Bird’s Nest Soup

UPDATE 08.08.08: For the latest, high-resolution images of the Bird’s Nest, including photos from the banner protest just two days before the Opening Ceremoies, please visit http://freetibet2008.org/globalactions/birdsnest/

Bird’s nest soup is an expensive delicacy in China. It uses the nest of a swiftlet, a swallow-like bird that builds its home out of its own hardned saliva. To a Tibetan used to a diet of yak meat and tsampa (roasted barley), eating avian spittle sounds funny to say the least. But no one ever says Tibetans and Chinese are the same… oh wait, the Chinese government does! But we digress…

Yesterday Lhadon visited a different kind of bird’s nest, the new Beijing Olympic Stadium nicknamed so because it resembles a huge nest. She wrote:

There is a common, psychological theme running through all of these projects including the Bird’s Nest: all of them are meant to communicate China’s technological progress and prowess. However, these project’s architectural scale and engineering sophistication cannot gloss over the absence of the two most basic rights of China’s people: freedom and democracy.

This brings to mind a similar kind of imposing, impressive, and oppressive building style: Nazi architecture. In Hitler’s Germany, “The very face of the land was to be transformed… The new buildings must proclaim to the world and to the unconverted German that the era of the thousand-year Reich had dawned. Obviously, then, in seeking to influence the foreign visitor with its overpowering representative edifices, the Third Reich was didactic and theatrical.”

We can’t help thinking of Comrade Hu Jintao coming up with the idea for the stadium while sitting down to a meal of avian spittle. But as much as we like that idea, that surely didn’t happen because the Bird’s Nest wasn’t designed by Chinese. The crown jewel of Beijing’s Olympic architecture was designed by foreigners (Herzog & de Meuron), just like its new airport (Foster and Partners) and China Central Television headquarters (Rem Koolhaas).

Can’t the Chinese government even do its own triumphal architecture? With all its nationalist bluster, isn’t it embarassed it needs to rely on foreigners? Tibet’s Potala Palace was built over 350 years ago by Tibetans themselves. A photo of it graced the office wall of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who considered it an inspirational masterpiece.

So looking at the noxious sky above the Bird’s Nest, Lhadon thought to herself:

“And this is the country that claims to develop Tibet for the better?” I said to myself, as I imagined the vast, blue, blue, blue sky of my homeland Tibet.

We ask ourselves the same question. China’s modernity and its wealth are made possible by foreign knowledge and foreign investment (and the sweat and toil of ordinary Chinese). What gives the Chinese government the right to tell Tibetans how their country must be run? If Chinese want to eat bird’s nest soup that’s their business. But Tibetans will stick with tsampa.