Taprooms and Temples: Beer, Buddhism and Tourism in China(2)
The beer and the brewery, she said, made Qingdao unlike other places in China. Japanese tourists came—she felt—for this very reason: Tsingtao represented a link to a lost colonial past. Chinese tourists, on the other hand, were eager to claim a beer culture as their own but weren’t sure how to do it (thus the fawning over the Germans). They wanted Qingdao to be what China was becoming: a cosmopolitan place with global reach. Foreigners were no longer an imperial threat and there was no risk that Tsingtao would be recolonized (even though Anheuser-Busch purchased a minority share in the 1990s, since sold). Instead, the Germans offered knowledge and maybe reassurance that something uniquely Chinese—with Anglo-German roots and a complex colonial history—was in place on the north China coast.
The nationalism that bubbled awkwardly at the brewery brought me to Qingdao’s Zhanshan Buddhist temple. Founded in the 1920s by local authorities eager to make the city seem more Chinese after years of foreign administration, the temple was one of Qingdao’s first Chinese-style buildings and symbolized the relationship between Buddhism and nationalism early in the twentieth century. It more or less does the same today. Buddhism, imported from India long ago, is the largest of China’s five officially approved religions, and the Chinese Buddhist Association claims 180 million members. With popular support for the once-unifying communist ideology mostly gone, the regime hopes closely monitored religions will help fill a vacuum of belief and lead to a “harmonious society”—one in which people don’t challenge party rule.
There were many similarities among visitors to both places. The beer museum was a purpose-built tourist attraction. Yet its crowds resembled those at the temple—a structure devoted, in theory at least, to antimaterialism. At both, visitors enthusiastically, if awkwardly, approached cultures perceived as exotic, if somewhat alien, parts of China’s past that were finding new utility (and profitability) in the present. Money changed hands readily as visitors bought souvenirs to authenticate their visits: incense and prayer beads for Buddha, commemorative bottle openers for beer.
Unlike temples in, say, Hong Kong, the Zhanshan temple charges admission, and its grounds were crowded with snack carts and souvenir shops selling incense to burn in trough-like censers. Older visitors—usually women—approached this task with reverence, bowing gently before placing a smoking stick in the censer. Younger people more often seemed embarrassed or amused. Many purchased enormous packs of incense sticks, lighting them all simultaneously while making exaggerated bows. Then, laughing and posing for photos, they tossed the smoking bunch into the ash-catcher. This earned derisive glares from the faithful, succinctly capturing the differing attitudes toward Buddhism in modern China.
All of China offers such contradictions and transitions. I have wondered if its relations with the United States are often tense because both nations share so much: nearsighted self-confidence, belief that their own country must play a unique role in the world and a conviction that almost any cost may be paid for the sake of economic growth. China’s experiment with state capitalism suggests that tropes like “capitalism cannot function without democracy” are no longer true, if ever they were. Like Buddhism and beer, China has taken economic and political ideologies and shaped them into something that is uniquely Chinese but still highly functional.
Likewise, the people I met defied easy classification. Did the bartender at the brewery, with her excellent English, represent the internationalism of coastal China or merely its hunger for tourist dollars? If Qingdao people cannot be authentic without beer in their lives (as the China Daily suggested), why were foreigners asked to pass judgment on the brew and its culture? Perhaps the incense-burning tourists were dealing with the same questions, if unconsciously, at the Zhanshan Temple: what is China, and what does it mean to be Chinese? Those are questions the Chinese people appear to be grappling with. In the meantime, a dark lager on a rainy day is highly recommended.
