Chinese boy defaces ancient Egyptian sculpture, prompts online outrage

At least in discussions on Western websites, the outrage always has an underlying racism permeating it. None of these people really have any right to be upset; they didn't care about the artifact, they've probably never been to a museum, let alone done anything to help preserve these sorts of things. That, coupled with all sorts of Chinese stereotypes and slurs that happen to pop up in this outrage, makes me think it's less about an ancient artifact and more about getting their weekly fill of hating a faceless "other." You don't see the same hate for all of the American tourists who write their names on the Great Wall[0] or the Colosseum.[1]

Seriously, what do they want from him now? What sort of responsibility do they want him to take, years after it happened? Beat him, as the top comment on NBC News (and many other sites) suggested? Ridiculous. Pay restitution to the Egyptian government? I'm sure neither one of these governments care enough to waste time over such a trivial matter as graffiti, and it's not like China is a stranger to people messing with ancient pieces of their society.

So, really, most of the people "outraged" have acted more disgracefully than that child.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/rNsPC6V.jpg

[1] http://www.hotsr.com/content/uploads/pictures/2013/01/Italy-...

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

> None of these people really have any right to be upset; they didn't care about the artifact, they've probably never been to a museum, let alone done anything to help preserve these sorts of things.

Would you say the same of everyone who was horrified by the dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan?

I find your concept of "'right' to be upset" to be rather suspect.

ceol6• 13 years ago

I would most certainly say the same to a bunch of anonymous, self-righteous Westerners crying for retribution in between parrotting disgusting stereotypes. But I'm not sure how you could think a child tourist scrawling his name on a statue is equivalent to a hateful organization completely destroying a monument.

bourne2• 13 years ago

The outrage has an underlying racism? From what I read, the outrage isn't from the West; it's from other Chinese.

ceol6• 13 years ago

Look at the comments on this random NBC News article. Then imagine them on every single article[0] about this story. The reddit thread[1] reached 3500 comments, and the top comments are all in the same vein: cries for punishment, stories about how awful Chinese tourists are, stories about how awful Chinese people in general are, etc.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws...

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1f2l3x/a_chinese_kid_ca...

yunong• 13 years ago

I find this wholly embarrassing as someone who is ethnically Chinese. This is not an isolated incident. I have personally witnessed domestic and international Chinese tourists behaving poorly, impolitely and without any consideration for the artifacts and other tourists. As an example -- whilst visiting the Ming tombs in Beijing, Ding Ling, to be specific, a couple let their child behind the cordoned off area to sit on the emperor's throne. This was a priceless 800 year old artifact and when I gently remarked upon this to them, it fell on deaf ears. Most warning signs are patently ignored -- examples such as smokers on the great wall, photographers in Buddhist Temples, screaming children in museums are just par for the course.

You have no idea how depressing it is to see the Great Wall of China littered with cigarette butts, or witnessing a small child defecating in the corner of the Forbidden City with the full blessing of its parent.

I would even go so far as to say that most people don't think the "rules" apply to them. This is true not just in tourism, but in everyday life. Any visitor to China will tell you stories of smokers in the pristine bathrooms of Beijing Capital Airport, or the subways, and people spitting on the street, jaywalking, or queue jumping.

Some personal pet peeves of mine include -- people getting on to subway cars before allowing passengers to get off, smoking in clearly designated non-smoking areas, littering anywhere and everywhere, line cutting, pushing and shoving others, blasting music from ipads on planes, and driving in the emergency lane on freeways.

This poor behaviour has only recently gained international attention because Chinese people have become more affluent and started travelling outside of China. However, prosperity doesn't correlate with class. Unless the Chinese government take drastic steps to cure this problem at home first -- the crass perception of its people will only perpetuate in the west as more and more start to travel internationally. Perhaps a system like Singapore where violations are fined severely might work -- provided it's implemented across the board everywhere.

Signed -- an embarrassed Chinese Canadian.

ekianjo3• 13 years ago

I can only relate here and I have seen the things you mentioned in the Forbidden city and the Great Wall as well. Not too long ago I was in Thailand (Pukhet), in a hotel resort for a couple of days off, and a couple of Chinese tourists came from the beach and washed their feet in the hotel swimming pool where everyone was swimming. Not embarrassed the least to do that. While there was a special hose, labeled and clearly visible for this particular use a few meters away for people to clean up their feet when coming back from the beach.

On another occasion, while flying domestically in China, I saw a guy just a couple of seats away from me on the left spitting on the aircraft floor several times during the flight. I was like... "huh?". I can kind of understand people spitting on the floor, outside, but in actual public transport? Seriously?

I have no idea what is going through their heads and why they even think it's remotely acceptable to do this. Would they like it if someone did it to them?

msie5• 13 years ago

Did you tell them to stop it? I think a lot of problems like this would be solved if someone worked up the courage to speak up. It could have just been a major misunderstanding. Maybe they really didn't see the hose or thought it was only used for emergencies. I've seen people of all races do stupid things.

maarten-pi• 13 years ago

I've been to China a few times and I guess you start to get an understanding of why this happens when you're there.

The trend is that quite some people have little regard foreach other. It becomes really annoying when standing in line and someone trying to get ahead of you in the queue (there always is someone trying to do it, in crowded places). But don't forget that situations where someone cuts in line will be noticed and remarked upon quickly instead of all the other people who didn't cut in line.

I've felt great annoyance about this as well and at one point it turned into some weird kind of amazement where you are observing behaviour from another planet.

I've deduced it to a few things.

1) The rushed lives in the big cities. The streets are full of people, the roads are packed (it can take up to 1 hour just passing by the 500 meter in front of a busstation with a taxi). People work ridiculous hours there (well some of them) so they are really tired when they move around

2) Also taking into consideration the enormous amount of smog / sand storms which pollute the city, you get a place where people just want to get out of as soon as possible.

This kind of explains the cutting in line and the spitting.

3) The 'one child-policy'. Chinese people tend to take an extreme amount of care of their children and it's not uncommon for parents to go to great lengths just to provide their child with everything it needs. That also goes for spending just about everything they've saved, just so their kid can go abroad to study and find work.

In some cases it goes well, but there are a lot of completely spoiled kids around. They actually think they own the world. For a change, I've been to a few more exclusive restaurants and what I found there was obviously good food (they've got that covered), but also young people with an enormous sense of entitlement. Really young, chubby kids ordering waiters to recook their meal, because it wasn't tender enough and giving the waiter all kinds of orders or just people taking off their shoes and put their feet on the table.

4) The enormous amount of competition. It's part of Chinese culture for parents to show off their kids and that tradition is largely ingrained in the new generation. People strive to own 4 apartments, a new car, a beautiful wife and a respectable job. This of course doesn't happen to everyone one.

Live on campuses is equally hard. Students who want to get somewhere need to study nearly every waking hour of the day from when they are 12 until they graduate from university.

The competition leaves people feeling estranged from each other, since there is no time and mental space to actually care about someone else.

5) China is mostly a rural country. Almost all parents had something to do with the cultural revolution. That meant pretty much everyone had to do some labor on the country. What we see now is a transition from a rural society to a modern one.

Well, I'll stop here. It seems like to me there are a lot of factors in play on why the Chinese do the things they do.

I guess it's mostly a state of transition (and I hope), I've seen great things happen in China. And well, with that many people there not all goes well.

msie5• 13 years ago

Yeah, I don't understand spitting indoors. Why didn't I remember this in your comment earlier?

meerkat2• 13 years ago

Do British Canadians try as hard to distance themselves from soccer hooligans? Not condemning you, but just wondering about this sad state of affairs that requires you to comment that not all Chinese are alike.

shellehs2• 13 years ago

In Chinese traditional culture, to write poems or paint on places or buildings or something, is some kinda, honor(?). And more famous persons's writing or painting, more famous the place to be. Then, the words or paints became important components of the place. It looks not shame, or bad but some behavior of culture.

Even one place is known by few people or none, or landscape is not attracting, if some well-known person defaced, then it will be well-known and be attracting.

Chinese belief in that nature and culture should be harmony. Later travelers come to see not only how beautiful the place, but also the marks left by whom, and how the words and paintings effected people to evaluate the place.

Now, people think to do so is damage the place.. It's bad, people who did that will be punished.

My point is, anything illegal, should be punished or maybe then discussed. If not, should be discussed.

shellehs2• 13 years ago

looks some one negative my comment.

Could I have the reason why you think it's shitty?

Did I say something wrong? or unproper?

Gigablah• 13 years ago

Your point isn't unique to Chinese culture.

Plus, the boy who wrote his own name didn't even have decent handwriting.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

It comes down to manners, something that seem to be lacking all over the world. I've had to prompt parents to stop their kids from touching (more like pawing) artwork in museums and crawling all over historical sites, and the parents look at me like I'm an alien. It's all about them and their precious little snowflake, rather than appreciating the art or history.

You can see it in the parents' apologia for their son's atrocious behavior, focused on how their son is a "good student" which has nothing to do with anything.

>>They also confessed that they had not been watching their son while on tour in Egypt

How long did it take him to carve the characters. Was he really unsupervised that long???

Keep in mind also this kid and his family are very fortunate to be able to travel overseas and see these priceless treasures, especially considering how poor most of his countrymen still are.

general_failure• 13 years ago

I wonder how one teaches people who don't know better.

In India, there is a place called hampi which is near a village called hospet. It is one of the worlds most ancient and spectacular ruins. There is also literally pigs and sewer everywhere.

For a more popular example take taj mahal. Agra is dirty like hell and words cannot describe the sanitation situation there. The taj mahal doesn't need help to look awesome but with a background of a stinking river and a filthy city, it looks like a diamond in shit.

Actually why tourist places. Are you guys aware that Indian railways encourages defecating in the open? Yes sir visit any train station in India and you will see fresh human faeces on the tracks. All toilets of the train open up straight into the ground.

All this to say that in countries like India people cannot take care of their own land forget other people s land.

pinaceae• 13 years ago

that's the classic traintoilet design across the world. only recently have toilets in trains been replaced with chemical ones - adoption was driven by high speed trains.

nothing particular about india in this little bit. i agree with your overall assessment though.

geoka9• 13 years ago

> that's the classic traintoilet design across the world.

I can confirm it's the same in the ex-USSR countries. That's why the lock the lavatory 10 minutes before arriving at a station and don't unlock it until the train is well clear of the town.

aaron695• 13 years ago

>I wonder how one teaches people who don't know better.

Considering first world nations still continue to pollute why do you expect people in abject poverty to be any different?

Open defecation is a serious problem, but I don't see it's relevance to "India people cannot take care of their own land" or graffiting other peoples property.

This is a issue about hygiene and how can one implement it in very poor countries.

INTPenis3• 13 years ago

Call me radical, I think we should legalize both all drugs and all graffiti. To be honest, I don't think this should be a big deal.

We should teach the cycles that civilizations have gone through, we should teach all we know about former civilizations, but I don't think we should treat their old stones as sacred.

I think we should build new, ontop of the old. You can't build something new without destroying the old, sometimes.

eggnet• 13 years ago

Should we stop sweeping streets or picking up trash too? Might as well shut down the sewer system, who needs it.

INTPenis3• 13 years ago

Now who's being radical? I was proposing to legalize something that only hurts the person doing the drug, or in the case of graffiti hurts no one if only people could look beyond the cover of things.

The drug debate is for a different forum but the graffiti argument is that people are judging things based on the cover. Anyone who goes into the German subway system and thinks "this is a terrible train and I might die if I ride in it" because someone sprayed some paint on the cart, or the walls, does not have their priorities right in my opinion.

Same goes for any building. It's a matter of tolerance and priorities. Can we learn to tolerate some color on gray walls, and can we prioritize important things in society over children playing with paint?

mercurial• 13 years ago

Sure. Looking forward to putting some Nazi symbols on Jewish graves for the fun of it and spaying "Osama was here" at Ground Zero. Nothing is sacred, right?

Could torch the museum, no point in spending money on old junk, especially if it might actually teach something to the visitors.

subsection1h2• 13 years ago

    I think we should legalize both all drugs and all graffiti.

Please provide your home address so I can spray paint "Convicted Child Molester" on your home and car. Thanks.

mieses• 13 years ago

Do you want to legalize damage to all property or just property older than some number of years? How does a thousand sound? That way your new bong and Xbox should be covered.

INTPenis3• 13 years ago

What damage is graffiti doing? It seems to me, that most of the time graffiti is mostly damaging peoples minds. Because people perceive something as dirty when it has paint on it.

I have neither of those things.

meerkat2• 13 years ago

I hope there will be a day when what one visible minority does doesn't reflect badly on his entire race. Not just thinking about what this Chinese kid did, but also about those two guys who killed that British serviceman. Muslims living in England must be on edge right now.

b6• 13 years ago

Note, when they say "quality and breeding", I'm pretty sure they're using a poor translation of the word 素质. I would translate it more like "character". I think it means how you behave when no one is looking.

oneiros• 13 years ago

I find this quite amusing. Yes, it was out of place for the kid to deface the wall. Yes, he should have thought twice before proceeding with his actions, but at the end of the day, this is nothing more than a material object.

People are so quick to bash on somebody, as evident in the comments on the article. This raises the question of whether the true issue is that the kid did something that was immoral, or that these commenters and those other people who are lashing out in anger in response to this are merely using this as a way to feed their ego, or possibly as a way to justify something that they've done, that caused others to consider them to be "stupid, "irresponsible", etc.

My heart aches for each time I see a child, and often an adult, kill, a living creature. Something even so small as a fly, killed just because the fact that it is a fly and considered "annoying". Everyone has a right to life, a scratch in some 3.4 thousand year old limestone wall is not going to hurt anybody. In fact, three millennia into the future, people might regard that very same scratch to be of important historical value. The fact that people are focusing so much anger and hatred to this naive child, instead of focusing on something more important such as spreading peace and love, saddens me. And how ironic, that the very same people who are so against graffiti, graffiti on something themselves.

The reason that these artifacts exist is to tell a story, the true value in these is not the material aspect of this artifact, but the informational value. The information, although now slightly altered, is not destroyed. This is what is important. And I don't doubt that there is photographic evidence of the egyptian glyph in it's preexisting form archived somewhere, possibly in a library.

If you really wanted to deface it, you'd need to find a way to remove it from history. Only then will it's true purpose, historical archive of an important message, will be defeated.

And think about this, for everyone complaining about him defacing the artifact, wake up, you probably deface the oldest artifact in existence every day. The earth itself.

subsection1h2• 13 years ago

    I find this quite amusing. [...] at the end of the
    day, this is nothing more than a material object.

Please post your home address so I can vandalize your home and car. If you get upset by my vandalism, I'll find it quite amusing.

Smudge• 13 years ago

There's informational value, sure. Historical value, aesthetic value, certainly some material value. And, sure at the end of the day, it's one small scratch on one artifact in one small part of the world. But if this kid's behavior is okay, then where do you draw the line? Can everyone etch their names in ancient sculptures and artifacts? Why not take some of it home with you? (After all, removing one stone out of thousands hardly affects the historical value of a site, no?)

You see where I'm going with this. We react so strongly to one small incident of graffiti because it's simply not sustainable. I'd like my kids (and their kids) to be able to visit sites like, say, the Acropolis in Greece and find the Parthenon (which was historically subject to a ton of looting and careless damage) as well-preserved as possible.

One could always make the case that it's not worth preserving these sites at all, but that's a different argument, and those of us who are interested in the historical value would certainly beg to differ.

Shorel• 13 years ago

I find that part of oriental culture great.

Had any of my classmates done something similar, their parents would have denied everything, downplayed the damage, and in general be overprotective and caring only about themselves.

Chinese boy defaces ancient Egyptian sculpture, prompts online outrage

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