Island of Misfit Relics

The August issue of beijing kids had an historical theme. The issue is well-worth bookmarking for the interesting sights and tours it describes. 

For my column, "Alternate Routes," I wrote about the history that had been overlooked and neglected in Changping Park, The Stone Inscription Garden.

Installed in the park in the 2000s, there are stelae, tomb-guarding figures, and other rock sculptures that individually wouldn’t look out-of-place at any Beijing cultural property. Here in our park they appeared like an island of misfit relics.

I had trouble believing them to be real historic artifacts when I first saw them, thinking they were more recently produced imitations. Besides, the park was built around fake rocks, a fake lake, and even a fake zhonglou. I couldn’t imagine that The Stone Inscription Garden among all these other manufactured decorations was real.

But these artifacts were, in fact, real stone pieces found in and around Changping, rescued from their abandoned state and brought into the park. For years they were just another feature of the public park, not protected or restricted in anyway. My kids used to play on them, like all the other local kids. The father of one of Myles' friends used the expression, "old, but not precious," when he was explaining to me why it was perfectly fine for the kids to climb all over them. Then, quite suddenly last fall, the stones were fenced off, suddenly treated as precious historical artifacts that they probably were all along.

After the jump, pictures of how the Stone Inscription Garden looked before and after the fence, as well as examples of what I mean as "Ozymandian discoveries."




All the time that we have lived in Changping, the Stone Inscription Garden was better than a playground.


March 2011



March 2013. It was around this time she named this stone horse, "Flower."






August, 2013



March 2014



Then, late in spring of 2014, this fence appeared, prohibiting access except for a few hours on Saturday mornings.



And signs along the fence like this one, reading

文物是历史的记忆

古迹是城市的名片

Meaning something (I think) like heritage is the historical memory, and monuments are the calling card of a city. Or something like that.

This spring we saw a group of men cataloging the relics, marking each with a sharpie with some sort of identifying number and consulting some folders.



Then this spring we had a Saturday with no scheduled sports, so I took Brigid down to visit Flower. She wanted to sketch her horse. It was strange, that for years this was our playground and now it was a museum. She was fine with it mostly, though sometimes she still mentions how much more fun it was to be allowed to ride Flower.




Later I'll have a post up with some pictures about what I meant by "Ozymandian" in that same beijing kids column. I love that word too much, by the way.