A Square deal

Here?s a slab of history. Tiles that paved Tiananmen Square were removed in 1999 for a facelift to mark the People?s Republic?s 50th anniversary.

Here’s a slab of history. Tiles that paved Tiananmen Square were removed in 1999 for a facelift to mark the People’s Republic’s 50th anniversary. Seven years later, a firm in Shanghai is offering those very tiles for sale. Each tile is encased in a red wooden box and will be sold as souvenirs. That’s what we call on this side of the Great Wall smart thinking. The idea came to an official in the Association of History of China, who convinced authorities to part with the discarded tiles. Now the pavement-tile seller has even found customers in hotels.

HT Image

The tiles will cost ‘what it costs to buy pieces of immense cultural significance’ — which is one way of looking at pieces of pavement. So what will the tourist-souvenir hunter cherish in this piece of ‘culture’? The ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’ is not perceived as the world’s largest open-air urban square that has seen political rallies since 1417 — which incidentally it is. Instead, it evokes memories only of the 1989 massacre where thousands of pro-reform protestors, the bulk of them students, were killed by the army to quell the protest. Does anyone want to buy this bloody piece of history? Loads of people, it seems. And the authorities also like the idea. They just want the tiles to be ‘authenticated’.

For those who hanker for historical trinkets, the most famous one, of course, has been the Berlin Wall that was ‘retailed’ in plastic packets after its demise. One hopes, though, that the Chinese are more careful than their German counterparts, who to their puzzlement still find chunks of the Wall being regularly sold (with ‘authentication’ tags) to toursists despite the niggling feeling that the original structure could not possibly have yielded so many bits and pieces.