History

I've always been a fan of the "authentic historical experience." As a child, I was annoyed that the reconstruction of the Mayflower had smoke detectors, and tried to trip up the Pilgrim interpreters by asking tunnels about them. Last year, while visiting Vietnam, I scoffed at the sections of the Cu Chi tunnels enlarged for Western visitors, as though my taking ten minutes to crawl through a hole gave me an "authentic" understanding of what it had been like to eat, sleep and survive there for months at a time, with bombs and poison gas dropping in from above.

Although I like to think of myself as an open-minded person, I've always been secretly annoyed when historic sites were "renovated" to make them more accessible. That was before I began to spend time with Robin, Burr and their four-month-old daughter Phebe. They're pretty tough — Robin carries Phebe, her car seat, diapers and toys through terrain that I have a tough time with just carrying my little backpack — but even so, there are some places where a baby just can't go. I like spending time with Phebe (I'm sure at some point Burr and Robin will get tired of me talking baby-talk to her, but it hasn't happened yet) and don't like being deprived of her company, even if it means being able to climb over some thousand-year-old ruins. Besides, it turns out my idea of an historical experience isn't so "authentic" after all.

What impressed me as I visited the Forbidden City yesterday was that this was a place that had evolved. The buildings, with their carved dragon eaves and brightly-painted crossbeams, had been burned down and rebuilt over and over again during the last thousand years, and each emperor, each new dynasty, had added or changed or destroyed something about the city. My guide (a young woman who approached me because her friend wanted to touch my beard) showed me that part of the palace where the last Ming emperor had been imprisoned for life after the rise of the Qing dynasty, and the well where the would-be leader of an insurrection had been ordered drowned by the Empress Cixi. Today, most of the city has been sealed under glass by the Chinese government, but some of it is still transforming — the former library that's now a bookstore, the ancestral temples that have become schools and offices.

I like to think of the place I live — Plymouth — as an historic town. But some of the cypress trees in the emperor's garden are older than the Pilgrims. Not all of them were in great shape — some had been patched with concrete, or were supported by wires — and that's hardly surprising: they'd seen emperors rise and fall, seen the Nationalists and the Communists and the Third Way ascend, heard sacrifices and whispered confessions and gunfire and silence. And they're still growing, and they'll probably be there for a long time after everything I've known has become history.