I read a big post by Dan Wang recently. The post is about Imperial China and Wang formulates some pretty good questions there, the questions that can be asked not only about old China but about old Europe as well.
In the second half of the post Wang asks a question that can’t be applied to Europe:
“It’s difficult to find evidence of historical monuments in Chinese cities today. Most large Chinese cities look similar in the same ugly way, with big apartment blocks, wide avenues, concrete everywhere. How is it that the splendid cities of the past have all been reduced to such dreadful streets and buildings?”
Then he quotes from an essay by Simon Leys:
“The past which continues to animate Chinese life in so many striking, unexpected, or subtle ways, seems to inhabit the people rather than the bricks and stones. The Chinese past is both spiritually active and physically invisible”
and kinda takes it as an answer.
He adds:
“Most Chinese know the same sets of stories and parables everyone is told growing up; the actions we see in paintings and read in books follow a logic that still makes sense; I’m personally struck that I’m familiar with the characters in centuries-old scrolls, unchanged as they’ve been throughout millennia.
…
It’s tempting to associate Europe’s intense efforts to preserve old buildings with its current economic malaise. That feels facile, and the connection is from me, not Leys. <…> Europe can use a bit of Chinese disregard of its material heritage, so that it has to think about how it will build the future”
As for the Europeans who’re keeping old building intact, there’s a much simpler explanation for that than European economic malaise and Chinese dynamism and vitality. China is still an industrial country and, until recently, has been a country with a rapidly growing population. Such countries need space for new plants and apartment buildings, so they demolish old houses and entire neighborhoods without a second thought. It happened in China 10–20 years ago, it had happened in Europe 100–200 years ago. Think of Haussmann’s Paris, think of reconstruction of Vienna in 1860s, think of London from 1780s til 1940s (St James’s Square, Pall Mall, City, Devil’s Acre in Westminster). The attitude started to change only when the industrial economy transformed into the service one and old neighborhoods became a valuable asset for tourism and recreation.
China has just started this transfer from industrial to service economy and conservation of old neighborhoods has started as well.
What’s more interesting here is the claim that Chinese people “know the same sets of stories and parables everyone is told growing up”. Wang doesn’t say that Europeans don’t, but he clearly implies it — the post is all about the difference between European and Chinese attitudes to history: Europe preserves stones, China preserves stories.
I don’t think it’s true. Every European country has its own set of stories and parables everyone is told growing up.
But there’s more to it. I’m quite certain that all Europeans share the same set of stories and parables, which is of course much narrower than the stories and parables sets for France, Germany or Poland, but quite wide nevertheless.
I’ve tried to recreate that set of stories here. Not everyone in Europe has read them, but almost everyone knows what they are about:
Probably Harry Potter should be on the list too, but it’s too soon to tell.
I didn’t include Dante’s Divine Comedy because, though everyone has heard of it, it’s not exactly a story that can be summarized in several lines.
Do you have something to add to the list or may be you think that some of the aforementioned stories are not universally know across Europe? Please, let me know.
