Our own Ozymandias

                                -- Percy B Shelley, 1807 

I used to work in Jurong, and when I had to ferry foreign visitors from the city to the factory, the most direct route would be the Ayer Rajah Expressway. As we approached Jurong, I would often point out to my guest the massive stone walls of a fortress on the right.

"And that," I would say, "is our new ancient fort."

Then I would count, "1… 2… 3…" and on cue the visitor would do a double-take.

"What do you mean, 'new'?" he was sure to ask.

"Well," I would delight in explaining, "Singapore is famous for our ruthless efficiency. Unfortunately, we don't have much history bequeathed to us. There wasn't any great ancient civilisation here, so we don't have ruins. This being Singapore, it doesn't stop us. We shall construct the ruins we need!"

By now, you may have guessed that I was referring to the Tang Dynasty City. It was an ambitious tourism project, a kind of walled city, modelled on Chang-an, the capital of China 1300 years ago. Frankly, though, this thing about resembling Chang-an is all fiction and hype. There's hardly anything left of the real Chang-an, near present-day Xi'an, and nobody knows what it looked like. Anyway, work on the Singapore "replica" began about 20 years ago, dragged on and on, with the main contractor going bust and another having to be appointed to carry on, but not till cracks and creepers had begun to take over. These of course, gave it a slightly ruined look, which easily fooled quite a few of my guests.

I don't think the project was ever finished. It was opened to visitors long ago, but not all the features, exhibits and shows originally envisaged were realised. It never received much traffic, and each time I glanced at it, the place looked more and more desolate.

Now the operators have declared bankruptcy and an auction of all the scrolls, sculpture, pottery, and anything else with even the slightest salvageable value will be held. The fort will be stripped bare, and left like real ruins. No one knows what is going to happen to the site, though I can't imagine anyone will go through the trouble of demolishing those thick 10-metre high walls and the castle-like complex within.

I have been cynical about the Tang Dynasty City since the first stones were laid. And I am now totally vindicated. From the beginning, I felt that both the concept and location were wrong, and wrong for fundamentally the same reason. Both were symptomatic of the command culture we have. But the promoters and the government economic planners who urged them on, forgot that the consumers – tourists in this case – were not susceptible to command the way meek and trapped Singaporeans are. Tourists have a choice of places to visit and the command culture doesn't work when people do not obey.

Take location. Here was a tourist attraction built 16 kilometres away from the city, in Jurong, a vast industrial estate. The planners wanted to inject life in the area, and decided to build a number of tourism sites (if the logic escapes you, you're not alone!). There are today the Chinese and Japanese Gardens (both nearly as desolate at the Tang Dynasty City) and the Bird Park, which alone is reasonably successful. There is also the Crocodile Park: this started life as another tourist attraction, but is now where one goes to taste crocodile meat, though mostly, people order dim sum.

Nobody seemed to have analysed how tourists move around. How were they going to get to these places within an industrial estate? Public transport to the area has always been bewilderingly complicated and time-consuming. The various sites weren't even clustered together. You'd need more than an hour to get from the Bird Park to the Chinese Garden, and another hour (if you haven't taken the wrong bus!) to the Tang Dynasty City.

I suspect they assumed that tourists would be bussed from downtown directly to these sites; this would be the only way they could get profitable numbers visiting the Jurong locations. The problem is that this kind of thinking equated "tourists" with "packaged tourists", precisely when the trend in the last two decades has been away from packaged tours, to independent travelling. In other words, the attractions were built for command-type tourism.

The concept behind Tang Dynasty City also reflected its command-culture origins. Strictly speaking, it was an idea copied from Hong Kong's Sung Village. However, the idea of copying took root in Singapore because there was this belief that Singapore was, like Hong Kong, a repository of Chinese culture and history. This was a kind of self-delusion that came from the political command that Singapore should remain Chinese, a pre-occupation of the government in the seventies and eighties (and not a lot less even today). 'Chinese' meant more than just being majority ethnic Chinese. It meant that Chinese Singaporeans should remain culturally anchored as Chinese, and not become Westernised. To be Westernised meant to be seduced into smoking pot, and criticising the government. That won't do for Singapore. More particularly, the command from the top was for Singapore to be a Confucianist society (one should show deference to one's higher-ups, etc, etc), so the 'Chineseness' to be promoted was not – no way! – the modern revolutionary Chinese culture that remade China in the last hundred years, but the traditional Chinese culture imagined to exist, for example, in Tang Dynasty China.

There you have it! The Tang Dynasty City project would resonate with Singapore's Chinese roots, and reap lots of tourist dollars as well. There would be traditional opera, gourmet food, alleys full of handicrafts, acrobatics in the courtyards, and exhibitions of calligraphy, art, ceramics and silk in the halls.

A project springing from self-delusion by the planners would very quickly find reality harsh. From Day One, nobody else thought Singapore to be a representative Chinese city. Tourists came to Singapore to see Singapore, not China, least of all, kitsch China way out in the Jurong boondocks. You can't command free-footed tourists to be as deluded as ourselves.

Worse yet, during the same twenty years that they struggled to complete Tang Dynasty City, China opened up. What hope of competing against authentic treasures and sites in a country authentically Chinese?

Ironic, isn't it? The mock ruined fortress that we have built, and which I have made fun of countless times, is now going to be an authentically Singaporean ruin, with its poignant message to succeeding generations. This crumbling, forlorn hulk in the industrial desert of Jurong, is going to stand as a reminder of the vainglory of our command culture. Our own Ozymandias.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. There is a park in Marina South where the government put up statues of Confucius, Mencius and other symbols of feudal China. They were meant as concrete indicators of how Singaporeans held their philosophies and traditions in high regard. Today, they are ignored. Everybody pretends they don't exist. They are an embarrassment: another reminder of our impotence as citizens against the command culture imposed by the top.

Addenda

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