China

'Hometowns' battle to claim their celebrities

By Hu Yongqi and Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-07 07:16

Finding leverage

Jiangyou is nowhere as desperate as Anlu in looking for a way out of poverty.

A county in Hubei province, Anlu had 462 million yuan in revenue last year, less than half of what Wujiashan, an industrial district in Hubei's capital Wuhan, pulled in this January alone.

Anlu was not Li Bai's hometown, but that of his first wife; the couple lived there for about a decade. That experience, though, was enough leverage for local leaders.

Among other things, officials named the county's central square Taibai Square (Taibai was Li's courtesy name), built him a statue, a memorial and a temple, and held a massive choir festival in his honor. A campaign to promote its own version of "Li Bai culture" has also been launched.

In Jiangyou, too, Li Bai the poet is often seen more as a strategic asset. The county's oldest complex commemorating Li was built during the Qianlong period (1736-95) of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a millennium after Li's time. Most early relics of his time were ravaged by centuries of wars and chaos. Existing replicas are by and large highly homogenous sites (many built with State funds after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake) aimed at drawing profit.

As with most ancient cultural icons, Li's early life is still an academic question. Historian Guo Moruo's 1971 assertion that Li was born near Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, has been widely accepted and is still found in some textbooks.

However, this claim has been contested, most famously by Zhao Yahui, a veteran reporter with the People's Daily, who wrote in 2009, "There's a more than 99 percent chance that Li Bai was born in Jiangyou, Sichuan."

Qin'an county of Gansu province, where Li Bai's ancestors were from, and Tokmok have also joined the drama.

It doesn't always work

Little attention has been paid to those who lose out in the game. An example is Xinzhou, one of the earliest localities to take the initiative in Shanxi province.

The alleged hometown of Diao Chan, from the early Three Kingdoms Period and one of China's four most legendary ancient beauties, built her a theme park in 1994, amid the nationwide tide to build manmade "attractions" to boost tourism.

But in the years that followed, very few bothered to go to a remote village to visit the statue of a long-gone beauty and read from stones engraved with stories about her.

At the turn of the century, farmer Wang Wangxi took control of the park and was determined to give it one last shot. Restaurants and motels were built around the park, but still no one came. Nobody wanted to handle the mess, either.

Wang gave up in 2005. Since then, he has been using the theme park as a rural yard to raise sheep and chicken.