Down here in Inner Mongolia, an old man squatted holding a bowl against his nose and flicking rice grains into his mouth with chopsticks.
If any of the passengers in the plane looked down, they saw nothing more than a light brown land, yellower where the grass was. It was practically all empty space, but I did not know then that empty space is the rarest landscape in China.
We set off again, to cross the plains. It was a long hot afternoon, with only the merest glimpse of people or animals. I saw camels grazing, and herds of horses, and sparrow hawks. At the railway stations with Mongolian names — Qagan Teg and Gurban Obo — the buildings were frugally built but freshly painted, with tiled roofs and flared eaves. Chinese travelers were lined up in an orderly way on prearranged spots as the train pulled in, but when the train stopped the people broke ranks and began fighting for the doors. They were dressed differently from the way I had remembered: fewer blue suits, more color and sun hats, sunglasses and bright sweaters, some women in skirts. All of this was new to me, and I wanted to see more; I was glad that I had come. Towards dusk there were hills in the distance, the limit of the province of Inner Mongolia and the beginning of Shanxi.
That provincial border is marked by a section of the Great Wall. We clattered along the Wall for a while and then, in darkness, passed through it. The Wall is broken and sloping and piled up here — a muddy-looking heap of brown bricks and rubble. We had arrived at the big brown city of Datong.
The Chinese guide said, "We were going to put you up at the Datong guest house, but it is not very clean these days. Now, only Chinese people stay there."
We were taken to the locomotive works, which was one of those Chinese factories that is so self-contained it is like a city. It was formerly a commune; it had schools and a hospital and stores, and a wall around it. It had a hotel, The Datong Locomotive Works Hotel, and that was where we stayed.
After all those weeks of getting there, China seemed shabby and busy and orderly, with great crowds of people, and glaring lights and the sharp smell of burning coal. It seemed odd for a place seemingly so battered and depleted to have such a buzz.
And it was dark and dusty, so that being in Datong was like being in an old movie, in black and white. Chinese clothes were part of the same effect — low hemlines and white blouses and sensible shoes, and men in pin-striped suits, and most of them wearing hats. Chinese-made cars were like the black limousines in old gangster movies. And the streetlights were high, on fluted iron lampposts, and they weren't very bright. The skyline was all factory chimneys — no sign of the Great Wall. The smoky air and flickering lights made it seem like an old movie, too. But that was Datong.
I fell asleep reading and woke late. When I went downstairs breakfast was over, and waiters and waitresses were clearing the table — about ten of them picking up plates. One was eating the leftovers. He was wolfing the bread and hard-boiled eggs that no one had touched. He stopped chewing while I looked around, and then I pretended to be busy and he resumed, stuffing himself and carrying plates and cups. He moved in a rapid, scavenging way.
A morning walk which I took intending to see the famous Nine Dragon Screen involved me in detours, and then I was fooled and lost. I was deceived by the simple city map into thinking the distances were not so great. But I was much more content looking at half-obliterated slogans that had once said Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong! Large and small, they were everywhere, and there were too many to rub out. But it was clear from the way they had been vandalized — because the Chinese don't vandalize anything ("Love Public Property" is one of The Five Loves) — that people frankly hated these painted mottos from the Cultural Revolution.
There were people working by the roadside — tinsmiths, carpenters, people drying beans and washing clothes and processing rags and sorting spinach. And repairing vehicles: it is the commonest sight on a Chinese road, people pumping tires, or fiddling with engines, or welding an axle; the bus jacked up and the mechanic's legs sticking out from under it.
The yellow smog in Datong was a combination of desert dust and fog and industrial smoke. It is a coal-burning city, and one of the largest open-pit mines in China is just outside the city limits. The fog was thick and sulphurous in the early morning, and it made the buildings look ghostly and ancient and the people wraithlike. But the buildings weren't old and the people were well fed and fairly friendly.
The biggest difference between this first Chinese city and all the other cities I had seen since West Berlin was that the shops were full of food and goods, and the market was piled high with fruit and vegetables. I kept thinking of the empty shelves and the dented cans in Warsaw, Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator; the women in black shawls carrying string bags and pleading to buy a peck of wrinkled potatoes or six inches of withered sausage. In Moscow I had seen long lines of people — thirty or more to a line — trying to buy tomatoes from hawkers on the street. The tomatoes had just arrived, overripe and soft, from the Caucasus; and they were scarce. After all that, China seemed a land of plenty.
The Chinese are the last people in the world still manufacturing spittoons, chamber pots, treadle sewing machines, bed warmers, "quill" pens (steel nibs, dunk-and-write), wooden yokes for oxen, iron plows, sit-up-and-beg bicycles, steam engines, and the 1948 Packard car (they call it "The Red Flag").
They still make grandfather clocks — the chain-driven mechanical kind that go tick-tock and bong! Is this interesting? I think it is, because the Chinese invented the world's first mechanical clock in the late Tang Dynasty. Like many other Chinese inventions, they forgot about it, lost the idea, and the clock was reintroduced to China from Europe. The Chinese were the first to make cast iron, and soon after invented the iron plow. Chinese metallurgists were the first to make steel ("great iron"). The Chinese invented the crossbow in the fourth century B.C. and were still using it in 1895. They were the first to notice that all snowflakes have six sides. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding calipers, porcelain, the magic lantern (or zoetrope) and the stink bomb (one recipe called for fifteen pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane and cantharides beetles). They invented the chain pump in the first century A.D. and are still using it. They made the first kite, 2000 years before one was flown in Europe. They invented movable type and devised the first printed book — the Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra in the year 868. They had printing presses in the eleventh century, and there is clear evidence that Gutenberg got his technology from the Portuguese who in turn had learned it from the Chinese. They constructed the first suspension bridge and the first bridge with a segmented arch (this first one, built in 610 is still in use). They invented playing cards, fishing reels and whiskey.
In the year 1192, a Chinese man jumped from a minaret in Canton (Guangzhou) using a parachute, but the Chinese had been experimenting with parachutes since the second century B.C. Gao Yang (reigned 550–559) tested "man-flying kites" — an early form of hang glider — by throwing condemned prisoners from a tall tower, clinging to bamboo contraptions; one flew for two miles before crash landing. The Chinese were the first sailors in the world to use rudders; Westerners relied on steering oars until they borrowed the rudder from the Chinese in about 1100. Every schoolboy knows that the Chinese invented paper money, fireworks and lacquer. They were also the first people in the world to use wallpaper (French missionaries brought the wallpaper idea to Europe from China in the sixteenth century). They went mad with paper. An excavation in Turfan yielded a paper hat, a paper belt and a paper shoe, from the fifth century A.D. I have already mentioned toilet paper. They also made curtains and military armor of paper — its pleats made it impervious to arrows. Paper was not manufactured until the twelfth century in Europe, about 1200 years after its invention in China. They made the first wheelbarrows, and some of the best Chinese wheelbarrow designs have yet to be used in the West. There is much more. When Professor Needham's Science and Civilization in China is complete it will run to twenty-five volumes.