china

Despite the amazing and even terrifying continuity of Chinese culture, it is really astonishing how little of ancient China there remains for anybody to look at. Lewis off-handedly mentions at one point that there remains not a single surviving house or palace from Han China. There are not even ruins. There’s no equivalent of the Parthenon or the Roman Forum, no Pantheon or Colosseum. You can come closer to the present: There’s no real Chinese equivalent for Notre Dame or the Palazzo Vecchio. For all its overpowering continuity, China does not preserve physical remains of the past. Even those things advertised in China as “old” usually turn out otherwise: the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City in Beijing originate in Ming times, but the forms we see post-date 1644 – and really they look like as if they had been remodeled and repainted as recently as last week. You’ll be shown a supposedly ancient pagoda, only to have it explained that it burned down in 1150, was rebuilt in 1300, then demolished, then built again, and has now been fully restored thanks to generous funding from the local government.

becker's history of "the city of heavenly tranquility," beigjing, describes the almost total demolition of historic beijing ---by the time they were through getting ready for the olympics, perhaps 3% of the historic city remained intact