So, a few days into my China trip my laptop died — motherboard fried. You see, my machine prefers to crap out when I am half a globe away from my local tech support, having most recently decided to spin its hard disk platters into the drive armature when I was in Egypt in October. Yeah, I needed that. What’s worse this time is that I had only recently achieved the goal of getting rid of individual power cords for my camera, iPod, and phone, instead charging them all via USB through the laptop. You see where I am going with this, no doubt. With a dead machine, nothing would charge. Single point of failure. Nice design, John. My technology world came crashing down in a single heap of powerless gadgets. And it was a weekend with little hope of tech support in China. How did I manage? My trusty moleskine of course! Eventually on the last day before coming home, some colleagues of mine in Taipei were able to repair my machine with one of only four motherboards for my laptop model on the island. Nicely solved!

A couple of assorted things before this China travelogue comes to an end.

• Cathay Pacific is everything that United as an airline is not. I could get used to that level of service. They even titillate you with onboard e-mail access, but it turns out the e-mail is queued locally on a server and sent out in batches. Not exactly Lufthansa-style in-flight access, but hey, they did treat me like royalty.
• Taipei 101, the current world’s tallest building, has a pressurized express elevator that moves you faster than your inner ear cares to admit. It also has a massive vibration damper tuned to the frequency of the building itself. It is open to public inspection and looks like something straight out of a sci-fi film. Bow down to the spherical power core!
• I never did get sick. My family continued to suffer, though, as a bout of pink eye and double ear infections added themselves to the compendium of maladies that afflicted the already-miserable.
• I ate a caffeinated egg and gelatinous coffee. Not sure which was worse.

Finally, some more polite signage from the Forbidden City. Really, no problem at all.

And then this:

Fine, but everyone knows there’s no such thing as a five-star crapper. Simply ridiculous. The scale just doesn’t go that high.

Today I spent many hours of hell braving the Ya Show market in central Beijing. Armed with printouts of fine handbags from my wife I was there to acquire as many name-brand knock-off purses as I could afford and carry back to the hotel without undue strain or attention being drawn. It was misery, since I’m not a big shopper anyway and have no innate sense of what a Prada purse should cost, but I made it out relatively unscathed. Two things made me laugh repeatedly, though. The English of the stall-keepers was uniformly horrible, unless it related directly to the act of selling or keeping you from walking away. Phrases such as “make me a smarter offer” or “where will you find such quality elsewhere?” were syntactically correct and enunciated flawlessly. It was fun to test the boundaries, to probe the limits of vendors who were really just human phrase-recall databases.

Input: potential buyer walking away.
Output: “Sir, please enter your price into my calculator.”

Input: Shopper says “Do you take US dollars?”
Output: “Why yes, sir, as well as RMB and Hong Kong dollars, thank you.”

Input: Shopper says “Excuse me, do you know the closet subway line to the market?”
Output: Blank stare, no keywords triggered. Abort, retry, fail?

The other thing I loved were the signs placed everywhere imploring shoppers to report any fake products. It was all so earnestly ridiculous. There wasn’t anything real in the whole place. (Not that I could have spotted a real Gucci purse, mind you.) Sure, I’ll dial the police right up. Just let me know if the American embassy will pay for my funeral after the shopkeepers — and their customers! — lynch me with so many faux leather belts.

True, in advance of the Olympics and as part of playing nicely with their trading partners, the Chinese authorities are starting to crack down on the product replica business, but I think this may not ultimately be as much an economic practice as a cultural one.

In his fascinating book The Future of the Past, Alexander Stille notes how China and other Asian countries do not consider a copy to be less real or less significant than the original it represents. Like a digital copy of a file that has no more claim to authenticity than its “source” file, high-quality copies in China are consider artforms in their own right. This is borne out in the field of cultural artifact conservation. For the Chinese, copying is conservation, a concept completely foreign to Western conservators. Because most Chinese architecture had traditionally been wood-based (rather than stone-based) there has never been a strong notion of permanence in art. To keep a work of art alive you had to replicate it and, in the process, were showing a reverence for the skill of the artisan that came before you. Still, this approach flies in the face of nearly every precept of Western cultural conservation. Can you imagine the Italians throwing out the David and creating a new, cleaner one as a solution to the recent conversation problems they have had?

It will be a shame if the fake product industry (or the skills upon which it thrives) does not survive in the face of globalization and homogenizing markets. In a way, the closure of the fake product markets is just the latest assault on the “culture of the copy,” as Stille terms it. Just as the Cultural Revolution decimated sites of historical value throughout China — effectively severing the centuries-old artisanal traditions that permitted the cycle of upkeep and re-creation to persist — the closure of markets like the famous Silk Alley represents the triumph of one concept, in this case the inviolability of global trademarks, over another, much older one: the exultation of the replica.