Google made me ponder recently, after making me watch videos from the Youtube channel FlyEast, like this one:
that it seems the Chinese have an irresistible urge to build on top of tiny, tiny precipitous heights. I can imagine them looking at the Three Sisters at Katoomba and thinking "why isn't there at temple on top of at least one of them, and stairway access?"
Not only that, it would seem that a lot of the population is missing the "fear of heights" gene. I find it hard to imagine the same tourist enthusiasm here for scrambling up near vertical stairs to get to small peaks with little standing space. Even with bridges, look at the tourists happy on this one, which I would go on too, I suppose, but not entirely without nerves:
Youtube is full of examples of precipitous buildings in China, and of course, horrendously scary mountain roads in China adjacent places. I know there are examples in Europe of buildings on scary heights too, but I still don't think that Westerners have quite the same enthusiasm for building things in such difficult and dangerous locations.
So why do they want to build structures up on tiny, tiny peaks anyway? Because of proximity to heaven or gods, I suppose, but I would like to know for sure.
Update: OMG, look at this video, which is incredibly beautiful, and has only had 23,000 views:
You can view the same temple complex in summer here.
2 comments:
The communist heritage means that they are harsh bastards. But one thing I like about them is they get all these academically gifted people into the communist party. Its kind of a Confucian thing where whole families will get behind their most academically gifted kids to see to it that they pass the exams and make it into the public sector or the party. As a consequence there are all these engineers in the communist party. So I see this as a kind of touching expression of their engineering power.
Neoclassical definitions of economics are to do with the allocation of scare resources. This is a real copout in my view. George Reisman defines economics as the study of the creation of wealth .... in the context of the division of labour.
That last stipulation kind of pushes us away from construction and engineering. I accepted this for awhile, because I thought I could communicate with people. But our economists have grown too stupid. So I think you have to just say that economics is the study of wealth creation ....... And then have all these engineering papers pushed into the economics degree requirements.
Even better would be to encourage too many engineering degrees and then when the engineers couldn't get jobs pay some of them to get post-graduate degrees in economics then sack the existing economists.
No I'm not really putting this out as a policy directive. But I'm kind of hoping that you get the point. We just aren't getting the long-term vision we need without balancing the economics mindset with the engineering mindset. To create wealth we need to be flying on both these wings I think. Particularly since we will be facing energy deprivation for many decades ahead.
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