Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation
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Flying in, I could see how this could happen, this losing of one of the great repositories of ancient art. The Mogao Caves lie at the very edge of the Taklamakan Desert, an enormous, expanding emptiness fringed by the soaring Kunlun Mountains. This desert is one of the world’s largest sand deserts. And, of course, it can get a little dusty here as wind stirs the fine grains. Indeed, as I walked across the tarmac at the airport, I listened to the jet engines wheezing and sputtering from all the sand. I watched the mechanics on their bicycles, pedaling toward the plane to investigate this strange grinding and whirring of the engines, and I thought of Buddhism, its Zen variation, and once again noted that I should look into it, because I was not at all calm flying in China and I really needed to do something about it.
Fortunately, Dunhuang is a calm place. I checked into a hotel and walked outside in the late-afternoon light to have a gander. The architecture was utterly unremarkable, but there was a pleasant small-town vibe, a congenial unhurriedness. It was the first place I’d seen in China where drivers didn’t sit on their horns. No one troubled me here. It was, dare I say it, laid-back. And nothing is laid-back in China. Dunhuang is also very mixed in its population. This is where China abuts into Central Asia. Though predominantly Han Chinese, there were also Uyghurs in Dunhuang, Muslims wearing their distinctive white hats. I made my way through a street that was setting up for the night market, past stalls selling books, ornaments, a little bit of everything, and settled at a table in front of a restaurant. Across the way there was a hairdresser’s shop with heavily made-up hairdressers idling at the door, waving and beckoning me toward them as they stood and flitted in their tight-fitting, clingy clothes. Messagee! Even here? I wondered. In Dunhuang? This town, this little eensie-weenie teeny town on the edge of the desert? Jesus, I thought. It’s startling the degree to which prostitution exists in China.
Before me, a friendly Muslim waiter set down a bowl of noodles with meat. I had pointed to it moments earlier and he’d cooked it up in a hotpot. It was good, a little gamey perhaps, and I opened up my guidebook since I didn’t have anything else to read, and soon learned that the local specialty in Dunhuang is luruo huang mian, or donkey meat with noodles. Super, I thought. I’m eating an ass. That’s all right, I reflected. For years, I’d been eating horse meat, a fact discerned only much, much later when Sylvia had accompanied me on a trip to Holland and, at my uncle and aunt’s home in Brummen in rural Gelderland, she’d inquired what precisely was that curious-looking cold cut I’d just used to make a sandwich. Horse, she’d been told, whereupon I coughed and hacked and choked on my sandwich as my uncle explained that for dinner that evening we’d be having the hare he’d run over the previous day. They’re good salt-of-the-earth people, my family in Holland, and I will not hear another word about how boring Dutch cuisine is. Indeed, it prepared me for China. If I could eat roadkill in Holland, I could certainly eat an ass here.
The Mogao Caves lie somewhere in the Hexi Corridor, once the only path between China and the West. Not far away is the Gilian Shan range, a solid wall of mountains that shoot out of the desert. Beginning in the fourth century and spanning more than a thousand years, worshipers of Buddhism filled the 492 grottoes of Mogao with art and thousands of ancient manuscripts. Once trade along the Silk Road collapsed along with the Yuan Dynasty, however, the grottos and caves lay forgotten until the early twentieth century, when Europeans began to hear rumors of their existence and they hopped over to explore and plunder, because that is what they did.
The Mogao Caves are not far from Dunhuang, and I hailed a taxi with a driver babbling on his cell phone as he drove me to a corner on the outskirts of town, where another taxi idled along the curb. The driver indicated that I should depart his taxi and hop in that one. Perplexed, I did as he asked, whereupon the pockmarked driver began to yell into his cell phone. They are not silent people, the Chinese, and I paid no mind as we passed the last cotton fields and followed the paved road through a barren desert of sand and stones.
Suddenly, the driver veered off the paved road to follow a deeply rutted gully. And why are we doing this? I wondered. Not for the first time, I wished I spoke Chinese. What’s he saying on that cell phone?
I have the foreigner. Now give me my money.
I was beginning to grow concerned, because earlier I had seen the turn-off to the Mogao Caves. And this wasn’t it. We went farther into the desert. We passed a dead dog rotting in the sun. The driver continued to yell into his phone.
I’m nearly there. Bring the gun.
A surprising number of Westerners do get themselves killed in China, victims of banditry. I was beginning to worry here. This path could do some severe damage to a car. What would the motive be for subjecting one’s car to such risks? It could only be something nefarious.
Suddenly, the driver veered back toward the paved road, and as we returned to it I felt true relief. What was that about? I wondered. I looked behind us. Of course. It was perfectly clear. We had taken a detour around the tollbooth.
I was let off before the entrance to the Mogao Caves, and the driver indicated that he was amenable to waiting for me until I’d finished. I explained, in that curious way one does when you can’t speak the local language, that I might be a while. He shrugged and indicated that he didn’t have anything better to do. It’s a desert. Not a lot of passengers here. And he had a laowai here who thought he was very cunning with his bargaining, but really, it’s like taking candy from a child. So he’d stay.
I paid the entrance fee and was pleased to find an English-speaking guide, who led me on a path through a small canyon. In its walls, hundreds of caves had been carved. They are known as the Thousand Buddha Caves, and inside the grottoes monks had painted vast murals and carved hundreds of stucco sculptures to encourage meditation and enlightenment. Many of the frescoes had been financed by Silk Road merchants. The Mogao Caves lie at the very edge of the Silk Road’s most daunting challenge—the desert crossing—and travelers either expressed their gratitude for completing the journey or their hopes for making it across by paying for lavish testimonies to their devotion. For the sake of preservation, all the caves are now sealed and only a few are opened each day for visitors.
“This secret library cave,” informed my guide, a young woman not entirely in command of the English language.
“There were thousands very holy manuscripts. English people steal them.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. In 1900, they trick monk and steal manuscripts. And you see those Buddhas without faces? Muslim people deface the Buddhas in 1920.”
There were more scratched-out faces in other caves. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?” I said. “Why can’t we all just get along? Muslims and Buddhists, Christians and Jews. Live and let live, don’t you think?”
“I know not what you say,” she said perfunctorily. I got the feeling that she’d memorized a script and any deviation from it would prove troubling to her. Frankly, I understood little of what she said and just nodded thoughtfully as she explained the story behind the immense hundred-foot-tall Buddha in the largest cave in a language known only to herself. We passed an open grotto with a sign that declared that under no circumstances should one think of entering, so I entered to find men with brushes working on a faded mural of a divine bodhisattva. Was this restoration or re-creation? It can be so hard to tell in China, and I wanted to explore this point with my guide, who had yanked me back, but her answers were insensible to my ears. But here and there, as I followed her from cave to cave, I’d pick something up though the incomprehensible din.
“In 1924, Americans take the statue. Now at Hoffhod University.”
“I’m sorry. Where?”
“Hoffhod University.”
“Ah. Harvard University.”
“Yes. Hoffhod.”
I was completely sympathetic to the difficulties many Chinese have with that pesky r, as I could not fathom getting my mouth around the vast majority of Chinese sounds.
She did have a point. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western archaeologists had plundered the world, filling up the museums and libraries of Europe and America with international treasures. But, of course, China had had its own little Cultural Revolution—Destroy Old Culture!—so much of China’s cultural legacy had been sadly destroyed by the Chinese themselves.
“Cultural Revolution finished now,” my guide noted when I made the point.
Very true.
One of the appealing things about being in a small town like Dunhuang is that one can entertain the possibility of riding a bicycle without succumbing to mortal fear. After all this time in China, I had yet to avail myself of the preferred mode of local transport. Now seemed like a good time to do so.
“How about this one?” I asked at a café that offered bicycle rentals.
“No brakes.”
“And this one?”
“Broken.”
“So this one, then.”
“Is good.”
It was a bicycle meant for nine-year-old girls. Midget nine-year-old girls, I thought as I pedaled my way out of Dunhuang. And it’s hard pedaling a bicycle for nine-year-old girls when you’re not one. Without being able to extend my legs so that the thigh muscles could do the work, it was left to the kneecaps to do the pedaling. I rode like an oversized clown on a tricycle, grunting savagely as I made my way up a slight incline. Teenage boys overtook me on their big bicycles, laughing and jeering from their perches high above, and as they passed I hoped that one day soon they’d find themselves overcome by a debilitating bout of acne.
I was heading a few miles out of town toward the giant sand dunes that surrounded Crescent Moon Lake, which wasn’t really a lake but a small pond with a pagoda, a classic oasis in the desert. The sand was alleged to sing atop these dunes, which stretched for miles into a barren wilderness. When I finally arrived, I uncoiled my legs and briefly contemplated stealing someone else’s bike before hobbling though a gate, where I discovered to my delight that I was in the midst of a thousand camels, idling in the sun, waiting to ferry passengers up the golden Mountains of Shifting Sands, or Mingsha Shan. This thrilled me, because really, is there any better way to climb a sand dune than on the back of a camel—a creature so large yet so silly-looking, with its strange contours and perpetual countenance of dopey confusion, an expression I empathized with completely here in China. No, there is not, I concluded as I settled myself between two humps and with bewildered glee experienced the swift, staggered, doddering thrust of a camel rising. True, this was essentially the local equivalent of a pony ride, and I was led by a camel walker who guided the camels up the narrow, ever-shifting trail of sand. Lawrence of Arabia I was not. But it’s a graceless ride that can only be embraced. So trust me here. If you’re putting together a To Do list, include Ride a camel up a sand dune.
But hold on. Camels do not lightly set off their passengers. They collapse. First the front legs go, and just as you think you’re about to hurtle front over end, the back legs go. It’s a startling sensation. The camel doesn’t so much sit down as fall down, and it’s an interesting feeling—crumbling to the ground together with a 500-pound animal—and you feel lucky to have survived the experience. Still, we hadn’t quite summited this mount of sand. There was farther to go, and I clambered up a steep wall of shifting grains.
At the top, it was alleged that this was where one could hear the sand sing. I did not hear the sand sing. I heard only the whoosh and demented cackling of someone hurtling down the sand on an inner tube. But it was not the only option for getting oneself down the other side; there was also something alleged to be sand surfing. Boys had carried the lids of wooden crates up to the peak, and the sand surfers were meant to sit on these lids of wooden crates and gently push themselves down the slope, which, frankly, looked like a really lame way to get down a sand dune. No, I thought. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. So I went with the inner tube.
I settled myself inside the tube and gazed at the wonder of the scenery, the desert, the mountains in the distance. I considered going farther west into the emptiness, through Xinjiang, all the way to Kashgar, where China meets Pakistan. But what would I learn about China, Han China, that I had not learned in Tibet? There were Uyghurs out there, the poor Uyghurs, China’s Turkic minority. Like the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, too, would prefer not to be a part of the People’s Republic of China. And so the government represses them with the same grim methods they use in Tibet. And while I had a pang of regret at missing the fabled market bazaar of Kashgar, it was time to turn my attention back to the east.
So I would go back to Han China. And as I pushed myself down and began the fast, oh so fast, descent down the swirling sands, I had one last thought in western China, a region I’d really come to enjoy. Perhaps, I thought as I hurtled perilously toward a herd of lumbering camels, I should have gone with the sand surfing after all.
20
I had come to Chengdu to see the pandas. I’m not sure why, exactly, I felt the need to see the pandas. I do not feel warm and fuzzy inside when in the presence of pandas. There are far more charismatic mega-fauna out there. But still, I was drawn to see them, if only because I’d been wondering whether the Chinese may have regretted giving two Giant Pandas to Richard Nixon in 1972, when he became the first president to visit the People’s Republic of China. Since then, as any visit to a zoo that contains pandas will confirm, the public has responded with one long collective aaaawwww, assigning to them all sorts of anthropomorphic attributes. The pressure to ensure that Giant Pandas do not become extinct must be immense. And that’s the last thing the Chinese government needs. More pressure.
But, as always in China, a visit to the Panda Breeding and Research Center was nothing if not interesting. I had expected to find it outside Chengdu, another urban megalopolis, somewhere in rural Sichuan Province. And once, that is where it was. But today, the lush grounds of the Panda Breeding and Research Center have been swallowed by Chengdu itself, and its bamboo-lined paths and frolicking inhabitants are now found in a light industrial zone on the outskirts of town. Inside its walls, there are, of course, Giant Pandas, dozing and munching on bamboo, and generally behaving like extremely contented animals. More interesting were the plaques and statues strewn throughout the grounds with quotes and testimonies attesting to the importance and value of the animal kingdom and that it is our responsibility as guardians of the planet to ensure their well-being. So said Gandhi and others. It’s a lovely thought, of course, and as I recalled the peddlers of endangered animals in Guangzhou, I suspected that the sentiment wasn’t universally shared in China.
There were other interesting sights inside the Panda Breeding and Research Center, including a baby panda nursery. For the panda lovers, this would be their nirvana moment, a large crib filled with a half-dozen baby pandas tottering about, ready for their calendar shoot. There were five little pandas, including two sets of twins, overseen by a man in doctor garb, complete with mask and paper hat, looking bored senseless as he sat next to a bucket full of soiled baby wipes. I began to wonder at the statistical likelihood of there being two sets of twins, born just days apart, in the Panda Breeding and Research Center. And then, as I read through the signs that outlined the panda breeding process, I was informed that China practices the West Virginia model of panda breeding. This wasn’t merely a kissing cousin situation. No, conjugal relations here were conducted in true hillbilly fashion. It makes them happy, the sign informed me. And if brothers and sisters fall in love, who are we to stop it? We want happy pandas. It’s no wonder, then, that the first panda to be bred in the Panda Research and Breeding Center and released into the wild did not live long. It was a genetic mutant. This all made me think of the movie Deliverance, and I set off in search of a panda lounging in a tree, strumming his banjo.
Beyond mutant pandas, Chengd
u pleased me in other ways. It has some scrumptious street food, which for someone like me, so easily flummoxed by Chinese restaurants, was a special treat indeed. The meat on a stick is lip-smacking good. I couldn’t say for certain which animal in particular I was eating, but whatever it was it had a mighty fine spice rub. I wanted more.
And there were oranges, big, impossibly juicy, mouth-watering oranges. I had no idea where they might have grown. Chengdu, like every city in China, resided under a gray-brown haze of pollution. Indeed, surrounded by the high mountains of Sichuan, the pollution was particularly awful. But no matter. Someone somewhere in Sichuan Province had grown the most perfect oranges. And here they were.
Really, I was so happy I was nearly tittering. This is because not only was I in the possession of citrus, I also had in my hands a thick stack of magazines and newspapers—Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the International Herald Tribune, a full week’s worth of news from the outside world.
How can this be? you wonder. Surely, it’s not possible to buy unfiltered Western newsmagazines in a country so very, very touchy about a free press. This is true. You can’t. Not in Chengdu, in any case.