its six Olympics co-host cities of Qingdao,
Qinhuangdao, Tianjin, Shenyang, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Inside the Olympic village of northern Beijing, athletes may sit
back, if they like, savoring Chinese tea and folk music, practising
calligraphy or watching a traditional drama.
In a national Olympic education program, more than 400 million young
people have been taught the Olympic motto, “Faster, Higher and
Stronger”. No parallel can be found in Olympic history.
Rendall, the teacher, thinks it’s necessary to pass on the Olympic
spirit to the younger generation because the Games make even the
poorest, smallest countries, whatever culture they represent, feel equal
to others by merely being present.
“Economic globalisation has led to the free flow of capital and
technology across the world and made competition and interdependence a
normal thing among countries and regions.
But it’s culture that decides the specialty of each one and makes
global exchange more active, enduring and efficient,” said Yu Pei,
Director of the World History Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences.
He foresees an increasingly sweeping cultural blend to come along
with the summer Olympics, with the overture starting from China’s
opening-up and economic reform 30 years ago and the climax featuring a
comprehensive dialogue between Chinese and Western civilizations.
“Conciliatory but not accommodating,” the doctrine proposed by
Confucius more than 2,000 years ago, will remain the essence, in
contrast to assimilation or elimination, Yu said. Unlike the Egyptian,
Mesopotamian and Indian civilisations that were either destroyed or
displaced, the Chinese civilisation stands to be the longest continuous
surviving ancient civilization, although the Han people at the core of
Chinese civilisation had been conquered by northern nomads as well as
other “foreign” invaders such as Mongols and Manchus.
The reasons, as Yu pointed out, are the special traits of Chinese
civilisation, underscoring diversity, tolerance, openness and modesty,
which encouraged the Han people to seek the interface of two different
cultures.
In a recent interview with overseas media before the Games, President
Hu Jintao said that one of the cultural heritages of the Summer Olympics
would be to boost exchanges among different cultures.
“If China, a rising power, can contribute anything to the Olympics in
the new century, it will be to prevent conflicts and wars and to
safeguard peace by boosting the blend among different civilisations,”
said Men Honghua, professor with the Institute for International
Strategic Studies of the Party School of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China.
Xinhua |