Rhythm & Xues: The dream that powered unlikely venue
Driven by a passion to fulfil his father's dream- and to strike a blow for culture - entrepreneur Simone Xue has restored a Zhuhai temple complex to its former glory. Today, it is the unlikely venue for, among other things, an international jazz festival, writes Thomas Bird
Beishan's Zheng Road is anything but idyllic. It may be the main street in this part of Zhuhai's Nanping town (about three kilometres northwest of the Macau border) but it is really no more than a lane, with a cracked pavement and soupy pools of black rainwater through which litter drifts. A makeshift abattoir-come-butcher shop operates beneath a tarpaulin; a tiny room houses a mahjong parlour. Overhead, electric wires knot with telephone lines. Remarkably, some remnants of China's majestic past remain: a few Qing dynasty buildings, ramshackle and forlorn, sit between "kissing" houses - charmless low-cost tenements quickly (and often illegally) built so close together it is said that neighbours can kiss.
"Everyone here is from outside," says Mr Peng, a migrant worker from Hunan province, over a steaming bowl in one of the street's eateries, a Chongqing noodle shop, explaining why no one here appears to speak Cantonese. "The local people rent us the houses, they've already moved to new housing."
A short distance away is some of that new housing: Huafa Century City is a modern waterside development of luxury apartments, Western-style coffee shops and European brand-name stores. Closer still is a construction site on which, it is claimed, will rise Zhuhai's swankiest mall: Huafa Shangdu.
And at the centre of the melange of often quite ugly buildings, both old and new, that radiates out from Beishan village sits the magnificent Beishan Hall, a complex of temples that had fallen into disrepair but has now been restored to its former glory.
rural until paramount leader Deng Xiaoping earmarked it as a special economic zone in 1980. The new city boomed due to its proximity to Macau, making landlords of fishermen and swelling the population with a labour force imported from the rural hinterland. As Peng puts it, "I've come to Zhuhai to work. I'll do anything."
Last year, the mainland's urban population exceeded its rural population for the first time in history but the country's breakneck urbanisation has brought with it a rash of problems, not least of which has been the loss of architectural heritage to the wrecking ball. Culture in general has been seriously neglected in the race to improve individuals' material standing. For a people who, as Martin Jacques writes in When China Rules the World, "live in and through their history", the homogenous and austere cityscapes of modern China are a travesty.