Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation

by J. Maarten Troost

  But not just a military occupation. The Lhasa train station, the ultimate terminus, is the means by which Tibet will finally become swallowed by China. Lhasa, four Chinese, one Tibetan. Shigatse, two Chinese, one Tibetan, Goba had observed. However, this is just the beginning. The new train to Lhasa, which began running in 2006, will enable hundreds of thousands more Chinese to come up high into the mountains of Tibet in pursuit of work opportunities. Clearly, the government really wanted this train. Indeed, they had spent more than $4 billion completing the project and more than 14,000 rail workers had been sent to the hospital with altitude sickness as they worked to lay the tracks. By the end of its very first year of operation, the Lhasa Express had already carried more than 1.5 million passengers into Tibet. The Chinese government regards this wonder of engineering as their gift to the Tibetans, as the train will bring opportunities, money, development, and economic progress to this poorest corner of China. They refer to themselves as a kindly benefactor generously helping the needy locals. Possibly, they even believe it. But the Tibetans don’t want this train. They just want to be left alone.

  Inside the new train station, it was the familiar bedlam as we boarded. But we have assigned seats! I thought. At least some of us did. I’d learned that hard-seat class operated on a first-come, first-served basis, and as I pondered the crowds battering one another to get on board, I reflected that I too would batter people for a seat on a forty-eight-hour train journey. Fortunately, I had paid a little more than a hundred dollars for soft sleeper class, and as I found my four-person sleeper cabin, it seemed positively deluxe compared to those of the other Chinese trains I’d been on—admittedly a low bar, but still. Each bed had its own flat-screen TV. And there were oxygen-supply units for every passenger, which was thoughtful. And necessary, of course, for those traveling from the other direction, coming from the flatlands below and rolling up to nearly 16,000 feet. Bodies don’t like that. The head doesn’t like it. Nor the heart. Nor the stomach. And thus the oxygen dispensers. It was a very tight fit for four, however, and I lived in hope that I’d have the compartment to myself. Meanwhile, through the window, two Tibetans in fur hats peered into my cabin. I waved. Nothing. Apparently, the glass was reflective. I put my nose to the window. I was an Eskimo kissing a Tibetan. But there was nothing.

  “Nihao.”

  Damn.

  A couple entered. And then another man. We would be full up for this journey across the Tibetan Plateau, a trip that would take us up to the Tanggula Pass, the highest railway pass in the world at nearly 16,000 feet, before finally descending through the arid steppes of Qinghai Province and on into the Sichuan Basin and eventually Chengdu. As we departed Lhasa, a train attendant popped in to explain the usage and mysteries of the oxygen-supply units. Outside, I watched a farmer plow his field with yaks. The sky was a deep blue and there was a full moon. I’m on Mars, I thought for the umpteenth time. But Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” was wafting over the speakers. No, I realized, this was weirder than Mars. I searched for an off button. Surely, we, the four of us inside this small compartment, could agree that Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” was unacceptable music for a journey over the Tibetan Plateau. I finally found the off button and switched it off, raising my eyebrows, expecting to be praised for this quick communal resolution to an irritation.

  The man across from me turned it back on.

  Oh, my friend, I thought. We are going to have issues.

  And so to the sound of “Beat It” we rumbled across Tibet.

  The new railway joined Lhasa with Golmud, a grim mining town in Qinghai Province where China sends many of its exiles and prisoners. From here, the train connects to preexisting lines that link this remote region with the rest of China. Lhasa to Golmud, however, is not a natural place to put down train tracks. There is the rugged terrain, of course. There is the altitude. And then there is the permafrost. Half the track lies on permafrost, which is problematic, since it has a way of melting during the day and freezing again at night, causing land to move, and you don’t want to lay tracks on land with wandering ways. Chinese engineers, however, had found a solution that involved gas and pipes and all sorts of other things that I didn’t remotely understand, all in an effort to keep the permafrost permanently frozen. All I could think as we picked up speed was that I hoped it had worked and that the tracks hadn’t suddenly lurched to someplace they were not meant to go.

  I moved into the hallway and watched this world go by. The water, small ponds and streams, remained frozen under the sun of mid-fall, which boded well for the train tracks today. We passed a nomad’s tent with a motorcycle parked outside, and beyond I saw herds of grazing yaks. Onward we climbed toward the Tanggula Pass, past Nam-Tso Lake and mighty Mount Nyenchen Tanglha. Outside, I saw a fox, the first real wildlife I’d seen in China. Now, if someone would please turn the fucking music off I’d be happy. For better or worse, we’d moved on through the Thriller years and were now being serenaded by the cloying, sentimental sounds of Chinese pop music.

  The compartment next to mine was occupied by policemen. They’re everywhere in Tibet, even on the train. They were smoking, of course, even though smoking was expressly forbidden, not only because smoking can be irritating to others, but because the train was equipped with pure, pressurized oxygen. And do you know what happens when a sufficient amount of oxygen meets an open flame? It blows up. Explodes. Boom. Really, the excitement never ends when traveling in China.

  Just as I could resist the lure of Dan Brown no longer, we stopped at a train station a short distance from Nagqu, a town in the high grasslands of northern Tibet. I stepped outside. The air was crisp and so incredibly clean. We were at 15,000 feet and the sky here, its blueness, was stunning to behold. This was Tibetan Big Sky country. Hundreds of people who had neither the petty authority nor the colossal stupidity of the police, and thus had declined to smoke on the train, stepped out for a cigarette. I waited for the heart attacks.

  It was, in fact, a very common occurrence on the way up. Lowlanders would suddenly find themselves in the thin air, light up a cigarette, and keel over dead. In the extreme altitudes of Tibet, it doesn’t take much to push someone over the edge. A mere smoke can do it. Our stop, however, resulted in no such casualties, and we reboarded and continued on upward through a landscape that was becoming increasingly desolate and lifeless, and as I scanned these vast spaces and the white mountains in the distance, I was left amazed. I did not know Earth could look like this. On a small barren road in the middle of nowhere, truly the middle of nowhere, the ultimate nowhere, I saw a monk on pilgrimage, doing his devotions with each step. I did not know people lived like this either, I thought.

  The train rumbled onward, and I made my way to the dining car for a meal of spicy beef and, inexplicably, Budweiser. As a darkening Tibet rolled by, I finished Angels and Demons. Come on, Dan Brown, I thought. I stayed with you through all that bad prose, through every preposterous turn of the plot, and you end it like this? You lost me with this ending. It’s absurd. Not good absurd, but bad absurd. I was irritated. Fast-paced, plot-driven books depend on the resolution. Everything is in the resolution—all the buildup, all the tension. It works or fails by how it ends. I felt the same way I’d felt when I finished The Da Vinci Code: lightly soiled and snookered. And now I had another thirty-six hours to go and nothing to read. I returned to my compartment, hopped into my berth, and turned to go to sleep. My cabinmates were lying in the darkness, sucking down oxygen. Mere weekenders, I thought. Lowlanders. I’d become a mountain man myself. Well, not quite. But still, I did not need oxygen. I’d been in the high elevations of Tibet long enough to have adjusted to the thin air. I listened to them wheezing, and just as I dozed off, a cell phone jangled. “Wei!” said the Michael Jackson fan.

  All right, I thought. Perhaps he forgot to turn it off. I watched as he had a long conversation. Then he fiddled with his phone contraption. I do not understand modern telecommunications. Once a telephone was simply
a telephone; now it is invariably some sort of entertainment device. In the darkness, I listened as the grating sounds of Chinese pop music began emanating from his phone. Nice, I thought. Very considerate. Prick.

  We are never more culturally primal than at breakfast. Instead of coffee, there was warm bean-curd milk. Instead of a bagel, it was braised cucumber. Instead of a bowl of cereal, there were shredded peppers with peanuts.

  I had awoken to the sun on the shores of Lake Qinghai, the largest freshwater lake in China. What a vast country this was. The altitude monitor indicated that we remained above 9,000 feet, but the landscape was profoundly different from the unearthly sights of the Tibetan Plateau. It was like Vermont with Chinese characteristics: a hilly, wooded expanse with terraced fields and tall, thin poplar trees turning golden orange amid villages of stone farmhouses.

  How idyllic, I thought. This was the land of the epic Chinese films, an old land of heroes and beauty, a place that was both majestic and humble. This was nice. True, a polluted haze had settled in the valleys, but if you ignored it—and you must ignore the blighted air if you are to feel anything but despair for China—this pristine landscape with the picturesque villages was like a pastoral antidote to urban China. I felt happy here, pleased to be traveling through such an alluring scene.

  And then, inside the train, I looked into the bathroom. I was no longer happy. It was simply vile. Clearly, the people on this train car were not well. They were sick. Perhaps it was the altitude. Or possibly the spicy beef. It was the most repellent toilet I’d yet come across in China, and I cannot begin to express what an accomplishment that was. Public squat toilets in China are nasty, and here—on this most high-tech of trains, a train that had been written about in newspapers across the globe—I’d somehow managed to find the worst one yet.

  Right, I thought. I would rather paralyze my bowels than use this toilet. And so that is what I did. I rifled through my bag and found my supply of just-in-case stuff and popped an Imodium. And so my happiness was restored. Medicated and numb, I had escaped from a perilous encounter with the most revolting squat toilet in China.

  Feeling cheerful, I decided to share a peace offering with my nemesis, my traveling companion with the fondness for noise. I gave him an apple, which he gratefully accepted, and by lunch we were the best of friends. True, we didn’t actually talk to each other, but still we were karmic friends. He had pulled out a can of warm Budweiser from his bag, offered it to me, together with some pickled meat he kept. Xie xie.

  As we descended from the Tibetan plateau, China proper began to reassert itself. We continued to roll through rugged, forested hills shrouded in the haze of industrial pollution. We passed through Xining, an odious city, where every house seemed to come with a stack of coal in back.

  I don’t want to go back to this, I thought. Not yet. It had been weeks since I’d last set foot in urban China, and I was in no hurry to return. I liked western China. I wasn’t ready to leave it yet. True, I’d read the stories about the foreigners who are forever disappearing there. But what’s a little banditry? And so, as we rumbled into Lanzhou, a city hundreds of miles from Chengdu, my original destination, I bade farewell to my companions and jumped off the train.

  It’s a good feeling, hoping off a train in a city in the very middle of China. Actually, it’s a good feeling hopping off any train you’ve been riding for thirty-six hours. And, as I breathed a thick whiff of coal, it was a good feeling knowing that I wasn’t going to be spending a moment longer than I absolutely had to in Lanzhou.

  I had decided to head for Dunhuang, a Silk Road outpost deep in the Gobi Desert. The thought of another thirty-six-hour train trip didn’t much appeal to me, and so I resolved to fly. To that end, I had consulted my guidebook, which charmingly describes Lanzhou as “the most polluted city in the world.” But there was a business hotel in town, and I thought I could buy a plane ticket there.

  I picked up my pack and headed toward the taxi line. There were no foreigners here and everyone stared with undisguised curiosity. I put my bag inside the trunk of a taxi, whereupon the driver pulled out a 20-yuan note.

  Bullshit, I thought. The hotel was less than a mile away, not more than a 10-yuan ride, maximum. And then I wondered what, precisely, had happened to me. It’s not often that I take offense at the thought of paying $2.50 for a taxi. But China changes you. Simple commercial transactions are played like a zero-sum game.

  I took my bag and walked away. I sensed that here, in a taxi line in front of the train station in Lanzhou, my presence was regarded in the same light as a hyena might regard the carcass of a lamb. A minibus driver offered to take me. He pulled out two tens. I walked on. A motorcycle driver pulled up. Not even if I were high on crack would I have gotten on a motorcycle in China.

  I walked to the street and hailed a cab with the first honest face I saw. He put the meter on. It started at seven yuan. He made a couple of turns. He’s running the meter, I thought. Instead, he smoothly took me to the hotel entrance. Seven yuan said the meter. I handed him a ten. He gave me back four. Surely, he had miscalculated. I pressed one yuan into his hands. No; he shook his head, and with his hands indicated that the correct fare was 6 yuan.

  I decided I liked Lanzhou.

  But not enough to stay.

  I had chosen this hotel because I needed a few hours to book a flight, get some laundry done, and check e-mail, and a business hotel was the easiest way to accomplish all this. Still, I had become accustomed to guesthouse prices and was wholly unprepared for the budgetary mayhem that followed.

  “How about 395?” I tried.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It’s 495.”

  I swallowed hard. Not since Shanghai had I spent that kind of money, about $60, for a hotel room. But hey, I thought, at least I’d saved a couple of bucks by not giving in to rapacious cabdrivers.

  I got up to my room on the sixteenth floor and admired the view. Yes, Lanzhou is polluted, all right. I couldn’t see beyond the neon Lenovo sign flashing outside my window. The pollution was literally breathtaking.

  I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth with tap water—because I’m reckless that way—had my laundry taken care of, and went down to book a morning flight to Dunhuang.

  “Big plane or small plane?” I asked the travel agent. These are the things that concerned me. She didn’t understand, and so I used charades, imitating the sounds of a jet plane and a whirring prop plane, and succeeded only in frightening her. Who was this sputtering laowai? Nevertheless, I soon had a plane ticket, and with hours to spare before I actually needed to be anywhere, I decided to get a haircut at the hotel barbershop.

  I had become decidedly hirsute in the previous weeks. That’s the thing about beards—they keep growing. Some beards turn out to be Santa Claus beards. Or Tolstoy beards. Friendly beards. Some turn out to be Satan beards. Mine was such a beard. No wonder I frightened the woman at the travel desk, I reflected as I sat down in the barber’s chair. With my beard, I looked like a crazed biker.

  “Just a little off the top,” I said. The barberess didn’t speak a word of English, of course. She proceeded to put multiple layers of cloaks on me. What, I thought, is this going to involve X-rays? Wrapping one towel around my neck, she proceeded to keep it all together with streams of toilet paper. Nevertheless, she did a fine job.

  Next to me, a man was being shaved with a switchblade. The barberess inquired whether I’d like a shave.

  “Just a trim,” I indicated.

  I thought I’d keep the beard. True, it was approaching Grizzly Adams proportions and we didn’t want that. I had a Jeremy Irons kind of beard in mind, the sort of beard that suggested, There goes a bad, bad man—yet he is also curiously intriguing. Like Satan.

  With the first pass of the razor, however, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I stoically absorbed the assault upon my facial hair. When she finished, I regarded myself in the mirror. This was not the face of a bad, bad man. It was more like the face of George Michael. Indeed,
with my fey George Michael beard, I looked like the sort of man who wears lots of cologne, and who lingers in nightclubs wondering where he’s going to get the evening dose of cocaine. Perhaps, I considered, I looked like a terrorist. But no. I just looked preposterous.

  When I left the barbershop, darkness had descended. Not that it mattered, of course. Lanzhou hadn’t seen the sun in years. And then I noticed that the hotel restaurant was offering a Western buffet. I had been in China long enough to know that the words “Western buffet” should be regarded as a threat and one should flee to the nearest market. But I was in an upscale hotel in Lanzhou, and I thought, What the hell, embrace the escapism for an evening. Besides, in my brief glance of the city, Lanzhou struck me as an excellent place to get mugged. And so I entered, and loaded my plate with meat and potatoes, and a serving of frog legs done in the French manner. It was competently done, and incredibly bland. Even the frog legs, which do, in fact, taste like chicken. The flavors of China had fried my taste buds. I picked at my food, feeling clumsy and barbaric using a fork and knife again.

  I looked about and was suddenly startled by the other customers. There was not a foreigner among them. Indeed, most of them were upscale Chinese parents teaching their kids how to use forks and knives and how to eat Western food.

  “Ah, ah,” tutted a father to his young son. “Only use English words.”

  “Do I have to eat this?” the boy pleaded.

  Afterward, I marched up to the business center and sent an e-mail to my wife. Start the boys on Mandarin lessons now. And have them use chopsticks.

  It’s going to be a competitive world they inherit.

  19

  There are few words more evocative than Silk Road. Imagine a world inhabited by Sogdians, Gokturks, Ferghanians, Parthians, Bactrians, Nabataeans, Samanids, and other civilizations now lost to us, a world of traders and conquerors, missionaries and zealots, poets and muses, traversing the vast distances of Eurasia, trading the gold of Rome for the silk of Xi’an. There were hundreds of trails from the Mediterranean to China that would collectively become known as the Silk Road, lonesome paths over treacherous passes and barren deserts upon which civilizations rose and fell. One such path had skirted the vast desolation of the Taklamakan Desert in northern China and made its way to the town of Dunhuang, near the splendid Mogao Caves, where for centuries Buddhist monks had carved and painted scenes of wonder and devotion, a vast tomb of extraordinary artwork that for centuries lay lost and forgotten.