Great mall of China
As Richard Nixon might have said: it is a great mall. Actually, what Nixon said on February 24, 1972, during that historic first visit by a United States president to Communist China, was the Great Wall of China was 'a great wall'. Not an original statement, but pithy, which is what US presidents seem to go for when they visit the mainland. Thirty years later, on February 22, 2002, on the Great Wall, George W. Bush said: 'The wall's the same. Different country.' He was right. The great mall of China - more familiarly known as the Golden Resources Shopping Mall, which opened in October - sums up pretty well how 'different' China has become in the past 30 years. It also says something about where the country might be headed and how far it still has to go because for now, being a mall bunny - or a shangchang tuzi - in China is still hard work. The infrastructure is there - but where's the fun?
I headed to Golden Resources with a friend recently and first impressions didn't disappoint. You approach the great mall - which, at about 557,000 square metres, is nearly 50 per cent bigger than America's biggest, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota - along a broad road heading west out of the city. Out here, there is still a vaguely Stalinist feel to the architecture, despite the fact a lot of it is newly built. Monolithic rows of apartment buildings line the road in a grim, watchful line. It makes one feel small and is a space best traversed in a car; walking would be slow and dispiriting work.
Looming on the right was our destination - the world's biggest, newest shopping mall. Six storeys high and with a basement, Golden Resources is actually three malls operating as one (two subsections are operated by Guiyou, a well-known Beijing department store, and the Lufthansa Shopping Centre, another established mall). The louvred external walls are a jolly hodgepodge of colours: orange, purple, yellow, red, blue and green. Set on top of the walls at regular intervals are irregularly shaped, raised silver rings that jut out of the top of the building. Our taxi pulls up and we saunter in, deeply curious and more than a little excited. It's not every day you go to the biggest mall in the world - and definitely not in Beijing, where the shopping is spread out and generally thin on the ground.
Inside, it is sparkling clean, with white marble floors and waist-high glass walls with matt steel-coloured railings circling around atriums. The stores are upmarket: Clarks, Travelpro, cigar shops, a (real) Northface shop, a Parsons music store. In the basement, 350,000 yuan Audis are for sale and Jaguars for even more. On the sixth floor, a restaurant specialises in crocodile. Three crocs, each about 1.5 metres long, swim dejectedly in a glass tank, their jaws conspicuously taped shut with what looks like red masking tape. 'We've sold 10 already,' says a waitress. 'I think people eat it because they're curious.'
There is a Papa John's pizza restaurant somewhere in the vastness of the building, but we head to the Taofengnian Jiaozi restaurant, a cheap and cheerful eatery that serves only boiled jiaozi, or dumplings - and you can't get more Beijing than that. Even here, they've taken care to go upmarket on the design. Old maps of China, blown up and mounted on giant wall boards, compete with blocks of red to give a neo-Chinoiserie effect that is no longer revolutionary, but is pleasing nonetheless. A long search for a cone of mint ice-cream for dessert ends in defeat when the Haagen-Dazs that should have been here doesn't materialise. The place is too big for easy finding and this shangchang tuzi quickly gets sore paws from walking around the endlessly long, blindingly white corridors.
On the sixth floor, a large branch of well-known bookstore Paper Tiger is still filling its shelves with merchan-dise, even though the mall has been open for weeks. Up a flight of stairs in the shop are a dozen tables and scores of chairs for book club members, where management plans to install free internet access.