Qingcheng Shopping

This is not a shopping tip but a plea to avoid buying them from small villages and towns in rural areas.
Old towns like Qingcheng are a storehouse of antiques, like a great many rural places in China. Every house contains objects and features that you look at and think “That would look wonderful in my place”, but please remember that if you buy them, you are removing artefacts and objects that are part of the social history of the village. Removing them removes some of their heritage.

Furthermore, local people are simply unaware of the value – financial or aesthetic – of what they own. Some have argued that local people are aware, and ‘have another one out the back for the next tourist’. This is just nonsense: I have often admired an object and had to fight to stop people – especially older folk – giving me stuff for free. One man was going to remove a window frame (!) because I liked it so much; he said he wanted me to have it because I “could appreciate it more than he”. Please, please, please resist this. Take photographs, touch the wood and store it inside your memories, but please do not remove heritage.

What to buy: If there is something that you really simply must have, then pay the money you would pay for it in Beijing, Shanghai or London. Getting a bargain from a rural Chinese family is not something to crow about – it is something to be ashamed of. Paying a fraction of the true value of a piece of a family’s heritage amounts to theft from people who have hard, poor lives.

I make a point of explaining the value of heritage to people I meet, and that their furniture, farmyard implements, photographs, pots and pans, etc, is important to them and their children.

If, as some have argued, you believe that buying furniture contributes money to the rural economy, this is simply fallacious, and it doesn’t take much thought to realise why.

If you care about heritage, please join the campaign to let people – especially in poorer areas – know the value of their household items and encourage them to hold onto them if they possibly can. You don’t need to worry about Qingcheng…..I’ve got that one covered!

Fortunately in Qingcheng, the enlightened mayor and the vice-governor of Yuzhong County, have started a register of movable heritage as part of a programme to inform local people of their history and heritage.