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Bond in Beijing

I am now back in England; since I am awake at 6am and am willingly wandering around the place looking for things to do I presume I’m slightly jet-lagged. As such I’ve decided to take advantage of this by getting all my non-work plans out of the way before I start the day - this is going to be a permanent tactic from now on.

So, a little thought on China.

While I was passing through Beijing this time I had my first (brief) chance to be a tourist and visited both the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City. I had much less time than I needed for both but I felt I missed a lot more of the Summer Palace given its size and variety; I was also relying on information boards at the various sites in the Summer Palace and an enthusiastic but fairly clueless volunteer guide, so my tour had very little direction beyond my estimation of the best route to cram as much as possible into the time available. My volunteer told me that her friend had spent two days in the Summer Palace in order to visit everything and, if you were going to really take it all in (and take the kind of photos the place deserves), I can quite happily believe that. From a visitor’s point-of-view, the park map was very good and the information at each site was rich and interesting; given enough time it would not be a difficult place to explore for the average ignorant Westerner.

While the Summer Palace is easy to navigate, given the decent paper map and the wealth of distinctive landmarks, the Forbidden City is more confusing. All of original construction occurred over the extremely narrow span of 14 years, hence (apart from a small park area) the architecture is all of the same standard and form; the only variety amongst the buildings is when significance has been given to some more important units through scale and position. Given that there are about 8700 (according to an official survey) or 9999.5 (according to legend) rooms in almost a thousand buildings (see photo link below), a helping hand is necessary.

This helping hand comes (at least for English speakers) in the form of an audio-guide, spoken by James Bond (Roger Moore, sounding a bit older than he did as Bond). My guide came in the form of an iPhone-sized device that hung around my neck, along with a single earphone. Unfortunately all the earphones fitted only one particular ear - the same ear - so you had to face someone to speak to them while the audio was playing, rather than standing next to them; this was a minor point, but it seemed like a flaw that could’ve been easily fixed. As one walks around the site, audio clips are triggered based on proximity to points-of-interest. As far as I could tell, this worked very well: I had to be within about 5 metres of the location described in the audio, so I was rarely confused about the information. The information itself was interesting and the tone was good and relaxed. The audio clips could also be triggered manually using the number-pad on the device: each clip had a unique code, all written by someone on my paper map by hand.

The only criticism that I have of the audio is when it tried to guide me to a subsequent, related location: Bond often told me to head down the “east side of the building” (I hadn’t been following my paper map, so which way was east?), or to walk across a particular named pathway that I hadn’t been introduced to before, and couldn’t immediately pick out on my paper map. While failing to complete the implied narrative didn’t have a great impact on my enjoyment of the City, I felt a bit frustrated, and the experience gave me some positive feeling about my recommendations of photo-trails to link dependent experiences in my own work.

Given the large number of audio clips and the size of the site I was quick to bemoan (in my head) the lack of a mechanism for determining which clips I had heard and which I had missed. Of course I did have my annotated paper map and could’ve simply typed all the codes in to see where I had been and where I hadn’t, but that’s a lot of work. I was also feeling slightly superior for suggesting such a useful improvement (to myself). Then, of course, I find out that such a mechanism does exist, in the form of a much more fancy audio-guide device that everyone else seems to have except me. While I’m sporting something that looks like a mobile phone from the early 90s with a number pad and a 3-digit display, everyone else has the device in the photo below:

On this device, locations lit-up to show whether you had visited or not and there was a compass. I was jealous, but soldiered on knowing that I was slumming it and surviving.

This is rather a moot point anyway, given that once again I had too little time to cover even a small portion of the site, thus rushing Bond more than he would’ve presumably wanted. This had actually been my first audio-guide in many years - the last I remember doing was at Battle and that was a long time ago. I would be interested to know exactly how the audio-clips are triggered by location and whether the locations are identical for the different guide languages (I was sure that other people around me were getting content when I wasn’t), but it’s proving difficult to track down who is responsible for the guide technology - I think it’s Acoustiguide, but I’m not completely positive. In the future I’d like to see multi-media location-based content: while the structures themselves were in great condition, the insides of some of the buildings - particularly in the Summer Palace - were not in fantastic shape and the exhibits that were there seemed to be something of an afterthought; I assumed that this was perhaps in anticipation of restoration, or simply for preservation, but in either case it would be nice to be able to see some artists’ impressions or historical photos which could be delivered via the guide device.

In conclusion: enjoyed being a tourist in China for once; also felt slightly better about not working by thinking some professional thoughts along the way.