User:JoeHK247/sandbox-Anders



"Landscape of the book" - Book 20 NA 6665 L201

Story
The Land Surveyor walks through the streets and alleys of old Beijing in Tong'an, a small town in the mountains north of Xiamen, and approaches a large castle he cannot enter. He circles the roads around the castle, waiting for an invitation to enter. The efficient and convoluted Chinese bureaucracy has yielded him a commission to map the surroundings. He carries a compass, an ancient relic, and an unfinished book by Kafka. Western literature is difficult to find, especially if it is banned and it is especially rare to find a Chinese translation of a German original. With his compass, he maps the concentric rectangles of roads that emanate from the castle, noting the topography of the region in his book. The town is built around the castle, concentric circular roads expand in size from the center point of the castle - radiating like ripples from a rock dropped in a shallow pool. North then East then Northwest. He makes mental notes and mountains drawn as an endless and silent sigh, echoing in the valley's V’s between the A’s of the mountain peaks. He sighs again and notes a single character on his map with vertical lines – san for three 山. Underneath he writes his name - translated to Josef K. The compass points East and he walks towards an empty horizon, waiting for his invitation to enter the castle. Confronted with the absurdity of his position, he realizes that the castle is a replica of the forbidden city in Beijing that is used to film television shows and movies and that he has been denied entry because they have been using the set to film a documentary of a feature length movie adaptation of an old Chinese book based upon a lost Italian text.

But the cartographer recalls being commissioned to survey the sub-provincial city of Tong'an, yet he has arrived in a community that can be described by Chinese standards as being barely more than a small town. He consults the town records and soon realizes his mistake. The city, once known in the Han Dynasty as Tong'an (Chinese: 同安), was later renamed Xiamen (Chinese: 下門) meaning lower gate and has since taken on a set of more refined characters (Chinese: 廈門) with the same pronunciation Xiamen meaning mansion door. In the mid twentieth century, the PRC's introduced the simplified Chinese character] system that changed the city name once more to [[Xiamen (Chinese: 厦门). Disoriented but now with the correct city name, he refers to his maps and travels a few dozen kilometers south to the island of Xiamen.

He climbs over the mountains and hills that break up the urban fabric of Xiamen, finding abandoned military posts and hidden Buddhist temples around the steep perimeters of cliff edges. From vantage points higher than the city's skyscrapers, he has a clear view of the central business district as well as the neighboring island of Kinmen. Passing joggers and bicyclists are unaware of the aberrations in the natural landscape: A rain filled puddle is the lasting history of a artillery bombardment, a tilted tree is the unrecognized gravestone for a Taiwanese soldier. The shape and topography of the mountains are records of the military conflict between Taiwan and China. Although both nations have moved on from the high alerts of their former hostility, gradually decommissioning their fortifications on Xiamen and Kinmen and building over scars in the city fabric, the mountains do not forget the battles that defined the border of their territories. The cartographer visits the PRC military tunnels, entering the island's mountains on the roads dug as part of the city's highway network. In their dark and labyrinthine passages, he manages to preserve his sense of direction. He tracks his progress on a folded map, entering underground spaces that have been closed off for decades. Passageways bring him through a sequence of square rooms of the same size and shape. Four walls and four doors lead into identical rooms of walls and doorways. He reaches a spiral staircase. Up a level and another series of identical rooms repeated seemingly forever. He feels like he is a character in a book but not the book that he carries with him or even one of the books that he's read or a book that he's heard of.

Another door, this time one he can not enter, on it is written the Chinese character 門. The traditional Chinese symbol for a door pictorially based on the shape of a door, placed on top of a real door. He wonders if the character on the door really just a redundant announcement of itself - like a wall that takes the shape of a WALL? Or does it refer back to the name of the city, Xiamen (Chinese: 廈門)? If it refers to the Chinese city, then the door must date to before Mao's 1950's language reforms. If it was done after, then it could also refer to Kinmen (Chinese: 金門) that translates to golden gate and retains the traditional character 門 rather than the simplified version 门 in Xiamen. Whatever it means, it doesn't matter, he only has to find a way out of the mountain. He certainly can't retrace his steps backwards through the maze of identical rooms, so the 門 is possibly his best chance to escape from underneath the mountain. Desperate, he knocks three times on the door. It opens to a view of 厦门 from the western coast of 金門. Doors linking doors. He stands underneath an enormous sign with bright red traditional Chinese characters 三民主义统一中国 "The three principles of the people unite China" and looks across the water to an even larger sign with bright red simplified Chinese characters 一国两制统一中国 "Peaceful Reunification - One Country Two System". Propaganda from two different countries directed towards each other but both essentially stating the same thing. Are they so different?

He knows that his journey through the mountain is as impossible to reconcile spatially as a compromise is for these two opposing ideologies. He could not have traveled that distance under the water of the strait in just those eight hours - or could he have been there longer? He doubts the navigational and directional skills that he had relied upon before. His folded maps have proven insufficient to prove a suitable explanation to the spatial paradox. Ink and paper, he concludes, are inadequate tools to solve the problem. Now in the territory of Taiwan, the land surveyor has access to Google Maps - an online service that was blocked on the mainland by the Chinese government's media policy. Using the Google Maps API developer platform he constructs an interactive map of his journey and posts it online. The map is censored in the People's Republic of China, but it is available for everyone else to see.

(Create a new topography - earth building dug connecting tunnels to the surface on the mountains)