“They are very bad boys,” Mr. Liu said, and he glowered at me when he saw that I was laughing.
The corpses in the underground tombs at Astana were six hundred years old, but perfectly preserved, grinning, lying side by side on a decorated slab.
“You want to take a picture of the dead people?” the caretaker asked me.
“I don’t have a camera.”
She paid no attention to that. She said, “Ten yuan. One picture.”
Mr. Liu said, “I hate looking at dead bodies,” and hurried up the stone stairs, fleeing the burial chamber.
When he was gone, the caretaker said, “Shansh marnie?”
Fear of Flying
CHINESE TRAINS COULD BE BAD. IN TWELVE MONTHS OF traveling — almost forty trains — I never saw one with a toilet that wasn’t piggy. The loudspeakers plonked and nagged for eighteen hours a day — a hangover from the days of Maoist mottoes. The conductors could be tyrants, and the feeding frenzy in the dining car was often not worth the trouble. But there were compensations — the kindly conductors, the occasional good meal, the comfortable berth, the luck of the draw; and, when all else failed, there was always a chubby thermos of hot water for making tea.
Yet whatever objections I could devise against the trains, they were nothing compared with the horrors of air travel in China. I had a small doze of it when I left Urumchi for Lanzhou — there was no point in retracing my steps on the Iron Rooster. I was told to be at the airport three hours early — that is, seven in the morning; and the plane left five hours late, at three in the afternoon. It was an old Russian jet, and its metal covering was wrinkled and cracked like the tinfoil in a used cigarette pack. The seats were jammed so closely together that my knees hurt and the circulation to my feet was cut off. Every seat was taken, and every person was heavily laden with carry-on baggage — big skull-cracking bundles that fell out of the overhead rack. Even before the plane took off, people were softly and soupily vomiting, with their heads down and their hands folded, in the solemn and prayerful way that the Chinese habitually puke. After two hours we were each given an envelope that contained three caramel candies, some gum, and three sticky boiled sweets; a piece of cellophane almost concealed a black strand of dried beef that looked like oakum and tasted like decayed rope; and (because Chinese can be optimistic) a toothpick. Two hours later a girl wearing an old postman’s uniform went around with a tray. Thinking it might be better food, I snatched one of the little parcels — it was a key ring. The plane was very hot, and then so cold I could see my breath. It creaked like a schooner under sail. Another two hours passed. I said: I am out of my mind. An announcement was made, saying in a gargling way that we would shortly be landing. At this point everyone except the pukers stood up and began yanking their bundles out of the racks; and they remained standing, pushing, tottering, and vaguely complaining — deaf to the demands that they sit down and strap themselves in — as the plane bounced, did wheelies on the runway, and limped to Lanzhou terminal. Never again.
Handmade Landscape
WE WERE STILL IN GANSU, GOING SOUTHEAST TOWARD Shaanxi Province (not to be confused with Shanxi, a bit northeast), and we had just left the town of Tianshui. The landscape was unlike anything I had seen in Xinjiang or even the rest of Gansu. It was the carefully constructed Chinese landscape of mud mountains sculpted in terraces which held overgrown lawns of ripe rice. The only flat fields were far below, at the very bottom of the valleys. The rest had been made by the people, a whole countryside that had been put together by hand — stone walls shoring up the terraces on hillsides, paths and steps cut everywhere, sluices, drains, and carved-out furrows. There was even more wheat than rice here, and bundles of it were piled, waiting to be collected and threshed — probably by that black beast up to his nose in the buffalo wallow.
The whole landscape had been possessed and shaped and put to practical use. It was not pretty, but it was symmetrical. You couldn’t say, “Look at that hillside,” because it was all terraces — mud-walled ditches and fields, and mud-walled houses and roads. What the Chinese managed in miniature with a peach stone, carving it into an intricate design, they had done with these honey-colored mountains. If there was an outcrop of rock, they balanced a rice paddy on it, and the steps and terraces down the steep hills gave them the look of Mayan pyramids. There had not been much of that in the west of China. It was huge, the sort of complicated mud kingdom that insects created, and it was both impressive and appalling that everything visible in this landscape was man-made. Of course you could say that about any city in the world, but this wasn’t a city — it was supposed to be the range of hills above the river Wei; and it looked as though it had been made by hand.
The Terra-cotta Warriors
THE TERRA-COTTA WARRIORS (WHICH CANNOT BE PHOTOGRAPHED) were not a disappointment to me. They are too bizarre for that. They are stiff, upright, life-sized men and horses, marching forward in their armor through an area as big as a football field — hundreds of them, and each one has his own face and his own hairstyle. It is said that each clay figure had a counterpart in the emperor’s real army, which was scattered throughout the Qin empire. Another theory is that the individual portraiture was meant to emphasize the unity of China by exhibiting “all the physical features of the inhabitants of mainland east Asia.” Whatever the reason, each head is unique, and a name is stamped on the back of every neck — perhaps the name of the soldier, perhaps that of the potter-sculptor.
It is this lifelike quality of the figures — and the enormous number of them — that makes the place wonderful, and even a little disturbing. As you watch, the figures seem to move forward. It is very hard to suggest the human form in armor, and yet even with these padded leggings and boots and heavy sleeves, the figures look agile and lithe, and the kneeling archers and crossbowmen look alert and fully human.
This buried army was very much a private thrill for the tyrant who decreed that it be created to guard his tomb. But the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was given to grand gestures. Until his time, China was fragmented into the Warring States, and bits of the Wall had been put up. As Prince Cheng, he took over from his father in 246 B.C. He was thirteen years old. Before he was forty he had subdued the whole of China. He called himself emperor. He introduced an entirely new set of standards, put one of his generals — and many of his convicts and peasants — to work building the Great Wall, abolished serfs (meaning that, for the first time, the Chinese could give themselves surnames), and burned every book that did not directly praise his achievements — it was his way of making sure that history began with him. His grandiose schemes alienated his subjects and emptied his treasury. Three attempts were made to kill him. Eventually he died on a journey to east China, and to disguise his death, his ministers covered his stinking corpse with rotten fish and carted him back to be buried here. The second emperor was murdered, and so was his successor, in what the Chinese call “the first peasant insurrection in Chinese history.”
The odd thing is not how much this ancient ruler accomplished but that he managed it in so short a time. And in an even shorter time, the achievements of his dynasty were eclipsed by chaos. Two thousand years later China’s rulers had remarkably similar aims — conquest, unity, and uniformity.