Dancing at the Jokhang Palace

Similar to the Banpo Matriarchal Clan Village, the goal of the park is to situate Han Chinese culture as the normative and rightful center to more exotic and less advanced marginal cultures. The employees are recruited from the various geographic locales represented in order to insure the authenticity of costume and music and dance routine. However, if one looks closely, the same handful of performers circulate among the many stages in the park.

The park uses of the mode of connoisseurship as an intervention into the deeply political and divisive topic of the relationship between Beijing and the Han Chinese and the federation of 56 minority peoples the central government claims to represent. Signs at each site name the minority culture represented, place it geographically, and give the current population. The only other information given are descriptions of the architectural features of the recreated buildings and occasional descriptions of the local diet. History and politics have been erased from this atemporal museum; there are no mentions of the frequent contentious relations between these colorful peoples and the Chinese state. Thus it is no surprise that the first and one of the largest structures in the park is the recreation of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibet. The representation of Tibet is also the most densely populated: "Tibetan monks" nap authentically in the temple and vendors sell Tibetan-themed trinkets in the abbreviated Barkhor market.