Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China

摘要

The anthropologist Beth Notar begins her sweeping and beautifully rendered account of the tourist discovery and popular imagining of Dali with a story of ruins. Back in the late 1980s, she was a foreign student and backpacker, and used to stay in a place called the No. 2 Guesthouse. In 1995 she returned in search of the guesthouse, only to find that the government had demolished it and a glass hotel had been built in its place. A decade later, the forces of privatization recycled the ruins. The government sold the monstrous glass palace of a hotel to a private company. A mini-mall is now built in its place, modelled on the courtyard villa that only a decade before was turned into rubble.