Shanghaied in Beijing

Wherever I have been in the world, there are scamsters and tricksters that pry on tourists. China is no exception. Already on my first attempt to buy something at the (in)famous Silk Market, I was fooled. Like most tourists I ordered a stamp with my son’s name. The girl I negotiated with was pretty and clever and I don’t think I paid too much more than double of what I should have. But when I picked the stamp up, it was handed to me by her boss. I could see on his face that he was up to something, but I did not figure out what until I came home and my son discovered that the ink container he had given me simply was too small for the stamp…..

Another day I was walking past the Oriental Plaza in central Beijing, which seems to be a favored place for tricksters. The location is perfect; an extremely expensive shopping mall next to a not so good neighborhood. If you shop at the Plaza, you are either very rich or a dumb tourist. I was approached by two girls from a far away province that wanted to practice their English. The tricksters always seem to come from far away. We started talking and they invited me for tea at a nearby dingy old tea house. It was an interesting introduction to traditional Chinese tea drinking. I took a couple of pictures of the girls, which of course made them very nervous. One of them borrowed my camera and tried to delete them, but not even I have figured out how to do that. The bill I got for the tea I do not even want to talk about. But the girls seemed so disappointed when I did not pay it all that I almost felt ashamed….

A couple of days later I was passing the Oriental Plaza again with a friend on my way to the railway station. Again I was approached by students from a remote province, but these were art students having a showing. They did look awfully old to be students, but we let them take us to their exhibit. They showed us all the paintings they themselves had painted and urged us to buy. All the paintings were of course copies we had seen on countless other locations. Obviously the students were not students and they knew little about art. But my friend still bought some drawings and it made us wonder why they do not try to make and sell something original instead of all the counterfeits. Surely they must know that most tourists will know it is just a scam. Perhaps it is the Bolex syndrome…

The Mao Conspiracy

I am not sure why, but I have always put Chairman Mao in the same category as Stalin, Hitler and Napoleon: powerful men but all small. Perhaps is it the foolish perception that some small men make up for the lack of size with enormous ambitions instead. In addition, the three men mentioned are perhaps not famous for being the kindest men that ever lived, and we westerners have a view of Mao Zedong as a despot and a foolish tyrant rather than a visionary and perhaps someone with good intentions. Besides, Chinese men are generally smaller than north Europeans, so surely Mao was smaller than me.

I was therefore very surprised when all Chinese I asked in Beijing said that Mao was very tall. Not only was he tall, they all knew that his exact height was 183 cm (6’0”), which incidentally is my exact height. I asked everyone from taxi drivers to tour guides to random people and they all know. Just the fact that everyone knows his height to the exact centimeter is puzzling. But there is more to the story. The embalmed Mao, who is at display at the Mao Memorial Hall at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, cannot, according to everyone I asked, be the real Mao. The embalmed Mao is simply too short. So for unknown reasons, there is some kind of conspiracy in where the real Mao has been subbed out with a look alike. No one had a good explanation for why, because everyone was exceedingly proud of the fact that Mao was not a midget.

My explanation was of course that Mao was short, because I cannot see why the government would like to portray him otherwise. Unless he was too different from the common people he was supposed to represent. With a height of 183 cm, he would of course be almost a head taller than most of his contemporaries. So I set out to try to find his height. In the process, I discovered that this is a big topic on the internet, with discussion groups dedicated to the topic. Many have strong opinions on the issue, but the estimates vary significantly. Chinese contributors generally insist that he was tall, while foreigners think that he was short. Most estimates comes from looking at photographs taken of Mao with other state leaders of know height. I set out to do the same, and scanned through hundreds of pictures posted on the internet. In many of the photographs it was of course impossible to verify that the person was indeed Mao. A number of Mao impersonators have their pictures posted too, or the Mao portrayed was too young to be recognized with certainty. Most times, the picture was taken in a way that his height could not be determined. One of the most famous pictures shows Mao with Richard Nixon. In this picture, Mao seems to be at least 15 centimeters (6”) smaller than Nixon. However, he is also quite old at the time and slightly stooping.

All in all, I never could verify if Mao was as tall as most Chinese want him to be. But the fact that the Mao in the mausoleum is small, can most likely be ascribed to the fact that he was 83 years old when he died. There is also an interesting anecdote about the embalmment of Mao. The Chinese got the crystal coffin and technology from the Russians, who had of course prepared Lenin for display. But the coffin was only 175 centimeters long and thereby too short for Mao. Designing a new crystal coffin worthy of such a great leader now became a major undertaking and a huge challenge.