In Xanadu (53 page)

'One chicky, two chikky, three chikky, four. . . .'

Outside, we had left the desert and were passing a textbook vision of China I had known since childhood: chequer-board paddy fields, wide-brimmed straw hats, swarms of harvesting peasants. We were now passing through the Gansu Corridor and the train chugged along between two parallel ranges of mountains. The chequer-boards were interrupted by wooden farmhouses and gravel farm tracks. As we pushed on up the corridor, the paddy slowly began to give way to narrow fields of russet-brown soil, newly harvested of grain. The blue-jacketed peasants tending the paddy-shoots were replaced by other groups of villagers standing in circles around yellow piles of harvested wheat. They were winnowing the chaff from the grain, throwing spadefuls In the air and letting the chaff drift away in the breeze. Some of the men were leaving the group, bent double under great bundles of straw. Others were digging the fields, either by hand or with the aid of a horse plough. On the fallow strips, horses and sheep were grazing, watched by shepherds. One squatted some distance away from his flock chewing on a straw.

That evening our compartment was invaded by a Chinese engineer and his wife on their way to a conference. They ignored Mr Chicken and ourselves and lay in the same bunk groaning into the small hours. We listened like outraged spinsters. But the engineer went on to commit a far more terrible crime. After we had all drifted off to sleep he furtively arose and turned on the Tannoy. The ability to turn the Tannoy off is perhaps the single most enjoyable luxury of travelling Soft Sleeper. As with the telescreens in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
silence and privacy are privileges jealously guarded by senior Party members and high officials. Our engineer was neither of these, and must have been unnerved by the silence. He certainly seemed relieved by the five a.m. news broadcast. We were less sure as to its merits. We swore at the engineer and turned it off again. Lou and I tried to get back to sleep; our Singaporean friend sought solace in a chicken sandwich. But the disruptions continued. Soon after the news had finished, our compartment became the venue for a morning gathering of all the engineers on the train.

The engineer and his paramour left us at Xi'an. Henceforth the only intrusion in our compartment was a succession of drunk Party cadres looking for the lavatory. The Soft Sleeper carriage was full of Chinese bourgeoisie, a class that officially does not exist. As I wandered up the carriage, open doors revealed competent-looking men in Western clothes: Fair Isle jerseys, stripy cotton shirts and tweed jackets. An old soldier and a provincial Party official alone wore Mao jackets. They looked as old-fashioned and out of place as a stockbroker in a bowler hat might do in Britain; they had an air of living up to a vanished stereotype. The younger Party officials had haircuts that were as distinctive as their clothes: they were smart and carefully styled. It distinguished them from the peasants just as clearly as the Manchu's
queue
(pigtails) distinguished the native Chinese from the northern invaders in late Imperial time.

Some of the cadres read, smoked or played chess. Others sat in groups toasting each other, chuckling and slapping each other's backs. A particularly noisy drinking bout was going on in the next compartment. From behind the partition could be heard the sound of toasting, the clinking of glasses and, a little later, the noise of retching. I lay on my bunk reading the Chinese section of
The Travels,
disgusted to note that Polo thought rice wine
(mao tai,
the filthy meths-tasting drink so beloved of Communist Party officials) to be the 'finest wine in the world'. This alone confirmed the worst I had come to expect of the Venetian.

Late that morning we crossed over the Yellow River and by early afternoon had passed into rolling hill country. Around the river the soil had been so carefully tended it looked as if it had been combed: every available inch was used, right up to the drop of the river gully. But in the hills there was a more relaxed attitude to the land. There was more meadowland, more room between the steeply pitched tile roofs of the farmsteads and the first browns of the arable soil. By evening the train had begun to gather speed and was heading out of the hills into fiat plains. The hills receded and the sun sank behind the hills and the colour drained slowly from the landscape. The train lights came on, and we thundered into the gloom.

The setting of the sun was a signal for the sleeping-car attendants, who rose like vampires from their compartment. They set about the carriage, mops and dusters in hand, working themselves into a frenzy of hygiene. Windows were cleaned, floors swept and sideboards dusted. The beds were stripped of their sheets and we were forbidden to sit on the upper bunks. To get out of the attendant's way we took Mr Flying Chicken to supper with us in the dining car. We got there with difficulty.

In the Hard Seat carriage a fierce dispute was in progress. Some Uigurs were kneeling in the aisle saying their evening prayers while a pair of attendants were trying to clean up around them. There was a lot of shouting and it was difficult to make out exactly what was going on. But it was clear that the Uigurs were not winning. They were being gradually swept back into their seats and the floor was being brushed, washed, soaped and disinfected. Islam was on the retreat. During supper, just as Mr Chicken was about to embark on his second course, the train pulled to a halt in a station and the attendants leapt outside and began feverishly swilling down the outside of the carriages. The train was due to arrive in Peking in less than an hour and the attendants wanted to spend as little time as possible cleaning up after we arrived. After supper we returned to our carriage to find that Mr Chicken's cake, nuts and melons had all been thrown away. He was still trying to retrieve them from the attendants when, at ten-thirty, the train pulled into Peking Central.

That night a ferry of buses took the frightened provincials to a dimly lit hotel in the west of the city, the East Acton of Peking.

All the diplomats, most of the correspondents and even a few of the tourists complain that Peking is a dull town, all flyovers and glass hotels. Arriving from New York or Tokyo it might appear so. Coming to it from the Taklimakan, however, it appeared dauntingly sophisticated. True, it did not quite conform to my Fu Manchu ideal of a Chinese city. There were no paper-lantern prostitutes or opium-den gangsters, no gambling Triad smugglers, no American agents in Burberrys, no exploding firecrackers. Nevertheless it seemed a huge and exciting place; we went to bed like schoolboys on the last night of term.

At first light we ate a hurried breakfast, then hired bicycles and set off into the slipstream. At the traffic lights we would pause, waiting with one black car and ten thousand other bicycles. When the lights changed we would shoot off down wide avenues, past crocodiles of schoolchildren, past groups of tourists photographing each other, past cranes and building sites and department stores. Outside, hordes of Chinamen would squint through the plate glass, watching the ranks of black and white televisions displayed in the shop fronts. Everything seemed so big - the crowds, the buildings, the articulated buses, the roads....

There were many things that we liked about Peking: the grinning dentists caressing their pliers outside the surgeries, the delicate boys in the barber shops, the old women hobbling past on unbound feet, the lines of plane trees and the silver poplars, the bird cages hanging from the street lamps. But best of all we loved the chocolate eclairs. Mr Flying Chicken would have been proud of us. At a small comer table at the back of Minim's a low-budget appendage to Yves St Laurent's new Peking Maxim's, we spent one of the happiest afternoons of the whole journey. We drank small porcelain cups of espresso coffee and ate our way through the cafe's entire patisserie shelf: fourteen chocolate eclairs in three hours. When the cafe closed, we stumbled out into the cold night air, bloated, ill and guilty. We had spent more money in three hours than we had in the previous three weeks.

We had sometimes talked as if Peking were our journey's end. Now we wished that it were. We were tired. We had little money left. Our curiosity and appetite for novelty was long satisfied. We longed for home, for comfort and for stability. Most of all we desperately wanted to stop moving. If there was one thing we had learned on the journey it was that we were not nomads. But we could not stop, at least not yet. In the inside pocket of my torn, soiled old waistcoat I still had the phial of oil from the Holy Sepulchre. Had Marco Polo arrived in China one month later, he would have delivered his phial to Kubla Khan in his new capital at Khan Balik, now in Peking, under the site of the old Forbidden City. But as it was. Polo arrived in May, and during that month Kubla Khan was away north of the Great Wall at his summer palace, Shang-tu, or, as it was called by Coleridge, Xanadu.

Xanadu was Kubla Khan's favourite residence. In the capital he pined for the steppe and to remind him of his home he planted a patch of Mongolian grass in the palace gardens. In the hot months he made straight for the summer palace… 'my vast and noble capital….. My splendidly adorned ' Xanadu was built on the first plateau of the steppe, the nearest piece of real grassland to Peking. The Chinese traveller Wang Yun visited the city soon after its foundation and wrote that it was encircled on four sides by mountains and surrounded by luxuriant and beautiful countryside; to the north lay pine forests famous for their falcons, nearer at hand were pastures teeming with herds of goats and sheep. But it is Polo who gives the finest surviving description of the palace itself; it is perhaps the most beautiful piece of descriptive prose in the whole of
The Travels:

There is at this place a very fine marble palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment....

Round this palace a wall is built, enclosing a com- pass of
16
miles, and inside the park there are fountains and rivers and brooks, and beautiful meadows, with all kinds of wild animals, excluding those which are of a ferocious nature.... There are more than two hundred gerfalcons alone. The Khan himself goes every week to
see his birds . . . and sometimes he rides through the park with a leopard behind him on his horse's croup; and then if he sees any animal that takes his fancy, he
slips his leopard at it    

Moreover at a spot in the park where there is a charming wood, he has another palace built of cane, of which I must give you a description. It is gilt all over and most elaborately finished inside.... On each column is a dragon whose head supports the architrave, and the claws are stretched out right and left. The construction of the palace is so devised that it can be taken down and put up with great celerity; and it can all be taken to pieces and removed withersoever the Emperor may command. When erected, it is braced by more than two hundred cords of silk....

The ruins of the palace were accidently rediscovered in 1872 by the physician at the British legation in Peking, Dr S. W. Bushell; he happened to pass the city while on a botanical expedition north of the Great Wall. The landscape he saw sounded fairly similar to that described by Marco Polo. But the scene at Xanadu itself was very different.

...
a wide rolling prairie, covered with long grass and fragrant shrubs, the haunts of numerous herds of antelope. The only building in the neighbourhood is a small Lama monastery, the abode of several wretched priests. The city has been deserted for centuries. The site is overgrown by rank weeds and grass, the abode of foxes and owls, which prey on the numerous prairie rats and partridges. .
..
The ground in the interior is strewn with blocks of marble and other remains of large temples and palaces, the outlines of the foundations of some of which can still be traced; while broken lions, dragons and the remains of other carved monuments lie about in every direction, half hidden by the thick and tangled overgrowth. Scarcely one stone remains above another, and a more complete state of ruin and desolation could hardly be imagined.