Jasmina Sopova, UNESCO Courier journalist, with contributions from Indian journalist Utpal Borpujari (New Delhi), Thai journalist Wanphen Sresthaputra (Bangkok), Paris-based Japanese journalist Missawa Kano, Chinese journalists Li Xiguang and Huang Yan (Beijing) and French journalist Claudine Meyer (Israel)
The church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. To mark the year 2000, the Palestinian Authority has launched a major construction and renovation programme in the town.
In Shanghai, a young couple watch the Bell of the Century.
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Calendars for all: We are in the year: |
From Osaka
to San Francisco, from Beijing to Moscow and Pretoria, millennium fever seems to
have gripped most—but not all—of the planet
At midnight on December 31, the world will enter the year 2000. For months,
sometimes years, plans have been made to celebrate this special New Year’s Eve, especially
in the Christian world. But what, if anything, does the date mean to non-Christians?
“December 31 may herald a new year, a new century and a new millennium, but for me
it’ll just be a normal day,” says an amused P. Balasubramanian, the chief accountant
of a large firm in the Indian city of Madras.
For a large part of humanity, the arrival of the year 2000 will pass completely unnoticed.
But because globalization means following trends or simply because there is money
to be made, many people have yielded to the temptation to join the festivities.
Marketing
the millennium
In India, advertising
razzmatazz orchestrated by millennium marketeers has reached most of the population,
thanks to satellite television. New Delhi is staging a “Millennium Night Celebration”.
Railway stationmasters will blow their whistles to send trains off on prestigious
trips around the sub-continent. In most of India’s major tourist centres, from Agra,
Khajuraho and Jaipur, all the hotels are booked up. Yet for many Indians, mostly
Hindus, there is really little to get worked up about.
According to the Vikram Samvat, the calendar of the Hindus and Sikhs of northern
and western India, we are already in the year 2055, while the Shaka, the country’s
most widely used Hindu calendar, only clocks up 1920. As Indian Catholics mark the
end of 1999, Buddhists will be enjoying the year 2542 and Muslims the year 1420 of
the Hegira. A hundred years ago, according to another ancient Hindu calendar, the
sixth millennium of the Kaliyuga era began, supposedly the world’s last (see box).
When all’s said and done, only the wealthiest and most westernized Indians really
feel concerned by the millennium celebrations. “It’s a legacy of colonial times and
a product of marketing,” says Bhupinder Singh, a practising Sikh who has retired
from the higher civil service and become a businessman. But he admits he has gone
along with it all. He is promoting Pakistan’s most famous classical singer, Shafqat
Ali Khan, in India with the slogan “The Star of the Millennium”.
Another “star” is the island of Katchall, one of the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of
Bengal, which will be the first place in India to see the sunrise on New Year’s Day
2000. The ministry of culture is cashing in on the event (as well as making up for
India’s lack of infrastructure) by inviting seven luxury ships from all over the
world to anchor off the Nicobar Islands for the big moment.
Other ships are being encouraged to go to Tonga, in the middle of the Pacific near
the international dateline. To attract them, Tongan King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV has
decreed a switch to summer daylight saving time on October 3, thereby gaining 14
hours over Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and making the archipelago the first place on
earth to enter the “third millennium”. This kind of thing has been done in the past.
When Pope Gregory XIII shortened the year 1582 by 10 days as part of his reform of
the Julian calendar, it meant that St Teresa of Avila died during the night of the
4th to the . . . 15th of October.
Weddings
and marathons
The U.S. Marine Observatory
in Thailand has put forward the controversial theory that the sun will rise at 7
a.m. on January 1 above the frontier between Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand and that
this will be “the best place in the world to see in the millennium.” But while the
Thais have a front seat for the big show, they may be giving it a miss. Like Laos,
Cambodia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Thailand is a country where Theravada Buddhism is
practised; it celebrated its third millennium 543 years ago. What’s more, Thailand
marks the new year in mid-April, during Songkran, the water festival.
All the same, some attempts are being made to stir up enthusiasm for the year 2000.
The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) is organizing events with a “new millennium”
tag—millennium weddings for 2,000 couples, a millennium marathon and a big seaside
concert. But in Southeast Asia, which is struggling to recover from a two-year economic
crisis, the “new millennium” is on the whole generating little real interest or extravagant
projects. TAT says there has been a 30 per cent increase in hotel reservations for
December compared with December 1998, but nearly all of them have been by foreigners.
Japan has followed the Western calendar since 1873, as part of the modernization
process it embarked on during the Meiji Era. Until then, the country had used the
lunar-solar Taiintaiyoreki calendar dating from the Nara era (645-794), Japanese
civilization’s golden age. For nearly a century, though, the Japanese, especially
those living in the countryside, went on celebrating the “old” New Year as well as
the new one. And since tradition demands that time is measured again from zero whenever
a new emperor comes to the throne, the Japanese followed three different calendars
at the same time.
These days the Taiintaiyoreki is only observed by a few sentimental folk and New
Year is celebrated on December 31. But though calendars come and go, traditions remain.
And so the Japanese will be marking the New Year as their ancestors did, with ancient
games and decorations, formal clothes and special “lucky” food dishes.
One well-known restaurateur has announced grandly he will make a Tale of Genji meal,
referring to a famous 1,000-year-old classic novel. On the menu will be 35 dishes
for four gourmets. All for a mere $8,000. More accessible will be the wildly popular
television programme Kohaku Uta Gassen, a contest between the year’s best male and
female singers, which most Japanese watch every December 31—especially this year
when the Y2K computer bug will encourage people to stay at home.
To the west of the Land of the Rising Sun, the new Gregorian year will be greeted
with typical panache in China. Beijing city council has gone to great expense, helped
by generous donors in Hong Kong, to build a “Chinese Altar of the Century”. The building
complex, which includes several exhibition halls, has cost some $24 million and mobilized
some 200 architects and art historians. The rotating altar, 47 metres across, has
a huge stage which can accommodate more than a thousand singers and dancers. You
enter it through a 300-metre-long “Tunnel of Time”, decorated inside with bronze
reliefs showing scenes from the country’s 5,000-year history.
But the older generation prefer to wait until February to celebrate the start of
the Year of the Dragon, and remote provinces will mostly ignore the fuss about the
third millennium. Young people however can’t wait for New Year’s Eve, and brush aside
the rebukes of the ardent defenders of the Chinese calendar who publicly oppose this
“biblical” anniversary, as well as the insistence of astronomers, who have taken
the matter seriously and are trying to explain that the new millennium will not in
fact arrive until a year later.
Indeed, in a calendar beginning with the year 1, a new century does not strictly
begin until the year 101, and so on until 2001. The Gregorian calendar in its present
form has only existed for 418 years, and it is really 2,044 years old when seen as
a direct descendant of the Julian calendar. What’s more, Christ was actually born
a few years before the official Christian date of his birth. So perhaps it’s not
surprising that young Confucians, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Christians and atheists
have concluded that the year 2000 just represents a worldwide desire to enter the
new millennium as quickly as possible—celebrating and making money at the same time—and
are keen to take part.
The same enthusiasm can be found in the Jordan valley. On the Israeli side there
is “Nazareth 2000” and on the Palestinian side “Bethlehem 2000”. Luckily the share-out
of the holy places is fair to the two peoples which, despite the small number of
Christians among them, are doing up these sites, which date back to the dawn of Christianity.
In a region with so many celebrations, there are countless welcoming banners. After
celebrations to mark the 3,000th anniversary of Jerusalem and 50 years of Israeli
history have been played down because of the stalled peace process, Israel’s Lod
international airport is building an extension called “Ben Gurion 2000” (after the
country’s first prime minister) to welcome the pilgrims who, between this Christmas
and Easter 2001, will climb the Via Dolorosa which symbolizes the life of Christ.
Will there be six million of them, as the Vatican predicts, or three to four million
as Israel has provided for, or the 2.5 million foreseen by the pessimists, who are
preparing for only a 20 per cent increase in tourist numbers?
Storm
in a wine-glass?
For Bethlehem, the
year 2000 is an economically important one. Experts forecast that the influx of tourists
will boost the income of the Palestinian population by $100 per capita during the
year. The World Bank has asked donor countries to beat the Three Wise Men to it in
Bethlehem, by providing $85 million to do up the town. The private sector has also
come up with funds to build 6,000 extra hotel rooms.
But the millennium has also produced some inappropriate tidings. A world away from
the rosaries, the merchants of the Temple have had the ultimate bad taste to offer
a “Jerusalem 2000” Cabernet wine. Its label shows the Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third
most holy place (after Mecca and Medina) despite the fact that Islam prohibits consumption
of alcohol. A storm in a wine-glass? The matter has been taken up with the Arab League.
In the Arab world, Egypt has decided to be the champion celebrant of the millennium,
and is avoiding any religious overtones. The occasion coincides with the start of
ancient Egypt’s seventh millennium, so the celebrations will naturally take place
at the foot of the Giza pyramids. More than a thousand performers will gather on
a 20,000-square-metre stage and join Jean-Michel Jarre, a French composer who specializes
in mega-events, to present The 12 Dreams of the Sun.
The producers are happy, as the $9.5 million spent on the project will be recovered
from some 50,000 people expected to attend with tickets ranging from $150 to $400
apiece. Such sums are beyond the reach of most young Egyptians, who will be able
to have a “place in the sun” for a more modest amount.
The concert will begin at dusk on the last day of 1999 and continue until dawn on
the first day of 2000. When the first ray of the sun appears in the Egyptian sky,
a nine-metre-high golden pyramid will be placed on the Cheops pyramid to mark the
birth of the “new millennium”.
Happy New Year!