Improvised building
(Right; Pillars. Left; safety precaution: Jing’An Temple, Shanghai)
When we visited this temple in Shanghai, it was being refurbished at much expense, as it has been for some time. Although the refurbishment is of such high quality, some elements of it seem quite improvised: in the left image, you can see a pillar of lions (which might be quite familiar by now) and a huge wooden one next to it. The matching wooden pillar on the other side of the temple is flawless, polished to a high sheen, whilst this has been left with a tangled bubble of knots at the top. Perhaps it is not so easily conveyed in this photograph, but it is so beautifully finished that it has a different beauty to the rest of the temple; it is a completely natural phenomenon showcased as a marvel. It is one of my favourite parts of the whole temple complex, simply because of it’s natural simplicity and because somebody chose to keep it, rather than hack it away.
The second image is less striking, but just as beautifully improvised; it’s just a plastic bottle on the bare end of a stretch of scaffolding. Without it, the monks and visitors would be at risk of a nasty poke in the face or rusty blindness, but with this safety provision, it just made us laugh – and steer clear, obviously. I think it is becoming increasingly rare to see these sorts of improvised measures in China. I believe the closer it gets to the dream of being the global superpower, the less of these delightful inventive scenarios we will see. Britain has been made less ‘fun’, even since I was a child by Health and Safety, bureaucracy and the ‘nanny state’ mentality. China has clearly not met with these yet on such a scale and (whilst I agree with many Health and Safety aims) it will steal these occurrences and standardise them, making life a bit more homogenous – one word I cannot use to describe China!
