On a brisk day in mid-October, Nobel prizewinner for literature Mo Yan's 62-year-old brother, Guan Moxin, stands outside their childhood home in Ping'an village, Shandong coastal province, posing for photographs with a steady stream of brightly dressed tourists.
He smiles as a teenage girl in a pink sweater puts her hand on his shoulder and flashes a peace sign at the camera.
"Everybody wants to understand what Mo Yan's life used to be like, when we were young," says Guan, leading a small crowd inside the abandoned house to a dusty room where Mo, now 57, was married. A broken antique radio – a wedding gift, Guan says – sits on a crumbling concrete bed, untouched for decades.
Ping'an, population 800, may soon be hard-pressed to maintain its rustic charm. Authorities in Gaomi, the municipality that administers Ping'an, plans to build a £67m "Mo Yan Culture Experience" theme park around the writer's old home, according to the Beijing News.
The plan adds a touch of avarice to the range of reactions with which China has received Mo's Nobel victory.
The author has worked with the Chinese Communist party for decades – many outspoken dissidents were outraged by the award. For many ordinary Chinese, however, the prize was a sign that China's cultural influence may now rival its economic clout. For Gaomi city officials, it could prove to be a goldmine.
Inspired by Mo's 1997 novel Red Sorghum, which Zhang Yimou adapted into an award-winning film, the government also plans to create a Red Sorghum Culture and Experience Zone in Ping'an. Although villagers counter that they stopped growing the cereal in the 1980s, the government is reportedly planning to pay local farmers to plant 1,600 acres (650 hectares) of the unprofitable crop.
The director of the Gaomi press centre, Wang Youzhi, told the official Xinhua news agency that the theme park was more a "vision" than a concrete plan. "Although the idea sounds promising, we have yet to take the whole situation into consideration," he says, adding that "this might be the regulatory commission's long-term plan over five or 10 years."
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