That’s pretty much how I feel as I recuperate from an exhausting four days in Beijing.

This was the first trip to China where I truly experienced Wikipedia withdrawal. You really don’t know what you’ve got until it is blacklisted by a state government. I worry about the larger implications of this.

I always chuckle at the Chinese entry document when you are asked to check the box corresponding to your intention: Business, Conference, Official, Other (huh?), etc. There’s a box that says Settle Down. I’m tempted to check it. What does that mean? Give me your poor, your tired, your crazed Westerners looking to just settle down? I imagine the schoolmarm at passport control looking at me stoically and saying “You just need to relax, hmmm?”

I’ve realized now, after my seventh trip to the Far East, that the timeshift is truly diabolical. I suppose it is my own fault. When working in Europe and the Middle East you basically have an elongated work day. Do your thing there, return to the hotel, log on, work with your colleagues back home for a few hours at the start of their work day. In China, it is like this but with about a five hour gap between the end of the Chinese work day and waking Americans. After a few days of this the only reasonable thing to do is sleep during this period. Which completely destroys any hope of a sustainable schedule. The day becomes split: awake 6am-6pm, sleep 6pm-10pm, awake 10pm – 2am, sleep, etc. Awful. Maybe I should just treat it like a vacation from work back home.

That said, I can’t complain. Working at the Forbidden City is a special treat. IT geeks are almost always housed in basements, dungeons, or worse — and when I work there I am in a temporary trailer — but how bad can it be when you step out to this?

The Forbidden City is surrounded by a wide moat on all four sides. It is stagnant and forboding, as a defensive moat should be, I suppose. Yet, there are always a few dozen people fishing in it. I’ve never seen anyone pull anything living out of it, but from the size of the poles they use (without reels) I am pretty sure they are angling for some sort of slithering leviathan the size of a bus.

Our colleagues at the Forbidden City again hosted a ping pong tournament. I should have learned from the first drubbing last year. I think I lost 11-7, 11-8 which sounds way closer than it was. Yes, my opponent held his paddle upside-down, yes he stood way the hell back and played many of my shots after the ball had dropped below the plane of the table on his side, but what really threw me off was his serving ritual. He’d pet the table up by the net, move back, bounce the ball slowly on his paddle held parallel to the table, tuck it all back in close to his body (so I could not see it clearly), then whip out a serve that never went where I thought it would. If I managed to return it the shot was so lame that I was shortly searching for the ball ricocheting between server cabinets way behind me. Still, it was good fun and I really love that Chinese television always has professional ping pong coverage on. Taunting, yelling, sweating, injuries — the way ping pong should be.

In The Future of the Past, Alexander Stille expands on a comment by Italian conservator Michele Cordaro:

“The Chinese, like the Japanese and some other Asian nations, have a tradition of conserving by copying, or rebuilding.”

Conserving by rebuilding made considerable sense in China, where, until recently, virtually everything — palaces, temples, and houses — was built of wood. Paradoxically, in architecture, working in perishable materals could potentially offer a superior conversation strategy: rotting wooden parts could simply be replaced as needed so that, just as our bodies replace their old cells with new ones while we remain “ourselves,” the buildings would be constantly regenerated, remaining forever new and forever ancient.

Seems logical, but in practice Western conservation is based on a philosophy of repair rather than replacement. This stems from the West’s long privileging of permanence and originality in art (even when what we praise isn’t in fact permanent or exceptionally original). Copies are considered at best qualitatively lesser; at worst, acts of piracy.

These conflicting attitudes toward monuments are related to profound cultural differences. China and Japan have traditionally had a cyclical view of time. Dynasties would rise and fall, be replaced by new ones, but, like the Forbidden City, reemerging from its latest fire, remain fundamentally the same: each ruling group held the “mandate of heaven” …. In a world that was both eternal and ever-changing, rebuilding monuments made perfect sense.

This past week I had the good fortune to be invited on a tour of the renovation of the roof of the Hall of Supreme Harmony at the Forbidden City in Beijing. This is the most important of the hundreds of buildings at the Forbidden City, now known also as the Palace Museum. The whole museum is being upgraded (as is all of Beijing, for that matter), but the work is most intense at the Hall of Supreme Harmony where a giant scaffolding and tent covers the swarm of workers who are in the process of removing the thousands of decaying terracotta tiles to get at the wooden infrastructure of the roof. The tiles are being meticulously removed and remade. The roof itself is imperceptibly sagging and this will be repaired too. The intricately painted outer beams will be repainted, resulting in stunning before and after comparisons. (Full photoset tour at Flickr.)

This is a less extreme version of wholesale rebuilding of cultural sites that Stille details in his study of Chinese conservation, but it is an example nonetheless. Only a specialist could point to what is original to the hall’s 1406 construction and what parts are copies installed since. This happens in the West too, of course, but the difference as I’ve experienced it in China is that it doesn’t matter. The originality of the building is the idea of it, what it represents.

The Palace Museum has a partnership with the Japanese printing company Toppan to create a detailed, high-resolution virtual replica of the Forbidden City. Right now only three of the main halls, including Supreme Harmony, are complete. The effect of moving about the virtual grounds in the wrapround-style theater is powerful, though in the people-free virtual model the awe created by the buildings’ scale is missing. There’s little aura to the simulacrum. The model will improve, of course, as the technologies of virtuality improve.

Comparison of a photograph and a still from the virtual model

No one claims that the model is the Forbidden City, but then you don’t get the usual quasi-apologies about its not being the “real” thing either. Most 3D modelling in cultural heritage is done for a specific purpose — reconstruction of what has been lost, for instance — and is treated as a teaching tool or a research resource. Not so at the Palace Museum. It will be interesting to see how this copy evolves.

You know that scene in Father of the Bride II where Steve Martin has the route to the hospital intricately plotted out in the event that his daughter (or was it wife) goes into labor? I laughed when I first saw that, pre-kids. Now it makes me laugh for a different reason, since that kind of detailed plan is bound to go awry. You’re almost asking for it to, taunting the due date gods to throw you a curveball. Short of scheduling an induction — and even that can be unpredictable — there’s really no way of knowing what is going to happen or, more specifically, when it will happen.

Which is why there’s palpable concern in my house over my departure today for China. With flights leaving for the US only during a certain window of time and the jaunt taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 hours, there’s almost no conceivable way I could make it back if my wife suddenly went into labor. Sure, this is highly unlikely. She’s neither dilated nor effaced. But then, our second son was three weeks early — and week 37 begins precisely as I am arriving home. So does the Chinese May Day week-long holiday.

Let’s hope China’s celebration of labor and mine happen half a world apart.