Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (45 page)

The Terracotta Warriors are in Xi’an. Actually, they’re a ways outside Xi’an, surrounded by fields of pomegranates. With reluctance, I had joined a tour group to see these Terracotta Warriors, and as I settled myself among the Western tourists on a tour bus, I felt more than a little
ugh
about the whole endeavor. Had I become a travel snoot? I’d been traveling on my own for some time now, and if I did touristic-type excursions it was in the company of Chinese tourists, and while I couldn’t actually understand what anyone was talking about, I still absorbed things. I could not speak the language, but I could still learn. I learned through osmosis. And now I was in the midst of people speaking my language. It was discombobulating, like going to the aquarium instead of donning snorkeling gear and heading out for the reef.

Our first stop would be the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Built during the Tang Dynasty, it was seven stories tall, and was named the Big Wild Goose Pagoda because one day, right in this very spot, some monks got hungry, whereupon a big wild goose fell out of the sky. This seemed auspicious, demonstrative of a benevolent deity, and so they built a pagoda to commemorate this big wild goose that fell from the heavens. But by now I’d been in China for months and had seen and experienced approximately 742 pagodas. And so I had pagoda fatigue. I climbed it for the exercise and at the top peeked out of the window to see a couple waltzing below. I couldn’t see anything else, of course, because this was China and China lives in a cloud of smog.

Back down at the base, some tour group members, who had found the Big Goose Pagoda about as enthralling as I did, were asking our young and friendly guide Polly about Mao and his legacy.

“I think he was mostly good except when he got old,” she said. “I don’t think he was right in the head. There was the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976,” she went on. “My parents suffered. They were sent to the countryside. My mother could not go to school beyond primary school.”

And yet, as with so many of the Chinese people I had encountered, Mao was still mostly good in her world. This remained both fascinating and perplexing to me. He was a bad, bad man, Chairman Mao, and yet he was still regarded as mostly a good man among the people who had to endure his colossal badness. It’s a complicated country, China, full of complicated people.

We hopped back on the bus and continued with our tour. I’d hoped that we’d go directly to the Terracotta Warriors, the thousands of fearsome stone statues that Emperor Qin Shi Huang had constructed in the third century
B.C.
so that he’d have an army to rule the underworld. The Chinese refer to the warriors as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Clearly, this was something to see. It was grand. It was important. It was the
Eighth Wonder of the World!
So we should get going. Move on. Enough with the dawdling.

So we went to the souvenir factory.

See how the ancients made the Terracotta Warriors,
said the sign as we hopped off the bus. It should have read,
See how the moderns make cheap trinkets to sell to tourists.
Here you could buy little warriors, big warriors, warriors on chariots, archer warriors, really, any kind of warrior. It was a warrior mill. But I was not yet so jaded as to resist bargaining for a box of mini warriors for my kids.

“Two hundred yuan,” said the saleswoman.

“How about thirty
kuai,
” I offered.

We settled at 160, not a strong performance on my part. I’d been schooled by this saleswoman, and I trudged back to the bus. Soon we went onward, not to the Terracotta Warriors but to the Huaqing Hot Springs, where we could see where Emperor Xuenzong cavorted with his favorite concubine during the Tang Dynasty. All right, I thought as I wandered the grounds. I’m bored senseless. So, I thought, perhaps I had indeed become that most insufferable of persons, a travel snoot. Onward to lunch, past the Eight Wonders of the World theme park, where along with the seven original wonders of the world the park had included replicas of the Terracotta Warriors. The Chinese will no longer be ignored. They will be heard. This failure to include the Terracotta Warriors as one of the wonders of the ancient world was clearly an oversight on the part of Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian who compiled the first Top Seven list. It must be rectified.

Meanwhile, we found our restaurant and began to graze through the buffet line.

“This is so good. Isn’t Chinese cuisine marvelous?” commented Janet, a kindly woman from Albuquerque.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s good.”

Actually, it was awful. It was the kind of food you’d find at the Lucky Dragon lunchtime buffet in Boise, Idaho. Reflecting on this, I concluded that I had also become a food snoot, the second most insufferable of persons.

At our table, we discussed leather goods. Normally, leather goods do not figure very prominently in my conversations, but Janet was a professional purveyor of leather goods and she’d come to China to do business-type endeavors with her manufacturers.

“About eighty percent of the manufacturing is done in China now,” she noted. More than ever, it seemed as if eighty percent of everything was manufactured in China. “So what are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m just kind of wandering around,” I said.

“And where have you wandered?”

I told her, and as I mentioned taking the train from Lhasa to Lanzhou, the other tablemates interjected.

“You took the train from Tibet!”

I had encountered English train buffs.

“What kind of engine was it?” asked an older man with a white mustache. “Diesel? Electric?”

I didn’t know. If he wanted information on the condition of the train’s squat toilets, I could have offered a few observations. But locomotive engines? No. I was busy reading about nefarious doings in the Vatican. If he wanted to know what it’s like to listen to “Billie Jean” at 15,000 feet as the train rumbled past a Tibetan nomad’s tent, I could have offered some insight. Or what it’s like to lie in the darkness inside a small compartment next to the noisiest man in China. Or the odd sensation of finding yourself in the most remote, inhospitable corner of Earth as you guzzle a can of Budweiser, a beer that you’re calling breakfast. These are things I could have helped him with, not train engines. Still, I tried to be helpful.

“Um…” I said. “I think it was electric.”

“Really. Are you sure? If it was electric, they’d need to construct a mainframe with about fifteen gigawatts of torque. Wouldn’t you say, Lester?”

“Provided, of course, they used an A-frame design. Did you happen to look?”

“Er…perhaps it was a diesel.”

“Yes. Quite likely. Now, I heard they blasted a tunnel through an ice mountain to build that railway. Did you see it?”

I don’t know. I was busy rummaging around trying to find the Imodium.

“Well, I slept through the highest parts of the journey,” I explained. Sensing the inadequacy of my answer, I hastened to explain. “It was dark. You know, nighttime. But I have a distinct memory of being awoken by a strange noise. We were in a tunnel. And the noise? It was different than a regular old train tunnel. It didn’t go clickety-clack. There was something otherworldly about it. Something…
icy.
”

“Marvelous, marvelous.”

Finally, it was time to see the warriors. We’d been told that we might have the opportunity to meet the farmer who’d found them one day in 1974 as he dug for a water well. He’d be in the visitors’ center signing books. Of course, it’s not always the same farmer who greets visitors, but China aims to please, and if visitors wanted to meet the farmer who’d found the Terracotta Warriors, then they’d meet the farmer who’d found the Terracotta Warriors.

The sight of this farmer’s findings is essentially an ancient mausoleum. It is near the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ruled during the Qin Dynasty. The emperor had found ruling the known world such an agreeable experience that he set off to rule the unknown world as well. And thus the Terracotta Warriors. Hundreds of thousands of workers had labored for years to give the emperor a life-size fighting force of thousands of stone statues to help him conquer that world he’d encounter upon death. Clearly, this was a man who thought ahead. Fortunately for us, the warriors remained in this world and we can only hope that Emperor Qin Shi Huang isn’t lonely there on the Other Side.

And I could see why he might miss them. The Terracotta Warriors are extraordinary, an entire army of archers and cavalry, generals and foot soldiers, horses and chariots, and each statue is unique. True, Emperor Qin Shi Huang was the Henry Ford of his time, constructing assembly lines where workers fashioned the torso and limbs of each warrior. But every face is individualized, and to gaze upon these statues is to glare into the past. And there were thousands of them. More than 8,000 had been found thus far, but many more are believed to remain unearthed. More than 700,000 workers were needed to construct the warriors and the enormous mausoleum, and it took them nearly forty years to finish.

The warriors are contained in three pits. Pit one was the first to be excavated, and many statues had been reconstructed and repositioned to provide a semblance of what they must have looked like when they’d first been sent forth to the Other Side. The remaining statues that had been unearthed were still broken and severed, victim of a warlord’s looting just five years after they’d been interned. Polly informed us that they weren’t excavating any further until the technology was there to preserve what they’d found. The statues had been brightly painted when they were first unearthed, but the colorful artistry had disappeared due to sunlight and pollution. Nevertheless, they are an astounding sight. Earlier, I’d read an account of a tourist who had disguised himself as a Terracotta Warrior and who had hidden among these statues, standing rigidly at attention. I could understand the compulsion. Actually, no. Clearly this was someone off his meds.

On the way out, I discovered that the little figurines I’d bought before lunch could now be had for 10 yuan. And suddenly I no longer felt like a travel snoot. I felt like a chump.

23

I
t’s cold in Harbin. It should be cold. It would be unsettling if it were not cold. Harbin is north of Vladivostok, home of the Russian Pacific fleet. So it’s cold. This was not the tropics. Harbin is in the far north of China. So the coldness should be expected. But
man,
it’s cold in Harbin.

I’d felt this coldness, this very intense nostril-freezing coldness, the moment the flight attendant opened the door. We’d been crowding the aisles waiting to disembark the plane since, well, I don’t know, probably an hour before we landed.
Please remain seated until we reach the gate.
As if. This is China. We do not remain seated in China. And I further endured this bitter coldness in front of my hotel when I’d had to deal with the usual let’s-rip-off-the-dumb-
laowai
routine of the airport taxi drivers. It no longer even fazed me. It was normal, just part of the experience.

“Four hundred and fifty
kuai,
do you say? Well, yes, that sounds reasonable. But let me ask the doorman what he thinks.”

So I got the doorman and I got the guy at the check-in counter and I’d asked passing pedestrians in fur hats what they thought of this 450-
kuai
fare, and soon the cabdriver was surrounded by dozens of people heckling and jeering him because everyone’s been ripped off in China, everyone’s been cheated, tricked into overpaying, and no one liked it one bit, and now they had one of these cheaters on their hands and they shamed him and told me not to pay one yuan and to report him to the police. But this I did not do. I asked the crowd what is the standard taxi fare from the airport to downtown Harbin and that is what I magnanimously paid the driver, who slinked off into the night like a chastened fox.

I continued to experience this coldness as I waddled up the cobblestones of Zhongyang Dajie wearing seven layers of clothes, everything in my possession. My quest for a warm coat, abandoned in Xi’an, had suddenly become more urgent. Style? Who cares. A good fit? Immaterial. And soon I became the owner of an enormous parka, a coat that would eventually make its way to a member of the Beijing Choral Society, because I have no need for an enormous parka. Except in Harbin. Because it’s cold.

But I liked the cold. There’s something about freezing together that brings the warmth out of people. Extreme heat tends to make people irritable. But in the cold, particularly when you have a heavy coat and a fur hat, mirth ensues.
Brrr, it’s cold,
you say.
I know,
says your friend.
Let’s get some hot chocolate.
Happy times.