China: Before You Go- Reviewed for the Kyoto Journal by Stewart Wachs
All About China, DVD segmented documentary, 2005, 2+ hours, southmountaintours.com
“To travel,” Aldous Huxley once wrote, “is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” In our time, China in particular is misunderstood. Typecast as little more than a modernizing monolith hell-bent on growth and profit, scorned as a purveyor of hazardous toys and foods, China gets at best a grudging respect. But astute travelers emerge from this nascent superpower with the observation that the globe’s oldest continuous civilization (at 2800 years) is not only rapidly developing, but also re-embracing its rich cultural and spiritual heritage.
Now two sagacious China sojourners have teamed up to create an engaging “before-you-go” DVD that does justice to the People’s Middle Kingdom. Entitled simply All About China, this product of author/scholar Andy Ferguson and his friend Red Pine (aka Bill Porter*), author and acclaimed translator of Chinese poetry and classical texts, is anything but bookish. The DVD, divided into six segments, is great fun to explore. It respects a viewer’s intelligence while entertainingly filling in cavernous gaps in one’s knowledge about Chinese history, legends, art and religions as well as practical matters like how to find and use those moneysaving IC and IP phone cards. Or how to say “thank you” and “restroom.”
A short intro underscores how the famous historical sites and places of natural beauty pictured onscreen are “stitched into the single brocade of China’s history.” And indeed the DVD’s longest, most captivating segment is a full-hour narrative of China’s nearly three-millennia story. Each dynasty rises and falls like a complex character in a riveting drama — some spanning centuries, others a handful of years; many torn by strife, others remarkably peaceful, such as the Tang Dynasty, when China had no peer in the world. We meet scores of salient figures like the Duke of Zhou, Lao Zi, Genghis Khan and Confucius, and as the final dynasty crumbles, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong. We see Chinese invent the compass, moveable type long before Gutenberg, and explosives. Along the way, in an epiphany, we pause to contemplate a moon poem by Li Bai.
Narrator Red Pine speaks in a voice irresistibly steeped in the knowledge he shares, as approachable as a close cousin. Ferguson’s video skills, while no match for his erudition, are still good value for money (this region-free DVD costs only US$10.00.). He effectively mixes CG maps and dynastic timelines with moving and still images, often of striking beauty.
“The Three Teachings” segment illuminates China’s historical schools of thought and reveals how their interplay shaped ancient life and continues to influence the Chinese today — Confucianism (political ideas, education and social relationships); Taoism (health of the human body in harmony with the environment); and Buddhism (psychology and the nature of mind).
Two segments will likely take you pleasantly by surprise: “Secrets of Chinatown” tips us off to who all those gods and legendary figures are that one sees as statues lining the shelves of gift stores (and in China, the museums and temples as well); and “Zen in China” documents a visit to the ancient, nearly forgotten burial site of Bodhidharma (470-543 CE), the Indian monk who first brought Zen to China. We witness how, with support from Japan’s Bodhidharma Society, China is reforesting the area around the tomb and reconstructing Empty Form Temple, now the site of an annual pilgrimage of more than 100,000 Chinese Buddhists.
While highlighting history and culture, All About China does give some hints about where to go, but more importantly, it helps us to see well when we get there.
—Stewart Wachs