The year of the tiger has arrived, and Martin and I are celebrating Chinese New Year in Kunming with a Chinese friend of Martin’s from university, who is back in China to spend Spring Festival with her family. We left Wuhan a few days ago, amid sub-zero temperatures, closed-up shop fronts and a seemingly non-stop salvo of firecrackers bombarding the neighborhood, and arrived in Kunming, known as the “city of eternal spring”, a place that seems like paradise in comparison. It’s very clear that they’ve decided tourism is the way to go here – apparently the old paper factories that used to cover the city in smog and pollute the lake have all been moved, and lots of money has been poured into building wide streets and an impressively walkable city-center, which includes a network of tourist-friendly pedestrian streets with shops and restaurants. Kunming apparently also has wonderful weather all year round, and Yunnan is filled with culture and delicious food. I’m still loyal to Wuhan, but I have to admit that Kunming is probably the most pleasant city I’ve been to in China.
The positive impression is also colored by the fact that thanks to our friend, we’ve been getting VIP treatment since the moment we stepped off the plane. On our first afternoon, we were taken to the “Yunnan Nationalities Village”, a theme park for displaying the cultures of the different minority groups that live in Yunnan (as well as elephants). Our friend’s father knows the manager of the park, and after being dropped off just inside one of the side entrances to the park, the manager personally welcomed us, and then handed us over to a guide who first brought us to the park restaurant for a very fancy lunch and then showed us around the park. We were driven around in a park-style golf cart, and the guide made sure that we made it to each part of the park just in time for each of the different dance performances. In the evening, the park held its yearly Spring Festival dinner for its employees and a few specially-invited local officials, and we were invited to join the dinner and observe the festivities. So all in all, a very VIP tour of the park.
A replica of Xishuangbanna's Manfeilong pagoda
I have to admit, I was fairly sceptical of the idea of a “minorities theme park”, it sounds suspiciously like a “minorities zoo”. The park itself was actually built in a fairly tasteful way, with beautiful replicas of important sites in Yunnan and examples of the types of houses that different minority groups in Yunnan have traditionally lived in (in that way, it was a little bit similar to Skansen in Stockholm, which does the same thing for traditional Swedish culture). In each “village” inside the park, there were also performances of traditional cultural dances, performed by park employees from those minority groups, which was also interesting to see and done in both a tasteful and entertaining way.
A performer climbs a ladder made of swords
But then there were also a few people who seemed to be hired just to be there, as a part of the scenery, in more of a zoo-type way. In one of the “villages”, an old woman with a tattooed face (typical for one of the minority groups in Yunnan) walked around among the houses. Our guide thought we should have our picture taken with her, but the woman objected, and told the guide that she didn’t like foreigners because once during the Water Splashing Festival, some foreigners called her names and attacked her with water guns. We insisted that we didn’t need a picture, but the guide convinced the woman that we were friendly foreigners, and in the end we all took a group photo together. I assume that all of the people who work at the park have chosen to do so because the pay and/or conditions are better than their other options, but walking around a park to “look at” minorities still feels very awkward.
The front of the church, with the altar labelled "altar" in Chinese, and Christmas trees on either side
There’s also apparently a minority group in Yunnan that practices Christianity, and to display that group’s culture, the park had built a small replica of a church, complete with wall murals, an altar, and choir music playing in the background, and everything inside labelled and explained. As someone who has grown up in countries where Christianity is mainly seen as a religion rather than as a cultural curiosity, it was a bit surreal to see a church in the park alongside everything else. But it put the whole park into good perspective, and in a way made me feel like at least the cultural voyeurism was taking place on slightly more even terms.
The text reads: The religion, which worships Jesus Christ the Savior, believes in that God created and rules over everything on earth, and takes the Old Testament and the New Testament as its Holy Bible, has given birth to three major sects of the Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox Eastern Church and the Protestantism, and churches are the public venues where its disciples worship the God. Catholicism and Christianity propagated to Yunnan's minority-inhabited areas over a century ago, and have sizeable numbers among the Miao, Yi, Nu, Lisu and Lahu minority people. To objectively portray this religious folk culture, a Christian church is built in the Miao Village.
On Spring Festival Eve, we walked around on Kunming’s West Mountain, fed seagulls by the side of the lake (apparently the thing to do here, they sell some sort of seagull food on the sidewalk), had a big family dinner at a golf club in Kunming, and then went home to watch the Spring Festival show on TV (there was singing, dancing, magic and comedy – other than the magic, a skit with a hysterically laughing woman with a recent face-lift was by far the most popular among the non-Chinese speakers in our audience, trans-cultural humor). Humor can usually be tough to learn in a new language, so I was especially proud when I got some of the jokes in the very first skit, references to popular online phrases this year. The time I’ve spent “studying” online has been rewarded.