Discussion keeps the world's turning.
This is Roundtable.
Drillis New to Roundtable with myself, Ho Young.
I'm joined by Yushan in the studio and Josh Cotterell on the line coming up.
Admit the bustling cities and serene landscapes.
A new tourism trend has taken hold.
The rise of archaeological site parks.
Let's examine the factors, driving the surge in popularity.
And the challenges of balancing tourism with the preservation of these invaluable cultural relics.
And we share with you what's brought us to your joy this week.
Join us for a dose of positivity, laughter, and all things that make our hearts sing.
In Roundtable's Happy Place.
Your voice matters and we want to hear it in our Heart to Heart segment.
Got a question?
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Fire up that voice memo and hit us up at eZFM Roundtable at FoxMail.com.
Our podcast listeners can find us at Roundtable China on Apple Podcast.
Now let's move on to the next topic of discussion today.
Archaeological site parks have emerged as a new tourist hotspot or hot choice on the Chinese travel map,
offering a unique blend of history, culture, and tourism.
With visitor numbers soaring to over 67 million last year,
the 55 parks have captured the public's imagination, allowing them to explore the country's ancient civilizations and gain insights into the developmental trajectories of societies.
So tell us what constitutes national archaeological site parks.
Well, in simpler terms, the National Archaeological Site Park refers to a specific public cultural space that's, you know, primarily based on important archaeological sites.
And also their surroundings with functions such as scientific research and education and recreation.
And at National Archaeological Site Parks, the public can observe, you know, the site itself and also to admire the unearthed artifacts and to purchase cultural and creative products.
And also get the full experience of the excavation of the artifacts themselves and also see how it was done and touched it.
And, you know, just in general explore the past and the future of human society with their own hands and eyes.
And yeah, according to a data from the National Cultural Heritage Administration, as of the end of 2023,
China had overall 55 National Archaeological Site Parks like this. And the annual revenue of the total of 55 parks reached 4.475 billion yuan or roughly 617 million US dollars.
And it is also according to the report that in 2023, the National Archaeological Site Parks welcomed the total of 67.2 million visitors.
And according to my research, I think Josh is more familiar with this figure than I am because it's actually the total number of population of the entire United Kingdom back in 2022, right?
Right, Josh?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's something like this.
And knowing Josh, I wonder if you've contributed to, you know, that significant number.
It sounds like the kind of stuff right up your alley.
Yeah, I mean, you know me, I love history and I like fossils and archaeological sites and stuff like this.
I don't know why and the older I get, the more I seem to enjoy them, just to look rock and stuff for a long time.
It seems to be something that puts me at peace. I don't know why. There's something very primitive and natural about it, especially if it's been dug up out of the ground.
You know, I prefer that to, to going to see a temple, you know, I don't know why I like to, I like to look at things that have been dug up from under the ground for some reason.
So maybe I was a dog in my past life, I'm not sure, but that is, I am the year of the dog. So maybe that's why.
Interesting. Zodiac references.
So it's not just because they're old.
They have to come from under the ground.
Yeah, I mean, something, something being excavated, I guess that maybe a lot of men and women maybe just appreciate the tools and the work that's gone into digging it up, just that sort of laborious thing of archaeological digs.
But of course, archaeology is a very, very developed and difficult thing to do, archaeological digs.
It's a lot more than just, you know, digging up into the ground, you have to be very, very careful. It's almost like an art form really in order to not damage certain things.
I used to do it when I was younger, when we would dig up for fossils. I know it's a running joke me and my fossils, but actually there was quite a lot of skills that we had to learn, you know, about how to not break the fossil, how to chip away at certain things.
I remember I was so traumatized once I found my first tooth, a dinosaur tooth in a rock and I tried to get it out.
And of course, I cracked the tooth, right, getting it out. And I was so heartbroken that after that, I was much more careful.
So you learn through experience. But yeah, when it comes to something obviously of great value, these guys have to be so, so careful because they're really priceless, some of these artifacts, right?
They cannot really be damaged.
So I was going to ask, you broke a dinosaur's tooth. Doesn't that, like, you know, weren't you to be put behind bars or something? No, obviously not.
No, no, it was only a little one. And fossils are in abundance in the northeast of the UK, actually.
You can just walk along and pick up a rock and there'll be an ammonite in it or something, which is the sort of swirly one, which most people see.
Well, that's how we see in certain areas in China, for example, like Xianyang or in, I just feel like the whole of Shanxi province.
You put the shovel down into the ground and you're bound to excavate something because of the rich culture, the long history, and so much has been just buried underneath of the ground.
So this is all very exciting, I suppose, and there is a sense of mystery to it. And when I first saw this piece of news, as well as, you know, we decided to put this as one of the topic discussions on the show,
I thought it was going to be a lot of new things, new sites that I've never heard about before, what I'd be encountering during the research.
But actually, a lot of these places are really well known. For example, the archaeological site parks we're talking about today include the old summer palace or Yuanming Wem Park in Beijing, obviously been there.
The Sun Xing Duai site in Sichuan province, very popular in recent years, and the Muslim of the first Qing emperor and aka Terracotta Warrior Army.
These are the most well known tourist sites in our country. So I mean, that's all fine and dandy, but it's not exactly show stopping new places that we're talking about here.
I just wonder why the sudden elevated attention and also this new term, archaeological site parks.
Aha! Well, I do feel you agree with you on that, Ruyang, because previously our idea about all of those places that you mentioned are either parks or museums, where you know, some place that hosts the cultural relics and present it in an exhibition-like way for people to get in and see behind glasses.
So now I think the idea has shifted from an exhibition or like a museum thing where you learn and read about and see it to some place that you can be part of and get the whole experience in a way.
Because it has a lot to do with how the archaeologists and paleontological researchers, they're actually reaching out to people to the mass to the general public, like Josh mentioned just now, that they're trying to inspire people to be curious and stay curious of such subjects just to want to be part of this and get involved in a way, maybe just as tourists for now, or you never know.
So a lot of these visitors are children, teenagers, like young Josh when he was trying to figure out how to get the dinosaur to thawed from the dirt.
And I was talking to a friend of mine from Canada who actually majors in archaeology right now, and he shares that a lot of us has such dreams.
So I want to study dinosaur when I grow up, I want to discover fossils when I grow up, but very few of us actually maintain that childhood dream after we grow up because we realize how blurring or how professional and high tech studying those things can be.
And with movies nowadays with like big IPs like the Jurassic Park or you know the Jurassic World nowadays, a lot of people start to re-gain interest and they start to, you know, just realize, okay, I really love this.
So why did I stop?
So because it's too professional, but hey, these archaeologists, they're showing the profession in a way that's entertaining that they're being more open about this subject, not closing themselves within labs, but rather presenting it in an entertaining way for the general public of all age groups to get interested in such subjects.
So it's something that they're doing to get back to the society in a way.
And that's what's inspiring people to talk about it and be there and become a tourist, I think.
And Josh, what do you see as the factors that contribute to this increasing popularity of archaeological site parks?
Well, I think that there's quite a lot of technological advancement. I think that this is a factor and I think that things like 3D scanning and virtual reality really help in presenting archaeological sites in an interesting way.
They also help the archaeologists actually in many different ways, as you can imagine, but as a tourist as well, I think one of the issues sometimes with archaeological sites is that for a lot of people, they can be a bit boring.
And I sort of get that, you know, something like fossils, for example, they can get a bit repetitive and you have to be able to give people a story and get people engaged in some way to appreciate this thing, right?
And I think that technology can help with this in many ways. And there's actually some examples from the UK I have.
There's a site called the Mary Rose Museum and they use visual innovations like films and interactive things that allow you to sort of feel the artifacts in a way that you wouldn't be able to before.
And I also know that in Israel, another part of the world that has many, many archaeological sites and also because it is arguably religiously one of, if not the most sacred place in the world for the three major religions, although one of the religions, not Islam, but for Judaism and Christianity, I think it is.
And I think this, I know that a lot of museums in Israel as well, when I went there, I saw that they utilized a lot of technology to make the exhibitions more engaging for the audience.
For example, there were sites like the Western Wall tunnels. If you go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, you can go through these tunnels and there's a lot of technology that's utilized to make it more engaging.
And also, I wonder here in China is that maybe people want a nuanced trip. So maybe there is on the one hand, you do the shopping.
Often they have this little, they have a street that sells the most delicious local food. That's one place you gotta visit.
And you want to see the modern side of the city, the region, as well as the old, the ancient. And if it provides this kind of interactive immersive experience so that you can learn a little bit more about culture and history, and people would go for it.
Is that maybe one of the factors or what do you see as the explanation to almost like an explosive interest towards archeological site parks, which I will add one footnote, apparently the ticket revenue has grown fivefold since last year.
So what explains? I think in a way that media promotion is also kind of helping to boom up the public attention on these archeological site parks.
Because like you mentioned, each of these like site parks, they're building kind of like their own IP or their own culture or like fandom culture in a way that inspires people to like maybe a mascot or maybe like an iconic figure or an iconic symbol.
About this place that makes people keeps on you know, being interested in developing more about what's the history behind what's the stories behind this like little symbol or little culture.
Like for example, I think this happens more often with museums like the first that I know is no doubt the forbidden city who is doing such a great job in developing their own products based on the museum's theme and everything they put the cats in the in the forbidden city as a macro.
So I think it's really as a magnet on refrigerator and everything and also I was learning just the other day that's a piece of report from global times.
And that as a lot of Chinese knows this national treasure of a bronze horse statue called mattafai which is like a horse shaped statue standing on a little sparrow shaped base and that is like sort of like a cultural relic that's unearthed and its history could be date back to Eastern
London is Steve from 25 to 220 AD which is like super long time ago and starting from just a few years ago the gunsoo museum that's like preserving this piece of cultural relics it's like developing a green bean colored bow jack look museum produced horse stuff toy that's dedicated to this theme.
They designed this bronze statue into a green looking horse because it's in bronze and it has the color green and you know just make the horse look like some sort of a funny little bit silly in my opinion but also kind of representative of the museum's culture and they just designed that into a mascot of sorts and kind of promote the museum's culture after it.
This is happening in so many museums and cultural heritage sites likewise so this is part of the way to promote things as well people go there people take say selfies with the green horse and they share it online and people laugh about it and more people want to take their kids there and see it and take this similar style in the famous picture or something.
It's like a media promoting and also like a snowballing of inches from a bigger general public out there.
And I wonder though when you've got swarms of tourists coming in what is this gonna do to let's say the preservation efforts of these archaeological site parks and I would think that certain aspects of these places would be quite fragile and it needs to be
properly protected but when you've got so many people coming in and breathing against is there a glass cabinet or maybe just open air I don't know but it's bound to have an effect.
So how do you sort of mitigate this kind of effect and are you worried at all Josh?
Well I think that it is quite difficult to mitigate this effect and similar conversations I know we've had about there's so many historic cities in China right and like living spaces that aren't necessarily just an archaeological site but there are areas where people live and it's hard to find this balance between preservation and tourism and you know actually keeping it alive.
One example that I have also there's a very famous Roman wall between in the north of England called Hadrian's wall and this wall is probably one of the most famous archaeological digs or archaeological sites it's not actually been dug up because it's a wall but it's been preserved and it's very real you can walk up to it and it's there you know it's not sort of protected by anything but it has been damaged multiple times over the decades.
And so there are strict regulations to manage this but still it's very difficult but at the same time I personally believe that it's it's a good thing that this wall is out in the open because it's more integrated into society and after all these artifacts they are hours or that I think they should be they should be the societies and so I think doing things like community involvement is really important and there's many things you can do with that.
One thing that you can do is I think it's great when you have class trips you know outside of the classroom and you take schools and take students out to see some of these sites I think that's really great and and having sort of walkway paths public footpaths and stuff by some of these places is also really good and sort of I think trusting the public to some degree to actually be engaged with these things rather than always having them maybe behind a glass wall or behind a fence and you can see that it's really great.
So I think that this wall or behind a fence or something like this I think that it's important that that risk is taken in order to make the community feel involved and then consequently want to take care of it.
Yeah and based on that I think one example that I kind of have a lot of personal interest in is the Liang Zhu in South Eastern China's Zhujiang Province which is like a newly developed archaeological park but also it's been there for a really long time and it's been kind of developing gradually in the past 20 years.
As it first started being initiated and in that place that's nowadays the Liang Zhu archaeological park used to be a huge stone pit you know back in 2003 and you know according to my research of course it was actually president Xi Jinping himself who when he was there as the municipal leader he kind of promoted the alteration of the local environment and everything.
So over time that place gradually transformed from a stone pit that can possibly cause a lot of pollution air pollution especially to like a green park of just archaeology based research center and nowadays is open to the public to welcome more visitors around and that in the meantime kind of creates new local lifestyle for people living in that area just like Josh said it's like a community efforts to be able to do that.
So the community efforts to promote the development of this park and in the meantime it definitely gives more jobs to local people and of course bringing more annual revenue to the local development and everything so in general they're taking in that place and get it to adapt to like public curiosity but in the meantime it's welcoming people so that the place itself become not just an area not unknown to the rest of the world but rather it's open to the world.
And it's creating more opportunities for people inside that surrounding us. Well I think that's like a very sustainable way to maintain the operation of the park as well.
Yeah and also just to make history alive instead of you know treating it as a dead object and instead of revering it actively engaged with it and I think that would excite people and also possibly put the ball rolling as well.
And also rolling as what you said you mentioned earlier and invite and attract new visitors every year but also keeping conservation in mind as well.
Coming up welcome to the happiest corner on their waves round tables happy place.
Delivery delivery delivery what is it happiness from round table.
Josh what's your happy place so my happy place this week is a book that I've been reading and it's actually a classic Russian literature novel called the idiot by Dostoevsky which I'm sure many people are quite familiar with and I'm sure it's been translated into
Chinese as well. I'm not a massive classic literature guy really and my friend presented me with this book on my 30th birthday quite recently as a sort of funny gift but he also promised me that it's a fantastic book and I'd read a couple of novels before when I was back in university.
But I've been thoroughly enjoying this book and I really love how Dostoevsky is actually so readable even though it's translated from Russian and I cannot read it in its original language I think contrary to what might be assumed about a lot of classic literature.
Dostoevsky is actually very accessible and quite modern it seems almost sometimes like you're reading a novel that could have been written quite recently his storytelling is really engaging and suspenseful and also his descriptions of human emotions and stuff and experiences like love and fear.
They really make it relatable even though it was written so long ago this particular book was actually published in 1869 so I've really really enjoyed it and I like how he's able to articulate and explain a lot of social anxieties and things like existential angst and stuff like this so yeah I would encourage anybody actually to go and give Dostoevsky a go if you're interested in this book.
So if you're interested in these kind of topics and I promise you that it's a lot more approachable than it sounds or it looks at least for somebody like me anyway so that is my happy place.
Thank you very much for sharing Josh in my happy place came to me as I was researching on the topic discussion for yesterday's show regarding county town aesthetics or
Siancheng Wenxue which actually has little to do with literature. It's more of a visual style and here we go.
In March this year documentary photographer Tsai Shen Hai stumbled upon the point in writings of a farmer grandpa called Fooching on all walls in his home courtyard during a funeral.
And Tsai being a photographer took pictures and post them online one writing red spray pesticides once when apricot blossoms fall each year and again for catapillars after the start of autumn.
Another one read how big is the universe and the not necessarily the writing that you would expect from a farmer grandpa.
The earnest and philosophical photos Tsai captured have received hundreds of thousands of likes online and many saw this as a powerful declaration of ordinary people, a reminder of the beauty found in the simplicity of rural life in China.
Growing up in a small town and transforming from an office worker to a full time photographer Tsai Shen Hai brings empathy and genuine interest to the stories he captures.
And his photography project which began in 2019 takes him on a journey through China's 2800 counties documenting the lives of everyday people who create their own infinite internal worlds to counter real life.
These earthly immortals as Tsai calls them include a man building a nine floor castle on wasteland, a caved waller and a monk restoring murals.
Through his lens Tsai reveals the rich tapestry of rural China celebrating the beauty of unconventional lives and the quiet resilience of those who live according to their own principles secretly rebelling against the country.
Tsai's work has brought me immense joy. His images uncover a touching blend of curiosity and everyday wisdom, the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary, making his work a heartfelt tribute to the creativity and resilience of rural life.
And that's my happy place. I couldn't help but notice an intriguing exchange in the comments section though, under a related video released by ETL on WeChat.
One internet user, Wang Wang Kai Shijia said, having deep pockets and plenty of time on your hands are pretty much must-haves if you want to make it like a photographer such as Tsai.
And Billy, another internet user, Shus back. Here's what he said. I think Tsai's priority is about experiencing the world with photography being more of a means to that end.
Dedicating years to just traveling takes a major lifestyle commitment. And the hard part is making that choice.
And the chances come after. Just the other day I saw this British family who liquidated everything to go on an extended world tour and they hit their one-year mark by reflecting on the great wall.
Before talking about cash and free time, ask yourself if you've got the guts to switch up your whole life like that.
And that's the thought I want to leave with you guys in this week's happy place. I apologize for taking up so much time, but YouChat, I'm sure you have something exciting to share with us. That's truly happy in the next edition.
Sure, yeah. Thank you for allowing me to indulge. And that brings us to the end of today's roundtable. Thank you so much, YouChat and Josh Cotterall for joining the discussion. I'm Hayoung. We'll see you next time.
