Newspaper Goblets and a Cracked Gold Staff: The 1986 Journey to the West Props Go on Display
The original props of the 1986 Journey to the West television series are on display in a Beijing mall: a wooden staff with cracked gold foil, and wine goblets made of old newspapers and exercise books.
Up close, the most famous staff in Chinese television is a letdown, and that is the point of the show. At a "Beijing Gifts" store in the Wanli shopping district of Tongzhou, the original props of the 1986 Journey to the West television series are on display: the staff that played Sun Wukong's gold-banded cudgel, its silver paint gone patchy and the gold foil cracked open at both ends, and the wine goblets the Monkey King drank from on Flower-Fruit Mountain — formed by the props team out of old newspapers and school exercise books. Beijing Daily's reporter came back from a visit with the question viewers keep asking: how did the golden staff end up like this?
The answer is that it never was gold. Money was tight on the 1986 production, and the props were whatever the crew could paint and paste: wood, silver paint, gold foil, newspaper. The objects belonged to Zhen Zhicai, the series' props master; after his death, his family, following his wishes, donated them to the Grand Canal Gifts shop rather than to any buyer. The series they come from defined the Monkey King for generations of Chinese viewers.
The phrase travelling with the exhibition on the trending boards captured the mood: "the props have aged, but the Journey to the West memory won't fade" (道具虽老，西游记忆不会褪色). Part of the pull is the honest materiality of it — the objects that built a mythological universe for an entire generation turn out to be wood, paint and paste, and they are now old enough to be falling apart. The other part is timing: the props are forty years old, and things that were never sturdy have become, by surviving, relics.
The Monkey King's afterlife keeps regenerating around them. The video game Black Myth: Wukong turned the same myth into a global product, and its concert played Taipei for the first time this month; the master of southern China's monkey opera, Xiao Qilingtong, died this month at 84. Against that industrial scale, the exhibition's frail props make the opposite argument: the best-loved Monkey King on Chinese screens was built out of a wooden pole and newspaper, and forty years of audiences never held it against him.