Grand Epoch City 天下第一城
河北省廊坊市香河县安平开发区. 走G103 京塘线, 离北京52公里
Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng’s coverage of Běijīng Suburbs and Beyond
Also known as Xiāng Hé No.1 City, the 200-hectare Tiānxià Dìyī Chéng is part model village, part theme park, and a competitor (in a very strong field) for the title of the most extravagantly kitsch experience in China, about 1.5 hours from the centre of Běijīng.
It claims to be modelled on the layout of Běijīng in the Míng and Qīng dynasties, and the entrance is through a 27.1m-high version of the Yǒngdìng Mén, the gate in the centre of the southernmost city wall, which was torn down in 1957. It leads to a jumbled, one-fifth-size, idealised Běijīng, constituting an admission that since 1911 the original has been destroyed.
Assorted long-vanished temples and princely mansions have been ineptly recreated, along with the Qián Mén shopping street. Depending on the season and the day of the week, assorted ceremonies are enacted in the Qián Mén Plaza, along with displays of Manchu dancing and stilt-walking.
There’s a labyrinth of bamboo-shrouded temples and courtyard houses with little moats around them, as well as great slab-sided buildings that turn out to be hotels. A Health and Leisure Centre offers the chance to try Manchu archery or rather less historic laser tag.
There are seven hotels altogether, two of them in recreated princely mansions, the largest marking the border between the southern (Chinese) city and the northern (Manchu) one. The Manchu City walls turn out to contain merely a golf course, visible from many of the hotel rooms, with miniatures of the city’s northern gates visible in the distance across green space.
This all offers the opportunity for an entertaining wallow in kitsch, but increasingly Běijīng practises on-the-spot self-Disneyfication, and since Grand Epoch City opened, its Toytown version of the Qián Mén shopping street has been superseded by redevelopment of the street itself into something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original. The Yǒngdìng Mén has also been partly rebuilt and in approximately its original location. Why go to a theme park when the city is being redeveloped into one about you?
The hotels nominally range from three to five stars in quality, furnished with red carpets, wannabe-antique Chinese furniture, and broadband Internet access, but all are overpriced and reluctant to discount. The restaurants in the three-star locations provide decent everyday meals at reasonable prices.
If some effort had been made to reproduce Old Běijīng in detail, or even if there had been some aspiration to accuracy in the buildings that have been reproduced and especially those now vanished, a trip here might have been a minor delight.
But a visit is less about vanished Běijīng and more about the exploitation of traditional culture for tourism purposes, China’s self-image, and the complete lack of authenticity in either.
▶ Tiānxià Dìyī Chéng, Xiāng Hé, Héběi, about 52km SE, gps 34º42’42”N, 116º54’03’E, t 5849 0997, www.grand-epoch-city.com, 8am–4pm. ¥80. m Tǔ Qiáo (Bātōng Line), then b 938[东段](跨省) or 938[西段](跨省) to 天下第一城. taxi Signposted just E of G103 Jīngtáng Highway to Táng Shān.
Next in Museums and Other Sights: Olympic Green
Previously: Tank Museum
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
