| What
a difference a stay makes:
In the face of cultural uniformity, Mike Meyer applauds
Asian cities where conservation efforts work to satisfy
the appetites of the local economy and tourists hungry
for heritage.
FT WEEKEND - TRAVEL
By MIKE MEYER
2 October 2004
Financial Times
London Ed1
(c) 2004 The Financial Times Limited. All rights reserved
The seconds tick away. A 14-metre clock
unveiled aside Tiananmen Square for this week's National
Day festivities counts down to Beijing welcoming the
world for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Here's what it
will see: a city that looks uncomfortably familiar.
Think Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and La Defense.
A budget four times the Athens games
is funding the slogan: "New Beijing, New Olympics."
New Beijing is bigger, wider, flatter, more.
This can mess with a tourist mind expecting
to see Old Beijing. Nobody flies around the globe
to land in a generic American metropolis, unless the
ticket says Houston. "I feel like I could be
anywhere," a German visitor lamented as we stood
before one of Beijing's 43 Starbucks. Sure, a degree
of cultural homogeneity should be expected - even
in an 800-year-old town that was once a masterpiece
of urban design. But this branch sits inside the Forbidden
City. History does not record which flavour frappucino
the emperor favoured.
Not all of Asia's cities serve such
tasteless combinations of west meeting east. In some,
the west's cultural export helps preserve patrimony,
rather than erode it. You won't find McDonald's arches
in Hanoi, Luang Prabang, and Lijiang. In these towns,
joint conservation efforts work to satisfy the appetites
of the local economy and travellers hungry for heritage.
"You go to another country to experience
a different taste," Nguyen Ngoc Dzung said, handing
me a glass of tea. He sipped Beaujolais. Nguyen's
first experience with a border was patrolling one.
After serving on horseback during Vietnam's skirmishes
with China, Ngyuen traded his rifle for a tour guide's
flag, opening Hand-in-Hand travel. Now he gazed from
a balcony in Hanoi's Old Quarter. From this height,
you can see the 19th century. The rooftops of French
colonial tube- houses glow under moonlight and the
incense smoke wafts from Bach Ma temple.
I walked past Nguyen's Cafe 57 thanks
to the Canadian Embassy. It funded a series titled
"Architectural Walks in Hanoi". The maps
allowed me to leave the guidebook behind and spend
a weekend plodding happily through an Old Quarter
that on first impression was merely a jumble of decaying
internet cafes/travel agents. The circuitous walking
routes, however, turn back the clock by singling out
building styles and historical sites, such as No.
87, on Ma May. This 19th-century house was restored
into a museum by a joint project between the city
governments of Hanoi and Toul ouse, France. Orange
trees and birdsong fill the building's two wooden
floors, allowing visitors to imagine what Old Quarter
life looked and sounded like before the first whine
of mopeds arrived.
American Bobby Muller is working to
restore a different sort of peace to the surrounding
countryside. Muller heads the Vietnam Veterans of
America Foundation, and he was in town for the announcement
of a first. The Vietnamese defence ministry will help
American war veterans join forces with local experts
to locate and destroy unexploded ordnance that still
litters the landscape.
"There is a complete transformation
in this country. Tourism is helping immensely,"
Muller said, marvelling at the political and economic
openness.
He arrived as a 23-year-old marine,
and was sent home paralysed from the waist down. I
met Muller at the Metropole Hotel bar, where a Graham
Greene Martini costs more than a copy of The Quiet
American being hawked on the sidewalk out front. Across
the street, at the Opera House built by the French
in 1911, a British conductor was leading the National
Hanoi Conservatory of Music through Dvorak's Symphony
No 9, op. 95 in E minor: "From The New
World."
In Luang Prabang, Unesco is trying to
preserve a bit of the old one. Here, that means restoring
the former royal capital of Laos into more than just
boutique hotels. "Tourism is killing tourism,"
warned Francis Engelmann, project manager at the city's
Heritage House. "This is not Hoi An. That was
an abandoned Vietnamese ghost city, resurrected with
everything connected to tourism. Luang Prabang, however,
is a working community."
Travellers expect to be awoken by the
pre-dawn drumbeats that call monks to the city's 35
temples. Many arrivals do not expect, however, to
end up in what Engelmann calls a "cultural Disneyland".
Which is how a stay here can feel, if
you wander no further than the main street, fashioned
into a sort of Buddhist Bordeaux. Storefronts offer
silk, antiques, and aromatherapy. Spin the postcard
stands, and you can almost smell the frangipani.
"Most visitors come to Luang Prabang
and they leave retaining an image of anice colonial
city," Engelmann said. "They miss half of
it. Here you have in one city: two cities. What is
most precious here are the remains of the city before
cement."
Heritage House is working with the government
to restore Luang Prabang's 200 ponds, a focus of village
life. Architecture is being preserved, too - after
five years Heritage House's architects have documented
the details of 600 buildings at the city core. Yet
as with Hanoi's maps, the team's best tool to raise
visitors' awareness of their destination is an inexpensive
one. The lit, red brick sidewalks that lead off main
roads are an invitation to explore the cloistered
neighbourhoods set around water.
A similar focus on micro-solutions is
paying off in south-west China's Lijiang, the ancient
capital of the former Naxi kingdom. Here, the local
government has teamed up with the California-based
Global Heritage Fund to restore the homes of native
residents - on condition that they won't be converted
into inns or shops.
"There are 20,000 residents of
the ancient quarter, and each year, 500,000 tourists
come to visit," said Ding Wen, chief of Lijiang's
Old Town Management Committee. "Tourists come
with modern things to see a less-than-modern culture,"
she said, leading me over cobblestone lanes, past
a row of look-alike faux-folk guest houses.
"So we have to conserve while simultaneously
modernising. If we don't raise the living standards
of local people, they'll either move to new homes
in the New Town, or renovate cheaply and incorrectly."
Ding pointed to a drab concrete home.
Ink-brushed paper above the door read:
"Heartbroken for three years," signifying
mourning for a dead relative, but also reading like
a requiem for the building itself.
Lijiang's project has restored 40 local
homes, and plans to complete 200 in the next three
years. In addition, it funded the city's first Master
Conservation Plan, which mandates the removal of the
cellular phone tower currently casting a shadow over
Old Town.
It has encouraged more locals to get
into the hotel business. Long Guohe, a Naxi native
who owns the Blue Moon Valley Hotel, estimates that
in only a few years, 95 per cent of inns are now held
by ethnic Han Chinese.
Long, aged only 21, opened his hotel
as a way to preserve Naxi heritage. His savings -
and English fluency - came from working as a teen
in a bar when Lijiang was the preserve of foreign
backpackers. "They always tipped," he smiled.
Long named his hotel after Lost Horizon's
setting. China says the place on which it was based
is north of Lijiang, on Shangri-La Road. I don't know
what the terminus holds but, at the start, the road
to paradise is lined with massage parlours and tattooed
labourers, stealing naps under shrubs.
There is no coffee here.
Please direct media inquiries to:
GHF Press press@globalheritagefund.org
or (650) 325 7520
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