Dirtying the waters: Archaeopop in Macao

A version of this article first appeared in Pork #10. Get it here.


Macao. This former Portuguese colony off the coast of China's Guangdong province is packed with baroque churches, old forts, and gritty 20th century apartment buildings dyed gray and black by the ever-present pall of air pollution. Since Portugal washed its hands of the place in 1999 the city has been transformed into Asia’s largest casino destination: the Cotai Strip, a giant landfill between two islands, was created about 5 years ago and now boasts the full complement of Vegas hotels (Venetian, Sands, MGM) along with some Asian chains like the Galaxy or the Waldo. Of course gambling on anything and everything is as Chinese as dragons or jade. The Macao Museum even has an exhibit about Macanese cricket fighting, which drew huge crowds of bettors to watch the celebrity insects fight to the death – some of the past champs are actually preserved in the museum!

Champion Macanese Fighting Crickets, 1960s

So gambling is not a new thing: but creating a whole new landscape lets the casino developers indulge their rich fantasy lives, which in Macao has a strong archaeopop flavor.

Entrance to the 'G.M. Casino', where Poseidon is your greeter.

Exhibit 1: the Greek Mythology Casino. Outside, a hideous pastel Poseidon lounges in a huge fountain with some wild-eyed pastel horses. Walking into the atrium, you find yourself staring up a staircase at a giant statue of Zeus, holding thunderbolts. The big guy is flanked by hideous stucco murals of centaurs getting sexy time with Lapith women, and bulbous naked hoplites with chariots going into battle. (Low quality, high relief.) Behind Zeus the kitsch ends, and you step into a elegant warren of VIP baccarat and blackjack tables with eye-bleeding minimum bets ranging from US$150-$2000.

Having some Starbucks with my homie Zeus.

The Greek Mythology atrium. The Chinese New Year Decorations kinda clash with the caryatids.

I wish I had something deep to say about how this casino relates to Chinese culture, but honestly I'm just kind of baffled by this place.

Centaurs get jiggy with Lapith women. There's about 40 meters of this.

Exhibit 2: the Venetian. You probably heard about the one in Vegas, this one is a copy of that, which is a loose interpretation of the real thing. It’s Venice reimagined as an indoor shopping mall. The stinky green water of the real Venetian canals is swapped out for a glowing sapphire blue liquid. You can take a gondola ride, but all the gondoliers are Chinese women.




The lighting and fake sky gives everything a creepy twilight feel, like it’s always about to get dark.

"Piazza San Marco" in the eerie permanent twilight

We ended up at the food court and I got some spicy soba noodles for my oncoming head cold, then went downstairs – under St. Mark’s square – to the giant gambling cavern. I had wanted to play some blackjack, but even here the minimum bets were US$40 and none of the dealers spoke English. I contented myself with losing some Hong Kong dollars on the slots and called it good.

The gates of 'Babylon', Macao Fisherman's Wharf

Exhibit 3: Fisherman’s Wharf. This is not a casino, rather a baffling free amusement park with miniature districts that look like Amsterdam, a Tibetan temple, the Colosseum, Babylon, and a Tang Dynasty fortress. There’s also an interactive volcano (it erupts!) and an incredibly non-PC paintball zone designed to look like an Iraqi village so you can play ‘Marines in Fallujah’.

Black Hawk down!!!!!

Real estate in Macao being insanely expensive, all these things are visually piled on top of each other in a totally loopy juxtaposition. The colosseum has a shopping mall inside – big surprise – and some kind of performance venue on the inside, but looked deserted.


Oh, and did I mention the new year’s decorations? Everything was tricked out in red to usher in the year of the snake. Zeus was flanked by giant strings of firecrackers, St. Mark’s square had a giant red gong, And the Largo do Senado - the old government center of the colony - was crammed with snake decorations.

The Largo do Senado dressed up for the new year

I was not sorry to leave Macao, between the terrible air pollution and the dirty feeling that flourescent lights and gambling leave on your skin. We had a 20th-floor hotel suite with a glorious view… of dirt barges and half-finished landfills.

That is to say, Macao is very ‘inauthentic’, but no one seems to care and I think that’s fine. The romantic old Macao of Portuguese churches, fighting crickets, and fireworks factories was inauthentic too – but in a way that made white European visitors feel comfortable. The focus on historical reconstruction IS part of a fascinating recent Chinese obsession with replicating European stuff. On the mainland there’s tons of new housing developments that try to look like little British towns. Somewhere in tropical Guangdong there’s now an exact copy of the Austrian alpine village of Halstatt, a World Heritage Site.

Austrian Halstatt vs Chinese Halstatt (Gizmodo)

The ‘European lifestyle’ in general is hot for aspiring Chinese plutocrats: China consumes 25% of the world’s luxury goods and there’s so many Italian stores (Balenciaga, Gucci, Pucci, Versace, Armani, Tumi, Ferragamo, etc.) that when I first went to Milan it reminded me of… Hong Kong. The historical stuff is largely an offshoot of this kind of richy-rich Europhilia. But on the other hand it’s not weird for rising powers to associate themselves with older civilizations. The Romans pretended to be Greeks, the British pretended to be Romans, the Americans pretended to be Greeks and Romans, and now the Chinese are pretending to be Americans pretending to be Europeans. These Chinese visions of Greece, Rome, Babylon, and Austria are filtered through Walt Disney’s ghost and the misdeeds of American real estate developers.

The results are pretty entertaining. But I’m disturbed for the Chinese. For the Americans to look elsewhere for history kind of makes sense: since we killed or drove out all the native inhabitants, it was easy to pretend that the whole country was a blank slate. The results of importing Greco-Roman civilization are still weird, though – there’s an exact replica of the Parthenon in Nashville! But given China’s badass 5000 year civilization it’s disturbing that they’re looking elsewhere for inspiration. It seems like a sign of decadence, as if the insane boom of the last 20 years has lost steam and is beginning to veer into unreality.

Tennis greats as terracotta warriors

Rafa poses with his doppelganger

I'm not sure I entirely understand this one, but here's some pictures of tennis greats re-imagined as terracotta warriors. Above, Nadal. Below, Federer. But which is me, and which is mini-me?!?

Apparently this has been done twice: once for the 2007 Masters Cup in Shanghai, and another round in 2010 for the Rolex Masters Shanghai. The final lineup: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Nikolay Davydenko, Andy Roddick, David Ferrer, Fernando Gonzalez and Richard Gasquet.

Read more about it here and here. Me, I'm confused. Which dead king are they guarding?!?!

This is just... trippy.

Hat tip to Archaeosoup Productions for turning me on to this.

Want more terracotta kitsch? Made of Legos, perhaps? Click right here!!!

Welcome to the family, Red Deer Cave People

Fantastic news this week of the discovery of yet another archaic hominin, this time in southwest China and shockingly recent (via The Guardian):

The fossilised remains of stone age people recovered from two caves in south west China may belong to a new species of human that survived until around the dawn of agriculture.
The partial skulls and other bone fragments, which are from at least four individuals and are between 14,300 and 11,500 years old, have an extraordinary mix of primitive and modern anatomical features that stunned the researchers who found them.

Named the Red Deer Cave people, after their apparent penchant for home-cooked venison, they are the most recent human remains found anywhere in the world that do not closely resemble modern humans. The individuals differ from modern humans in their jutting jaws, large molar teeth, prominent brows, thick skulls, flat faces and broad noses. Their brains were of average size by ice age standards.

"They could be a new evolutionary line or a previously unknown modern human population that arrived early from Africa and failed to contribute genetically to living east Asians," said Darren Curnoe, who led the research team at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

At work in Red Deer Cave (Livescience)

The full article is at the Public Library of Science. The fossils were found by geologists in 1979, but they were encased in rock and not analyzed until 2008. When Ji Xueping and his collaborator Curnoe analyzed the fossils, they were stunned by the combination of unusual anatomical features and its extremely recent age (derived from C14 dates from charcoal deposited within the skull). These people were contemporaneous with the oldest known temple complexes at Göbekli Tepe, and lived a few thousand years after people settled South America. They outlived Neanderthals by several millenia.

Artist's reconstruction (Livescience)

Suddenly the world of early humans is diverse and complex. In the last few years we've learned about the "Hobbits" of the Indonesian island of Flores, the Denisovans (who got around all over Eurasia), an unnamed African hominin, and now the Red Deer Cave people. There's probably more out there somewhere waiting for us. I call them 'humans' because a lot of modern people are their descendants. Eurasian people get 1-4% of their DNA from Neanderthals, Melanesians 4-6% from Denisovans, and African people 2% from an as-yet-unnamed hominin (see this article and this article for more). The Red Deer Cave people and - who knows? - even the Hobbits could be in the mix somewhere too.

We can't talk about 'us' and 'them' anymore: we're all descended from some of these early human variants. This is despite the technical genetic difficulties involved: one estimate is that perhaps only 2% of Neanderthal-modern human liaisons produced children. Getting so much DNA into the gene pool must have required some mating persistence. Racists beware: in the long run, physical differences are no match for the human sex drive. This image of richness and complexity in human origins is a beautiful thing.

For more on archaic sexy time, read: A Third Archaic Human Population: and Yes, We Bonked Them 

China's deserted fake Disneyland

No way I can improve on the reporting from Reuters' David Gray, so I'm going to shamelessly reprint. Original article here. More of Gray's China reporting here.

Along the road to one of China’s most famous tourist landmarks – the Great Wall of China – sits what could potentially have been another such tourist destination, but now stands as an example of modern-day China and the problems facing it.

Situated on an area of around 100 acres, and 45 minutes drive from the center of Beijing, are the ruins of ‘Wonderland’. Construction stopped more than a decade ago, with developers promoting it as ‘the largest amusement park in Asia’. Funds were withdrawn due to disagreements over property prices with the local government and farmers. So what is left are the skeletal remains of a palace, a castle, and the steel beams of what could have been an indoor playground in the middle of a corn field.

Pulling off the expressway and into the car park, I expected to be stopped by the usual confrontational security guards. But there was absolutely no one to be seen. I walked through one of the few entrances not boarded up, and instantly started coughing. In front of me were large empty rooms and discarded furniture, all covered in a thick layer of dust, along with an eerie silence that gave the place a haunted feeling – an emotion not normally associated with a children’s playground.

Once outside again, I came across some farmers who originally owned the land and are now using it to once again to grow their crops. Their tracks and plantations can be seen running through and surrounding the uncompleted buildings. Walking further, I came across a rather farcical sight of some farmers digging a well next to a castle; a moment I will always savor as a photographer in a place like China where castles are not in huge supply. I explained this to the farmers and they just shrugged their shoulders, oblivious to a photographer’s happiness. I asked them what happened, and they simply answered the developers ran out of money, and they are getting back to doing what they do best. They are even slowly starting to plant trees and build shelters near the buildings, adding they think it is now safe to think the developers are never coming back. This I can believe, as the absence of any security (something very rare in China) leads one to think that even the developers have given up on what is already there.

All these structures of rusting steel and decaying cement, are another sad example of property development in China involving wasted money, wasted resources and the uprooting of farmers and their families. It is a reflection of the country’s property market which many analysts say the government must keep tightening steps in place. The worry is a massive increase in inflation and a speculative bubble that might burst, considering that property sales contribute to around 10 percent of China’s growth.

Links January 18

Been traveling the last few weeks. Some belated links to a variety of archaeopop subjects...

The New York Times asks, "What's up with all the UNESCO sites?" A good introduction to the problems of WHL listing.

“The dark side, of course, is consumption,” said Francesco Bandarin, assistant director-general of Unesco and head of its World Heritage Center, speaking of the consumerism that so often surrounds heritage sites. “And consumption and preservation do not go together.” If a site is “within an hour of a harbor,” he added, “it becomes inundated by a flood of tourism and geysers of money.” 

The post-eviction archaeology of Zuccotti Park (OWS-Archaeology). Some objects are now curated at the Columbia archaeology lab! 

The first thing I noticed was change. Lots and lots of change: pennies and nickles mostly. Going through the gutters taking pictures of objects in situ before picking them up attracted attention and as I got to talk with a number of people I learned that earlier that morning (I arrived around 8:30am) people had already been seen picking up change. This would explain the lack of quarters and dimes.

How to downsize a transportation network: the Chinese wheelbarrow (Low Tech Magazine, h/t Exiled). Invented 1000 years before the European model, still more efficient. This 'European technological superiority' thing is a historical blip.

Fascinating historical research on the relationship between education and industrialization (VoxEU)

Thursday Links

The Magdalenburg Iron Age tomb complex in Germany is a map of the lunar cycle and constellations (Past Horizons). Ridiculously cool.

A photographer sneaks into China's deserted fake Disneyland (Reuters). China has reached the heritage singularity, full of ruins of a future that won't actually happen.

Antiquity has published a rock art analysis of Johnny Rotten's graffiti on the walls of the Sex Pistols'    old flat on Denmark Street in London.  "Deconstruction of the graffiti...presents a layering of time and changing relations." Yep folks, punk is dead...

Watch the Destruction of Kashgar in Real Time

Hollowing out old Kashgar

New web tools make it easier than ever to track depressing things like the obliteration of historic cities. The great blog Ogle Earth has two posts documenting the destruction of Old Kashgar, in China's Xinjiang province. Until recently it was the “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia.” These presentations show the power of Google Earth as a monitoring tool for urban conservation.

Until August, this was a dense network of traditional courtyard houses.

Stefan Geens spent a week in Kashgar in August documenting the demolition, and has a great post with photo gallery (the photos here are his).

I have learned from living in Shanghai and now Beijing that Chinese authorities — and to a certain extent mainstream Chinese culture — do not attach much importance to protecting traditional vernacular architecture. Imperial palaces and grand religious temples are worthy of preservation or even reconstruction, but not on the whole the hutong of Beijing or the lane houses of Shanghai, which are deemed too ordinary, especially when there is money to made building high-rises in their stead.

He made a .kmz file for Google Earth so you can track the bulldozers yourself:


Basically, the government is keeping some attractive façades for the tourists, while destroying the neighborhoods behind it: an example of façadism at its worst.

Why hasn't tourism been a better incentive for preservation? You do see the occasional westerner exploring the town, but the overwhelming majority of tourists in Kashgar are affluent visitors from within China, and they uniformly travel in bussed tour groups, deposited at various locales where they are led to photogenic spots by guides bearing portable loudspeakers. Among these destinations are the two officially protected parts of the old town, the 15% where bulldozers won't tread. These neighborhoods have been turned into open-air museums, with an entrance fee (RMB 30, USD 4.40) that entitles access to various courtyard homes and souvenir shops. I suspect that the Chinese authorities think these two areas should suffice for the majority of tourists. Depressingly, they may be right.

In a more recent post, he also dug up a 1908 map and superimposed it on the current city plan, so you can see what has changed, and what hasn't. The .kmz file is here.



Geens reflects on what you can see in the overlay:

Right away, it also becomes clear that the river's course used to lie further East, across lowlands that are now decked in relatively modern buildings. The maps's main discrepancy can be found in the size and orientation of the settlement to the Southeast of the city; the fortress to the west is also larger than life. In the Eastern half of the cities, the topology of the mapped alleys is tantalizingly familiar, though without producing accurate matches.

It goes without saying that the destruction of Old Kashgar is an instance of cultural warfare. The government would like to pacify and/or eliminate the local Uyghur culture, which is Turkic, Muslim, and not always especially thrilled to be part of China - especially after (successful) efforts to ensure that Uyghurs become an ethnic minority in their own territory. After last year's bloody riots between Uyghur and Han, tensions still remain high in the region. Heritage Key asks whether granting UNESCO World Heritage status would stop the destruction - an idle question, since UNESCO only inscribes sites nominated by member states, and has no particular incentive to provoke China. And for Chinese planners, like their American counterparts in the 1950s, the old is just an impediment to progress, which is obviously best implemented by stuffing everyone into concrete towers that are shabby almost before they're even finished.

An Auto Archaeologist in Beijing

The super-stretch Hongqi (Yin Yeping)

The days when China was car-free are rapidly becoming a historical memory. The Global Times reports:

Just a short drive from the traffic headache that is downtown, but a long way from the mass-produced vehicles that congest Beijing's roads today, lies the Beijing Museum of Classic Cars. This Huairou District museum was set up just last year but has yet to make establish itself in the guidebooks as a tourist draw; Lifestyle went to see if it was worth a visit.

Probably the most eye-catching of around 160 domestic and foreign cars are the Chinese cars designed and manufactured in the 60s, which in-clude over 10 Hongqi (based on a 1955 Chrysler) and Dongfang (a Mercedes- Benz 190 "homage"), which represents the first generation of Chinese vehicle. "[The Dongfang] is very difficult to find. I believe it's the only one left," said curator and owner Luo Wenyou. Only six were originally produced in 1958, entirely by hand, and presented to Mao Zedong by FAW, China's first car manufacturer.

These things look pretty tight, I gotta admit.

When Mao tried the car, he bumped his head on the low door; what could have been a nasty moment was relieved when Mao simply joked that car didn't seem to be for him. FAW president Yao Bin got the hint and produced the Hongqi instead based on the Chrysler design of wider doors and large interiors; hence the Dongfang's tiny production line.

Luo found his abandoned, with no glass or tires but it has been restored to center stage with a refurbished appearance alongside a classic of governmental pomp, the Dongfanghong - or Communist China's answer to the stretch limo. Such leaders as Georges Pompidou, Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk, North Korean leader Kim II Sung and Zhou Enlai have all traveled somewhat in style in this classic.

"Somewhat in style." Classic. I really want to drive one of the Mercedes copies! Apparently this museum also has a wooden Rolls Royce that used to belong to Lenin?!

These cars are a great example of how authenticity is situational. The car can be a copy of a Cadillac or a Mercedes, but seen through the lens of a radically different political context and the ensuing maelstrom of social change, it becomes something more 'authentic' and interesting than the original could ever be.

With the ridiculously fast pace of change in material culture these days, it's great that people like Luo take the initiative to preserve heritage that gets neglected as being 'too new' but is still culturally significant. I mean, somewhere in the back of my brain I still have this image of China being a land of nothing but bicycles, but those days are already long gone.

Also check out coverage from Reuters and Xinhua.

Cai Mingchao: Civil Disobedience at Christie's

Today’s news from the antiquities trade involves a fashion designer, the Opium Wars, Jackie Chan, political blackmail, and a creative act of civil disobedience. The biggest private art auction in world history concluded in Paris at Christie’s last Wednesday, as the collection of fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sold for $484.6 million (the catalogue alone ran 1,800 pages).

The biggest stir was caused by an anonymous telephone bidder who purchased two Qing dynasty bronze fountainheads for $20 million each. The heads were among a dozen looted in October 1860 by from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace by Anglo-French troops during the Second Opium War. The palace was stripped of artwork prior to its destruction on the orders of Lord Elgin, then British High Commissioner to China. (And, ironically, son of the Elgin of Parthenon Marbles fame). Since the Christie’s sale was announced, the Chinese government has been demanding the return of the bronzes as stolen property. Actor Jackie Chan was quoted in the Times Online as saying “They remain looted items, no matter whom they were sold to. Whoever took it out [of China] is himself a thief. It was looting yesterday. It is still looting today.”

Cai Mingchao reads his statement (Photo Brothersoft).

The mystery bidder was revealed today as Cai Mingchao, a Shanghai collector and dealer and consultant for China’s National Treasure Fund, a government organization which purchases looted and stolen relics on behalf of the state. There was, however, a catch: Cai declared that he has no intention of paying for the heads, and that he placed the bid in order to sabotage the auction. He excused his action as an act of patriotic civil disobedience: "every Chinese would have done the same as I did. It's just that I got the opportunity. I have fulfilled my duty." He also noted that because the Chinese government had deemed the sale illegal, he would not have been able to take delivery of the heads within China anyhow.

While it is unclear whether Cai’s scuttling of the auction was in any way sanctioned by the Chinese government, it fits with the tenor of its recent statements. The French decision to allow sale of the bronzes caused “serious damage to Chinese people's cultural rights, interests and national sentiments,” according to the China State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

On the surface, it is easy to admire Cai Mingchao for risking his reputation as a dealer and collector in pursuit of historical justice. Among the more repulsive episodes in European colonialism, the Opium Wars were fought to defend unregulated narco-trafficking in China by government-sponsored British and French cartels. Beijing’s Summer Palace was looted and burned as a gesture of revenge, and Chinese still smart from the humiliation.

I am generally sympathetic toward repatriation demands. I also see how useful civil disobedience at auctions could be as a strategy for derailing the sale of obviously looted antiquities. (I have heard of other examples, which I will track down for a different post.) Some further context, however, makes the story a little murkier. Of the original twelve heads, five are missing and five are back in China, making the two YSL heads the only two left on the market. While they are interesting and significant as artifacts, they are not particularly ancient. Nor they even particularly important compared to other looted Chinese treasures floating around the antiquities market. And China already owns most of the extant pieces! I suspect the government has chosen to pursue these particular artifacts in order to whip up nationalist and anti-colonialist sentiment both at home and to sympathetic audiences abroad.

The play of meaning around these artifacts is fascinating. While they were clearly collected by Bergé and Saint Laurent as pure objets d’art, no one involved in the auction pretends that they are only that. Cai and the Chinese government have made them into patriotic symbols, while Bergé used them to snub China with a facile statement about human rights. According to the Daily Telegraph, Bergé offered to give China the heads in return for human rights concessions:

"I acquired them and I am completely protected by the law, so what the Chinese are saying is a bit ridiculous," he said. "But I am prepared to offer this bronze head to the Chinese straight away.

“All they have to do is to declare they are going to apply human rights, give the Tibetans back their freedom and agree to accept the Dalai Lama on their territory.

"If they do that, I would be very happy to go myself and bring these two Chinese heads to put them in the Summer Palace in Beijing. It's obviously blackmail but I accept that."

The amount of real charity behind this “offer” is, of course, nil. As Bergé surely knows, this particular piece of “obvious blackmail” had a 100% chance of strongly offending the Chinese government and zero chance of success. His gesture has the odor of colonialist smugness: the uppity natives might be allowed to have their baubles back if they meet the rational demands of the white man. But of course they won’t because, after all, they’re not very civilized, now are they, old chap?

It is important, however, that Bergé acknowledges, in principle, that the heads are not simply art objects. Dealers in stolen antiquities often insist that the value of the objects is truly to be found in their inner aesthetic aura, so that their lack of provenance (and the destroyed archaeological sites the looters leave behind), are unimportant. This case exposes a revealing chink in the armor of that argument.

Link roundup:

Portfolio on the auction
Portfolio on Cai's announcement
The story in the Times Online
Danwei on Cai
The Daily Telegraph on Bergé's "offer"
Some AP photos of the bronzes