A Steppe Too Far...

We had been told to expect a welcome reception from the Mongolian people on our arrival at Hailar. As we disembarked from the train and met the cold morning air, our worst fears were confirmed. The weekend was going to be passed not in the traditional style of nomadic Mongolian peoples, but rather in the far more exotic and unintelligible style of modern Chinese tourism. Our three Han tour guides, wearing brightly colored fake Mongol robes over their jeans and sneakers, approached our conspicuous group. One started distributing uniform blaze yellow ball caps, while the other two bestowed each member of our group with a long white sash around the neck. After boarding the two buses to go to breakfast, the tour guide delivered our first welcome address using a microphone that echoed everything like a karaoke microphone.

Our first site was a War Museum dedicated to the Sino-Russian alliance in forcing the Japanese out of Inner Mongolia during World War Two. We walked through the exhibits, housed in the former bunker, and then were surprised to find, at the end of the exhibit, a small oriental rug on the floor. A camera on the wall fed the image from the carpet onto a large TV screen that displayed a panning shot of the Mongolian plains, such that the carpet and anyone sitting on it looked like Aladdin soaring above the fruited plain. But we should not have been surprised, because China is a nation of unexplainable contradictions, and that’s why most of us enjoy spending time here. After spending far too long taking turns on the carpet, we discovered another unusual attraction – an indoor shooting range. For something like 20 RMB, anyone could walk into something that looked like a bowling alley and take three shots at a target with live ammo.

The rest of the morning was spent outside of the museum by the parking lot, where dozens of fake, concrete army tanks and hundreds of over-sized Russian soldiers had been installed so as to appear, from a distance, as if they were attacking the hill. The attackers were themselves besieged with an onslaught of American students and Chinese teachers who proceeded to pose for every conceivable photo using the peculiar backdrop.