The Paris of the East. Or the West. Or wherever.

You’re reading a travel article about a certain place when there it is—the cliché phrase about how the certain place was so wonderful it has been called the “Paris of the East”.  Or the West.  You’ve seen this comparison many times before, and you’ll see it again.  I would like to ask a favor of us all—can we please stop comparing so many cities to Paris, and stop in general with the other trite, useless nicknames?

Paris gets around, truly a moveable feast.  There are several other too-common nicknames, such as “The Pearl of …wherever”.  The problem is that seemingly every near-major city was once the Paris or the Pearl of wherever it is, as if that phrase was a meritocracy awarded by a panel of judges.  The moniker means nothing, and probably speaks more to delusions of grandeur.  When all are Paris, none are Paris.

Moreover, most of the time it’s in the past tense, as in “The city was once known as the Paris of the East” or “…has been called…”, as if Budapest was the Paris of the East from 1890-1910 and then the nickname moved on to Shanghai.  Moreover, who exactly called it the Paris of the East?  We writers, yes.

It’s not just Paris.  Most cities don’t have nicknames, not ones that people know, and those that do tend to be oversized.  Any other nicknames don’t really stick, much less apply, and are not used except within travel articles, and so can we just stop mentioning these?

I’m not opposed to nicknames.  Sure, just in the United States where I live, New York is the Big Apple and Chicago is the Windy City and New Orleans is the Big Easy and San Francisco I had to google to even remember it’s the City by the Bay.  That may be all.  No, Seattle is not known as Emerald City by anyone and neither is Baltimore known as Charm City by anyone on a daily or even yearly basis.

Plus, if I write a blog post about Baltimore and call it Charm City (indeed, supposedly its nickname), I’ll just confuse everyone.  Any non-Americans ever heard this?  Any Americans know this?  Do Baltimore residents construct sentences such as, “Well, here in Charm City…”?  Yet writers do just that.

A few placename nicknames, sometimes called sobriquets, work just fine, such as Rome being the Eternal City or New York City being Gotham or Las Vegas being Sin City or Japan being the Land of the Rising Sun.  Albania may be the Land of Eagles, sometimes, but that adds nothing to the travel article, unless the Albanians use that all the time and the traveler needs to know that.  Or if actual eagles are involved.

Dropping a legit nickname into a writeup of a city may be harmless enough, but at least let us stop with the comparisons to Paris.  Wikipedia alone, that arbiter of knowledge, has 23 cities listed all claiming the title of “Paris of the East”, including such dubious entries as Warsaw, Saigon, Kabul, and Phnom Penh.  As for “Paris of the West”, just in the United States, Denver, Cincinnati, and even Detroit tried to claim that label.  Better candidates include Buenos Aires, Montreal, and San Francisco.

The many Paris of the South include Buenos Aires again (might as well try both directions—one might even stick), Barcelona, Nice, and even Ashville, North Carolina.

The Paris of the North candidates include Warsaw again (I don’t think it stuck), along with Szczecin, Poland, Riga, Latvia, Tromsø, Norway, Newcastle, England, and Dawson City in Yukon, Canada, a tiny town that swelled to 40,000 back during the gold rush.  Dawson City now has a population of 1,375 as of 2016 and judging by their website, looks little like the City of Light (there I go, dropping a nickname).

Silay, a city on the Philippines island of Negros, is apparently called “the Paris of Negros”.  I’m sure there’s hot competition for that title.  I’ve been to Negros and I quite liked it, but you can’t get a decent croissant there.

Apologies if you’re from Kabul, Afghanistan and you love your city, yet if you google some pictures of Kabul and cast your eyes upon them, as I’ve just done, you will probably not mutter, “Ah!  I am put to mind of the streets of the City of Light and the many pleasures contained therein.”  I’m sure Kabul has its own charms and doesn’t need to be Paris.  It was once terribly popular for the hippie trail overland from Europe to India, so much that Lonely Planet’s early guides worried about it being over-touristy, back in the 1960s.

Moreover, Paris itself isn’t overwhelmingly popular.  I’ve seen many other many other travel bloggers ask their readers to comment about overrated or disappointing destinations, and Paris is always overly represented in the comments.  It’s the city most people mention they dislike.  I have an irrational love affair with the city, which was my first overseas destination when I was 18, yet even I have quibbles with it.

Our problem is that so many mentions about these places repeat the nicknames, usually in the intro paragraph, since it makes the city sound attractive.  Ah Shanghai, China, once known as the Paris of the East, also as the Pearl of the Orient.  It was also known as the Whore of the Orient, but let’s not mention that.

Next time I write about Tokyo I could mention that it’s known as the “Big Mochi” and few people beyond its residents would question me on this nickname I just made up.  Probably because they couldn’t care less; it’s not an important fact, and unless it’s amusing, adds nothing to the article.

Paris may be the gold standard, but if it’s not Paris, the second-place comparison is Venice, such as St. Petersburg, Russia, the “Venice of the East”.  Other contenders for that same title are Hiroshima, Kyoto, Manila, Bangkok, Istanbul, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Suzhou, China.  Any city with a canal, or even some streams of water flowing through it, can be a Venice.

If you’re not in the East, you can contend for Venice of the North, such as Amsterdam, or in England, Birmingham, Manchester, or Leeds.  Just in Poland, Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk, Kalisz, and Wrocław have claimed that non-exclusive title.  Consider also the country of Venezuela, whose name means “Little Venice”.

Rome gets some comparisons, since any hilly city like Lisbon can also claim to be built on seven hills, as Rome is.  Everyone knows you’re not going around the city counting hills to ensure it’s really seven.  Oxford and Athens as well are comparisons, if you claim to have lots of universities or just general philosophy.

“Pearl” is another overly-used term, such as with Shanghai above.  Uganda was called the Pearl of Africa by Winston Churchill in his 1908 book “My African Journey”.  He probably wasn’t the first to label it such, but now everyone including me must repeat that he wrote that.  Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, and Guinea have all been the Pearl of West Africa.

Manila, Phnom Penh, Goa, Penang, Saigon, Sri Lanka, and Hong Kong are all the Pearl of the Orient.  I would think a region should only have one pearl, as it’s not like a necklace, so often the place chooses a smaller region of which to be the pearl.  Haiti was the Pearl of the Antilles, Odessa is the Pearl of the Black Sea, Damascus is the Pearl of the East (east of what?), Dubrovnik the Pearl of the Adriatic, Budapest the Pearl of the Danube, and I could go on but you got the point a while ago.

One of the reasons for the duplication is that city comparison nicknames are usually limited to Paris and Venice, unless there’s a very direct correlation, such as Macau being the Vegas of Asia for gambling, or Nagoya the Detroit of Japan, for car factories.

Just this month, as I write this, Conde Nast Traveler magazine described a part of Kyushu, Japan as the “Naples of Japan” because the nearby mountain apparently looks like Mount Vesuvius, just like so many other volcanic mountains do.  I don’t know if you can get a good pizza there, or if there’s any other similarities, or if the residents like the comparison.  In the same article, they called Atlanta the “Hollywood of the South” and let you know that Chattanooga, Tennessee is supposedly called “The Scenic City”, because dammit they just can’t help themselves.

Buffalo, New York could be the Liverpool of America, Toronto is of course both the Frankfurt of the West and the Pearl of the Great Lakes and no, those things just don’t work.  Just default to being Paris.

How does this happen?

Let’s take “Oman, the Pearl of Arabia”.  That’s truly the title of an article at this link, describing taking a clearly sponsored journey there, through the National Council on U.S.-Arab relationships, not quite a neutral site.  The article was then filtered through the Saudi Gazette here.  A few other articles, about ten that I could find, mention this pearl thing.  No references older than 2015.  Clearly, I’m crying bullshit.

This other article starts with, “Oman undeniably deserves its reputation for being ‘pearl of Arabia’”, but it’s quite clear that there is no reputation if the first mention of it is from only six years ago, as I write this (2021).  Moreover, it has competition, at least a dozen (but not really any more) references to Bahrain as the pearl of Arabia, also none more than five years old.

This matters, because writers, even bloggers like me, talk about it and always drop something like “Oman has been called The Pearl of Arabia” into our text.  But there’s no context; we’re just quoting each other, and contributing to the happy-talk type of prose that is far too common in travel writing, when everything about the destination is wonderful, even grandiose.  Travel writers tend to gush.  The place is probably also the “perfect get-away” and “a hidden gem” with a rich heritage that time forgot that has something for everyone.  No wonder it’s a pearl.

I make a point on my blog to write some articles now and then where I don’t love the place, because that’s valuable to a reader as well.  Some popular cities aren’t all that much, such as what I wrote about Prague or Ljubljana or Reykjavik.  Your milage may vary, but when I’m traveling to a new place, I also seek out articles where the writer didn’t love the place, where it’s no pearl, because I want to know why.

I want to ask: it’s been called “the Pearl” by…whom?   Besides travel writers.  If I say I’m off to the Pearl of Arabia, everyone’s reaction would be, “Oh!  And where exactly is that?”   Even if I say “I’m off to Oman, the Pearl of Arabia,” others would not beam to express their admiration then talk of how they’ve heard so much about Oman living up to that storied moniker.  If I say I’m off to Oman, no one would say, “Ah, the Pearl of Arabia!  You lucky chicken, you.”  If you hear it’s been called the pearl, are you impressed?  I doubt many residents of Oman know this nickname.

So What?

Beirut is a good example.  If we’re trying to convey that the city was or is really something, we need more evidence than just the Paris nickname.  The Onion, that satirical news website, wrote in their book “Our Dumb World” about Beirut, “Commonly called ‘The Paris of the Middle East’ by those who have visited neither…”  They renamed it “The Paris is Burning of the Middle East”.

Beirut, Lebanon is a city that has suffered much.  Read anything about the city and you’ll find people talking about how wonderful the place was, you know, before all the war.  Beirut was Paris of the Middle East due to, I don’t know, its many charms and the French influence there, whatever.  But for some, being called Paris reduces this culturally-rich city down to a Western perspective.  Beirut is so good it could be (the assumingly-superior) Paris, and thus not be what some might think, an incomprehensible Middle Eastern city, and thus something strange.  If you audience is Western, comparing the place to Paris sounds good to them. 

No one ever says Paris is so good it could be Beirut.  The comparisons carry an assumption that Paris, or whatever city of comparison, is better.  If city X is the Y of someplace, then Y is better.

The Paris nickname, at least here but in other cases as well, can thus have shades of a colonial reference, whether the actual French were involved or not, especially since, as I noted, so many nicknames are in the past.  Beirut was something, the Paris reference tells us, back during the Western influence or ruling period.  Shanghai was something, back in the 1920s with those concessions.  Hanoi as well, back when the French ruled it.  It’s been called that…by the Westerners.

An article entitled “Can Beirut Be Paris Again?” wonders about the future of Beirut by tying it to its (assumingly better) colonial past.  To be fair, it discusses many aspects of the place, and concludes with “Beirut, whether it’s the Paris of the Middle East or not, might once again become a great city.”  Indeed.  You don’t have to be Paris.  You’re not Paris anyway, and that’s quite fine. So writers, next time you’re covering some city, hesitate to mention the city’s nickname unless there’s a reason, such as that people use it, in the present.  If the nickname involves Paris, Pearls, or the Crown in the Jewel of someplace, my pity rejoinder shall be “Almost every city have been called that”.