Off Camera

If you have ever visited a film set you will know that there is a narrow angle of view in which the scenery and the actors are perfectly positioned inside their make-believe world. If the camera were to shift, even slightly, to the left or right the illusion would be broken as a small army of production staff come into view.

As we embark on the package tour part of our journey Michael (our tour guide) gently but quickly sheppards us from one perfect view to another with scripted factoids about this or that emperor. He tries not to expose us to the off camera world but no matter how narrowly he defines our view he can’t stop us from looking in the ‘wrong’ direction or outside the predefined parts. Take the Great Wall for example. Whilst the view from the top was undoubtedly spectacular the car journey too and from the wall was, in many ways, more impressive but, when pressed, Michael seemed almost embarrassed to discuss the bits of the wall we weren’t actually visiting. Perhaps this is why he chose to distract us on the way back with a lecture on China’s family planning policy.

There are other things that won’t make it on to our photos. Whilst I painted a serene view from a picnic area at the top of the Great Wall I chose not to include the Korean boy peeing off the side of the wall next to me. On the other hand I would be unable to capture the noise as we walked through the tunnels, deep in the mountain, to the cable car station which made me feel that I was travelling into the nostrils of a dragon.

Sometimes, however, Michael has planned some off-camera moments. The value of a trip like this is in an intangible commodity of views and memories but, ultimately, someone has to pay for it. This is why the off-camera surprise of yesterday consisted of a ‘Jade Museum’. The museum itself was an identical series of rooms – each big enough to accommodate a single coach party and displaying about 15-20 modern jade carvings. We were greeted by an enthusiastic ‘curator’ who wasted little time with a museum tour before taking us, past the master craftspeople (4 bored looking people behind glass screens polishing bits of Jade), through to the ‘museum shop’ or perhaps, more accurately a Jade supermarket. We were told that we would be taught how spot real Jade from fake. The answer – to buy it from the museum shop.

It is often these off-camera moments and scenes that are most interesting and most revealing. They may not be part of the ‘Magic of China’ illusion but they are an inevitable and important part of the script of our holiday.