by Paul Theroux
Around midnight, the train drew in. There was a commotion outside as the hotel touts and agents jostled for attention. I went to the sleeping car. Mr. Fang vanished. I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy. My own gooseneck lamp, plastic flowers, thermos, pillow, quilt and comforter. There was a tablecloth on the little side table, and a five-foot crocheted antimacassar on the seat back.
The only disquieting part of it was the music. I couldn't twist the knob with my rubber-band trick, so I took out my Swiss army knife and unscrewed the loudspeaker from the ceiling, disconnected it, replaced the plate and was able to read in silence. I was reading Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" because a Chinese woman had said that the story revealed the Chinese national character. So far it was about Ah Q's pompousness, foolishness, pretense and cowardice—and he had the farcical misapprehension of Mr. Pooter. Was that the point? *
I read on, soothed by the ponderous motion of the train and the melancholy cry of the steam whistle.
There had been a bucket of dead eels next to the hopper in the toilet cubicle. I had glimpsed the creatures in the middle of the night. That was memorable—and a good thing, too, because the next morning I went to the dining car and asked what was on the menu, and the chef said, "Eels!"
He said the train was operated by the Qingdao Railway Board and had just come from the coast. It made a great loop through China, bringing with it Shandong specialties—seafood, jelly candy and China's best beer.
We were still in Gansu, going southeast towards Shaanxi Province (not to be confused with Shanxi, a bit northeast), and we had just left the town of Tianshui. The landscape was unlike anything I had seen in Xinjiang or even the rest of Gansu. It was the carefully constructed Chinese landscape of mud mountains sculpted in terraces which held overgrown lawns of ripe rice. The only flat fields were far below, at the very bottom of the valleys. The rest had been made by the people, a whole countryside that had been put together by hand—stone walls shoring up the terraces on hillsides, paths and steps cut everywhere, sluices, drains and carved-out furrows. There was even more wheat than rice here, and bundles of it were piled, waiting to be collected and threshed—probably by that black beast up to his nose in the buffalo wallow.
The whole landscape had been possessed and shaped and put to practical use. It was not pretty, but it was symmetrical. You couldn't say "Look at that hillside," because it was all terraces—mud-walled ditches and fields, and mud-walled houses and roads. What the Chinese managed in miniature with a peach stone, carving it into an intricate design, they had done with these honey-colored mountains. If there was an outcrop of rock, they balanced a rice paddy on it, and the steps and terraces down the steep hills gave them the look of Mayan pyramids. There had not been much of that in the west of China. It was huge, the sort of complicated mud kingdom that insects created, and it was both impressive and appalling that everything visible in this landscape was man-made. Of course you could say that about any city in the world, but this wasn't a city—it was supposed to be the range of hills above the river Wei; and it looked as though it had been made by hand.
The river itself was muddy, flat, shallow, full of sandbanks this time of year.
"There are no fish in the Wei," a man told me at Baoji, the railway junction where we stopped at noon. And then he loudly cleared his throat and spat a gob on the platform and in a reflex of politeness scuffed it with his shoe.
Everyone hawked, everyone spat, sometimes dribbling, sometimes in a trajectory that ran like candlewax down the side of a spittoon. They tended to spit in wastebaskets or against tree trunks; but not even a government campaign restrained some from spitting on floors, and I saw people spit on carpets, always remembering politely to grind it in with the sole of their foot.
I noticed on the platform at Baoji how they walked scuffingly, sort of skating, with their arms flapping, with narrow jogging shoulders, or else hustling puppetlike, with their limbs jerking. They minced, they plodded, they pushed, keeping their hands out—straight-arming their way—and their heads down. They could look entirely graceless—unexpected in Chinese.
And they talked very loudly in that deaf, nagging and interrupting way, as if no one ever listened to them and they had to shout to be heard. The radios and televisions were always turned too loud, too, the volume at maximum. Why? Was there a national deafness, or was it just a rather unfortunate habit?
The Chinese left doors open—that was a national habit. And they liked sitting in their underwear on the train. They were naturals for relaxation, and could turn even the shortest journey into a pajama party. They were very tidy in the way they dressed and packed their bags, but they were energetic litterers, and they were hellish in toilets. It was strange seeing a neatly dressed mob leaving a railway car that they had befouled.
They spat, they shouted, they stared and undressed in public; and yet with all this they seldom quarreled. They were extremely shy—timid even—modest and naive. "Modesty helps one to go forward," Mao said, "whereas conceit makes one lag behind." On trains they often looked contemplative.
We were now through the Wei Gorges, and after Baoji the land opened up and became flatter. It was spread with wheat fields in which people were scything and bundling and carting away the stalks. It had grown very hot and hazy, and though it was humid, too, this midafternoon the fields were full of people, because of the harvest. They stood chest-high in the wheat, and they disappeared when they bent over with their sickles.
The villages here were tumbledown, but even the poorest houses had tall TV antennas. In some countrified places there was that other Chinese conundrum, of ugly tenements and barracklike buildings in a pastoral setting. We stopped at Xianyang, where China's first emperor had 460 of his critics buried alive, and then we crossed the Wei again—two shallow here for even the smallest boat—and through more wheat fields to the city of Xian.*
The first sign of the city proper is the high wall around it, like a medieval fortification, built in the Ming Dynasty, fourteenth century, and recently restored. It has crenellations and sentry posts and towers with windows designed (like those on the Great Wall) for the width of crossbows. And like the Great Wall, it was built as much to keep some people in as to keep others out. The Xian city wall was high and bulky, and the train passed the North Gate, which looked like a temple, with red beams and a large arched roof. Near it was a big banner with two-foot characters, saying, Be Disciplined and Obey the Law.
Xian Station was new, the streets were broad, the city was well organized; it was as though it had been designed to be visited. As the capital of the brilliant but brief Qin empire and the starting point of the Silk Road, Xian had always been regarded as a visitable city. Even 8000 years ago, people lived here in reasonable comfort—the proof was at the excavated neolithic site at Banpo, nearby. Xian's most glorious associations are with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the man who unified China, burned the books; built the Great Wall; standardized the laws, currency, roads, weights, measures, axle lengths and written language; and ordered the now famous terra-cotta warriors to be made. That was well over 2000 yeats ago, and the warriors weren't uncovered again until twelve years ago.
"When I was young, no tourists came to Xian," Mr. Xia told me, as we walked around town. He was thirty-two years old, a local guide, one of the many I hired en route. "There were some visitors and foreign experts from East European countries. But we never saw Americans."
"When did they start coming?"
"Obviously, after the terra-cotta army was found. Then, people were very interested. More and more things were unearthed. In 1980 some diggers found the bronze horse and chariot. People wanted to see these things."
That was wonderful for the Chinese. They probably realized that the value of a tourist lies in his attention span. Sight-seeing is perfect for a dictatorship
—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The nonsightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency and has to be deported. Also, typically, the nonsightseer is not a big spender and, in his or her unregulated way, is quite a dangerous person to have around.
I hated sight-seeing in China. I felt the Chinese hid behind their rebuilt ruins so that no one could look closely at their lives. And the rebuilding was poor—usually botched and too sloppily painted. The places were always impossibly crowded and noisy. The Chinese were so desperate in their courtships that they went on tourist outings in order to hide and canoodle. Every holy mountain and famous pagoda had more than its share of motionless couples hugging and (sometimes) smooching. It was no good saying a particular place was hideous or pointless. It was the ritual of visiting—the outing—that mattered.
Xian was one of the few exceptions I found. It was genuinely interesting and pretty, and rather a stately and dignified place—different in that respect from most other Chinese cities, which were sooty and badly made and industrial. But Xian knows it is important. Hotels were being put up quickly to accommodate tourists, and in what had been for hundreds of years a very provincial city, off the beaten track, people seemed aware of the city's new celebrity as a tourist attraction.
The stall holders of Xian's market are relentless in their hectoring. They plead, they beg, they bargain. They hawk cast figures of the warriors, and mats, and puppets cut out of cowhide, and horrible little coasters, and they push them in your face and shriek, "Ming Dynasty!"
Tourists and the free market economy arrived at about the same time, which meant that the first tourists found rapacious individuals waving handicrafts and haggling.
A small proportion of the merchandise is not junk. It is stuff from attics and old chests—the family jewels, knickknacks that have been around for years, filthy little incense burners, cracked jade seals, tobacco boxes made out of hammered silver, rags of silk, very old and beautiful clothes made of silk and embroidery, and bonnets, jade wine cups, old brass padlocks, wooden images of gods and goddesses, silver fingernails, elaborate hairpins, perfume jars, snuff containers, pewter jars, pretty teapots, chipped dishes and plates, ivory chopsticks and mortally wounded vases.
Entirely off their own bat the Chinese turned the free market into a flea market. The trinkets and treasures have come out of the woodwork, and the stall holders or improvisational market people have become pestering hagglers for the first time in the People's Republic.
A thought that occurred to me back in Xinjiang was that the Uighurs were reverting to what they had always been—travelers, nomads, bargainers, inflexible Muslims and "shansh marnie" people. So it was elsewhere, too. Scholars who had had to pretend to be political parrots for the sake of Mao were re-forming themselves into that old distinguished class of scholar gentry; gamblers and drinkers were reemerging, and so were family farmers, and tinkers and pot wallopers, and small businessmen; and these folks living at the margins of the big cities—the market traders. Especially them.
What choice had they? Politics was closed to them. They couldn't emigrate. They couldn't criticize the government. The Communist Party was like a Masonic order, just as mysterious a brotherhood, possibly sinister, and just about unjoinable—you had to be chosen, and the most supine and robotlike yes-men were the likeliest candidates.
In such circumstances, who wouldn't dig out the family silver and flog it to tourists?
"This is old—very old!" they squawked. "Early Qing Dynasty! Ming Dynasty! Fifty kuai! How much you pay? Make me an offer!"
That fascinated me. No fixed prices, no fixed location, no overheads. Just a wild-eyed person clutching my arm and pushing a string of old beads at me.
What made the whole enterprise even more interesting was that the stuff ranged from certifiable treasures to outright fakes. I went to Mount Li to look at the man-made hill which is probably the tomb of the first emperor—and it is probably just as likely that the tomb was looted in 206 B.C., the year his dynasty ended.
A man lurking in the market near that hill hissed at me and pointed to a bulge in his shirt, indicating that he had something wonderful inside.
"You want to sell me something?" I said.
He shushed me, making a worried face. And with great caution he showed me what he had. It was a brass jar, with a lid, about five inches high, with markings on it.
"Two hundred yuan," he said.
I laughed at him, but he persisted. "Look," he said. "The sides. The top. Look closely."
There were erotic carvings on it, five sexual positions, tiny inscriptions, and bits of flummery and decoration. Also, I could see that it was old—not ancient, but old. Qing. Nineteenth century. Maybe a little earlier than 1850. Dao Guang period, according to my book.
"I'll give you fifty."
He laughed at me, harder than I had laughed at him.
"What is it?"
"For special medicine," he said, and leered.
He meant aphrodisiacs—what else would you put in such a thing?
He dropped his price to 150 and then to 100. Then I showed him 80 yuan in foreign exchange certificates, and our illegal bargain was sealed. It was not a treasure, but it was unusual, and it was a damned sight more interesting than the dusty hill on the tourist itinerary.
The fakes were not difficult to spot, but the whole idea of people knowingly selling fakes said a great deal for this new burst of Chinese enterprise. Sometimes they were little stone statues, often they were clumsy bronze copies, but the majority of the bogus merchandise was in the form of marble or limestone heads or carvings that had been made to look as though they had been hacked off a temple wall. "Very old," the traders said. "Song! Ming! Qing!"They quoted high prices and dropped them. Fifty other people were selling identical stuff, but that did not stop anyone from claiming the items were ancient, when, as was very obvious, they had all been made in a factory that specialized in fakes.
A very large market, selling all these things—fakes, treasures and flea-market knickknacks—had just been specially built and recently opened adjacent to the site of the terra-cotta army. It is the government's way of admitting that such free-lance traders are here to stay. Some stalls have roofs, and are rented for a small fee; but the rest of the market is in the open air, set up on tables and benches.
"When the foreigners come, business is very good," a man told me, after selling me a pretty perfume bottle for about a dollar. "But the Chinese people don't buy these things. They don't like antiques."
They are proud of the terra-cotta warriors, though.*
When I was there, thousands of visitors were looking at the figures, and very few of these people were from overseas. The majority were Chinese tourists who had come great distances in rickety buses that had been hired by their factory or cooperative or work unit. They were poorly dressed and perspiring in the summer heat, they hurried to and fro in little trotting groups; they grinned for pictures, striking poses in front of the hangarlike building that houses the warriors. They were photographed by foreign tourists, and some of them returned the compliment—or insult—and took pictures of the foreigners.
The terra-cotta warriors (which cannot be photographed) were not a disappointment to me. They are too bizarre for that. They are stiff, upright, life-sized men and horses, marching forward in their armor through an area as big as a football field—hundreds of them, and each one has his own face and his own hairstyle. It is said that each clay figure had a counterpart in the emperor's real army, which was scattered throughout the Qin empire. Another theory is that the individual portraiture was meant to emphasize the unity of China by exhibiting "all the physical features of the inhabitants of mainland east Asia." Whatever the reason, each head is unique, and a name is stamped on the back of every neck—perhaps the name of the soldier, perhaps that of the potter-sculptor.
It is this lifelike quality of the figures—and the enormous number of them—that makes the place wonderful, and even a little disturbing. As you watch, the figures seem to move forward. It is very hard to suggest the human form in armor, and yet even with these padded leggings and boots and heavy sleeves, the figures look agile and lithe, and the kneeling archers and crossbowmen look alert and fully human.
This buried army was very much a private thrill for the tyrant who decreed that it be created to guard his tomb. But the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was given to grand gestures. Until his time, China was fragmented into the Warring States, and bits of the Wall had been put up. As Prince Cheng, he took over from his father in 246 b.c. He was thirteen years old. Before he was forty he had subdued the whole of China. He called himself emperor. He introduced an entirely new set of standards, put one of his generals—and many of his convicts and peasants—to work building the Great Wall, abolished serfs (meaning that for the first time, the Chinese could give themselves surnames), and burned every book that did not directly praise his achievements—it was his way of making sure that history began with him. His grandiose schemes alienated his subjects and emptied his treasury. Three attempts were made to kill him. Eventually he died on a journey to east China, and to disguise his death, his ministers covered his stinking corpse with rotten fish and carted him back to be buried here. The second emperor was murdered, and so was his successor, in what the Chinese call 'The first peasant insurrection in Chinese history."
The odd thing is not how much this ancient ruler accomplished, but that he managed it in so short a time. And in an even shorter time, the achievements of his dynasty were eclipsed by chaos. Two thousand years later China's rulers had remarkably similar aims—conquest, unity and uniformity.
