Riding the Iron Rooster

We left Lanzhou at about midnight—the best time of day for catching a long-distance train. You board, hand over your ticket and go to bed; and within a few minutes you're jogging along, sound asleep. When you wake up you've gone 500 miles.

This was the train that the man in Peking had called The Iron Rooster, which was like calling it "the cheapskate express," because the people who ran it were penny-pinchers. But that was just prejudice, a way of maligning a minority, a dig at the Uighurs. In most respects the train was no better or worse than any of the others I had taken in China. And the penny-pinching was not unusual—austerity, and mending and patching had long been among the commonest features of Chinese life. Luxury, even simple comfort, had been condemned as decadent, and so inconvenience, plainness, and roughing it had come to be accepted as virtues. Only recently—within a few years—had anyone confessed to wanting creature comforts and pretty colors. But that did not strike me as immoderate. It was a society that was pledged to austerity that was probably the most prone to going on binges.

So, philosophically, the name didn't fit. But in every other respect this thing was an Iron Rooster. It squawked and crowed and seemed to flap, as steam shot out of its black boiler and it shook itself along the tracks. It was a big, clattering thing, with bells and whistles, that went its noisy and cocksure way westward, into the desert of what used to be called Turkestan.

I slept like a log. The train was not particularly crowded. Mr. Fang was installed in another compartment. I had expected a stifling coach, but it was chilly on the train. I needed the China Railways' horse blanket.

I woke at six, in darkness. All of China is on Peking time. It had been light until nine at night in Lanzhou. I read Mildred Cable on the Gobi Desert and realized that I was just passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror. ("Some told of rushing rivers cutting their way through sand, of an unfathomable lake hidden among the dunes, of sand-hills with a voice like thunder, of water which could be clearly seen and yet was a deception.") I read for an hour. At seven it was still dark, the sun behind the distant mountains. We came to a small station called Shagoutai, where the only living things were a muleteer and his mule—the animal loaded with water bags and waiting behind the grade crossing.

The mountains were dark, treeless, grassless ranges and they were folded like thick quilts. They were black, because they were backlit by the unrisen sun. Near Lanzhou, I thought the mountains were like shuijiao (water dumplings). The same smoothness, and folds, and crimp marks. I loved the sight of the wilderness of dumplings. But in this semidesert, with far-off hills, no image came so easily to mind. The nearer hills all had cave entrances in them—the arched doorways of the cave dwellers of Gansu. It was a strange, rocky province, and so long and narrow I knew I would be traveling through it still tomorrow. Like Qinghai, the adjoining province to the south, Gansu was notorious for being a place where political prisoners were sent, the Chinese Siberia. Security was a simple matter because there was no escape through the desert. Only forty years ago travelers on this route—and at just about this spot in Gansu—were met by a large stone tablet with the inscription Earth's Greatest Barrier. Meaning the Gobi.

The landscape changed, all at once, into everything, at the town of Wuwei. The Iron Rooster was in a deep, cool valley, and there were wet mountains a few miles away, and beyond them a great ridge of brown mountains, and higher and farther still, on the distant horizon, a long range of snowy mountains. So blue and white were these mountains of ice that the range itself had the look of a sword blade. There were arid patches, too, between the snowy peaks in the distance and the green valley in which we were traveling.

These mountains to the south were the Datong Shan, several of them 20,000 footers, in the province and sometime penal colony of Qinghai, which stretched beyond them to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

I had been warned that this train trip west would be barren and boring. It was not. I was beginning to understand that the empty parts of China are the most beautiful, and some of them—like these valleys—very fertile. It was a chain of oases along the northern arm of the Silk Road. Its utter emptiness was so rare in China that it seemed startling to me, and where there were gardens and trees it was almost lush. Large herds of sheep grazed along the stonier stretches, nibbling at hanks of grass; and there were mules and crows and mud-walled towns. In one place I saw six camels, big and small, placidly watching the train go by. The mules were indifferent to the train. They were braying, and biting and mounting each other, honking and showing their teeth as they hauled their hoses into place.

The train was full but not crowded. The dining car was nearly always empty, perhaps because most of the passengers were Uighurs—Muslims—and the Chinese menu was about as porky as it could be. And the other dishes could not possibly have been halal, which is the Islamic version of kosher—implying ritual slaughter. Because business was so bad, the chef usually chatted, asking me what I wanted. How about some chicken and prawns? Or shredded pork? Or pork balls? Or diced pork and doufu (bean curd)? Or fish with ginger? Cauliflower with dried shrimp? Sauteed cucumber?

Like many features of Chinese life, the food had glorious names, and each dish had its own identity and pedigree. But in practice they were almost impossible to tell apart, having not only the same taste, but the same color and stringiness.

By midafternoon, the train was moving across a flat green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese were averse to planting shade trees because it was impossible to plant crops under them. They favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province—the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.

In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person—or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape there was a person in it staring back at me.

Even here in the middle of nowhere there were people and settlements. The villages were walled in, and most houses had walls around them: mud smeared over bricks. They were the sort of stockades that are frequent in Afghanistan and Iran—at the far end of this Silk Road—and probably a cultural hangover from the memory of marauders and Mongol hordes, the Central Asian nightmare.

The day had turned very hot. It was now in the nineties. I saw eighteen sheep crowded into a little blot of shade under a frail hawthorn tree. Children cooled themselves by kicking water in a ditch. Farmers with lamp shade hats planted crops by pushing one sprout at a time into the ground, in a process that had a greater affinity to needlepoint than to farming, as though they were stitching a design into the furrows. And though there were black peaks and mountain ranges on both sides of the train, the land ahead fell away, and it was as if we were approaching the ocean—the land dipped and had the smooth, stony look of the seashore. It was the hottest part of the day, but even so the land was full of people. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert I saw a man in a faded blue suit, bumping over the stones on his bike.

Then there were sand dunes near the track—big soft slopes and bright piles; but the snowy peaks in the distance still remained. I had not realized that there was anything so strange as this on this planet.

I was eating dinner in the empty dining car at about eight that night when we came to Jiayuguan. What I saw out the window is printed on my mind: in the summer dusk of the Gobi Desert, a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall—the Jia Yu Watchtower—a fortresslike structure with pagoda roofs; and the train slowed at the Wall's end, a crumbled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. In the fading light of day, there was this ghostly remainder of the Great Wall, and what looked like the last town in China. The Wall went straggling west, but it was so small and destroyed it looked like little more than an idea or a suggestion—the remnants of a great scheme. But my excitement also came from seeing the red paint on the gate, and the yellow roof, and the thought that this train was passing beyond it into the unknown. The sun slanted on the gray hills and the desert and the blue bushes. Most of what I saw was through the blurring haze of the day's dust, and the intimation at sunset was that I would fall off the edge of the world as soon as it got dark.

On my way back to my compartment I passed the Hard Class compartment, in which Uighurs were praying—kneeling on mats and facing southwest towards Mecca between the berths; and Chinese were brushing their teeth, and glugging tea, and hanging up laundry; and very loud Arabic music blasted from a portable tape player. Some people were sleeping and many were sighing, and a few spitting and hoicking. A card game was in progress, and a furious argument. Nearby a young girl placidly nursed her baby. The floor was thick with spittle, orange peels, peanut shells and tea dregs. More men entered, gargling, from the washroom.

Someone grasped my arm. The light was bad, but I saw he had a big nose and wavy hair and a brown suit with bell-bottoms, a style that had become popular that year in the oases of the Xinjiang desert.

"Shansh marnie?"

It was the Uighur catchphrase: Change money?

The Uighurs were officially designated a Chinese minority, and Xinjiang was their own autonomous region. They were a Turkic-speaking people, the remote descendants of nomads whose kingdom existed here 1200 years ago, and many of them looked like Italian peasants. It was no wonder that Marco Polo found them a friendly and fun-loving people. They were overwhelmed by the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, and were drafted into the army of this khanate. They converted to Islam, they adopted the Arabic script for their language, they were conquered by the Chinese several times, and several times rebelled, most recently a hundred years ago. There are about four million of them in Xinjiang, and they seemed totally out of sympathy with the Chinese and often mocking. Their world was entirely separate: it was Allah, and the Central Asian steppes, a culture of donkey carts and dancing girls. They ate mutton and bread. They were people of the bazaar, who—familiar with outlandish travelers—were travelers themselves. For the first time since the People's Republic was founded they were allowed to travel.

They were the people who lurked outside the Friendship Stores in Peking and Shanghai, and stood discreetly outside the tourist hotels, looking like exchange students from a Mediterranean country. They usually wore dark suits and ties and platform shoes. They wore watches and sunglasses. Their Chinese was seldom fluent—but that was excusable: it was rare to find any Chinese person who spoke Uighur. But their history as a people had taught them to count in fifty languages. Numbers, after all, are the language of the bazaar. And they had two words of English.

"Shansh marnie?"

"How much?"

"One dollar, four yuan." The official rate was three.

"Say six." I was bargaining for the sake of it, and because it was such a novelty to encounter a black market in this upright, no tipping, no favors, anticorruption economy. What this Uighur and I were doing was sinning; and it felt delightful.

"No six."

"Five."

"No five. Four." He also had bushy eyebrows and a big chin.

He asked me how many dollars I wanted to change. He took out a pocket calculator and said that over a certain amount he could give me a better rate. The train rumbled on towards Ansi (Anxi). 1 lost interest in haggling and had no interest at all in changing money at the black-market rate. What fascinated me was his tenacity in sticking to this one-to-four rate. For him it was like a magic equation. But this Uighur was no fool. Two months later the Chinese government devalued the yuan to exactly this rate.

That night the train crossed the Ravine of Baboons (Xingxing Xia), which had always been regarded as the frontier of Chinese Turkestan.

'The desert which lies between Ansi and Hami is a howling wilderness, and the first thing which strikes the wayfarer is the dismalness of its uniform, black, pebble-strewn surface." That was Mildred speaking. And reading her book reminded me that I was missing one of the glories of this region by not visiting the caves at Dunhuang—Buddhas, frescoes, holy grottoes; the sacred city in the sands. But I intended to go one better, by visiting the lost city of Gaocheng (Karakhoja) whenever this train got to Turfan.

I had gone to bed in a strange late twilight amid a rugged landscape; and I woke, slowly jogging in the train, to a fiat region of sand and stones. Farther off were large humpy sand dunes, which had the appearance of having softly flowed and blown there, because there was nothing like them nearby. The dunes were like simple gigantic animals that went blobbing along through the desert, smothering whatever they encountered.

Soon a patch of green appeared—an oasis. Once there was merely a road linking the oases—but "once" meant only thirty years ago. Before then it was a rough road, what remained of the Silk Route. But these oases were not metaphors for a few trees and a stagnant pool. They were large towns, well watered from underground irrigation canals, and grapes and melons were grown in great profusion. Later in the day the train stopped at Hami. The Hami melon is famous all over China for its sweet taste and its fragrance; and Hami had been no insignificant place, although now it was what remained of the fruit-growing communes of the fifties and sixties. It had known great days, and had had a khan until this century. It had been overrun by Mongols, by Uighurs, by Tibetans and Dzungars. It had been repeatedly reoccupied by the Chinese since the year a.d. 73, during the Later Han Dynasty, and had been a Chinese city from 1698 onward. Nothing of this remained. What had not been damaged in the Muslim Rebellion of 1863–1873 had been flattened in the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese had a facility for literally defacing a city—taking all its characteristic features away, robbing it of its uniqueness, cutting its nose off. Now all Hami was known for was its pig iron.

The peaks beyond Hami and farther up the line had patches of snow on their ridges that lay like saddle blankets, squarish and flat. But down here in the train and on the desert it was very hot—over one hundred degrees in the train and hotter outside. The sun burned down on the sand and stones. There were a few gullies, and in the oldest and deepest ones, which were sheltered, perhaps a dead wu-tong tree, and here and there clumps of camel thorn, the only identifiable weed, apart from the spikes of gray lichens. We were heading towards a dusty range of hills that was surmounted by a blue range of mountains, and rising up beyond were more mountains, which were bright with snow patches and ice slides—long streaks that might have been glaciers.

They were the first sight I had of the Bogda Shan, The Mountains of God. They were very rugged and very high, but their snow was the only lively feature of this place. Beneath those mountains there was nothing but desert, "the howling wilderness," which this afternoon was too bright to stare at. Rainfall is unknown here, and most of those mountains seemed little more than a vast, poisoned massif—a lifeless pack of rock. This is the dead center of Asia.

The Iron Rooster moved along at about thirty miles per hour, as it had done for two and a half days; moving slowly as the landscape grew ever stranger. That was a good thing. If the train had been moving any faster it would have been impossible for me to comprehend the changes in the landscape, from the rice fields and little hills to the great bare mountains. A plane ride from Lanzhou to here would have resulted in shock, and from Peking, in total bewilderment. Arriving here by plane from anywhere else would have been like space travel—some interplanetary mind-bender.

I paced up and down in my pajamas, among slumbering Uighurs, and occasionally had a beer. They were half a liter and cost 15 cents. Because we were on Peking time, the hottest part of the day was 4:30 in the afternoon, and it remained light enough to read by until almost midnight.

In this oddly lighted world of snow and sand, the stone mountains reddened and rushed up to the train. In the distance was a green basin, 500 feet below sea level, the lowest place in China, and one of the hottest. Another oasis, the town of Turfan. Round about there was nothing else but a hundred miles of blackish gravel, and Turfan itself was twenty miles from the station. I got off the train here.

Turfan ("one of the hottest places on the face of the earth") was an extremely popular oasis about 400 years ago. Before then it had been a desert town overrun by successive waves of nomads, Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols. The Silk Road established it as a great oasis and bazaar, but after that—from about the sixteenth century—it was all downhill. And after it was finally left alone by the warlords and the Manchus, new marauders appeared in the shape of enterprising archeologists, and the few frescoes and statues that remained after more than 2000 years of continuous civilization were snatched and carried away to places like Tokyo, Berlin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Such a place seemed to me unmissable. The station was at the edge of the depression. All I could see were telephone poles in the stony desert, and the huge purply-red range called The Flaming Mountains. The town of Turfan did not reveal itself until I was almost on top of it, and even then it seemed less like a Chinese town than a Middle Eastern one—it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.

The desert was almost unbelievably horrible looking—bouldery and black, without a single green thing in it. And it seemed as though if you walked on those stones you would cut your feet. In some spots it looked like an immensity of coal ashes, with scatterings of clinkers and scorched stones. In other places it was dust, with rounded mounds piled here and there. The mounds I discovered were part of the irrigation system called the karez, a network of underground canals and boreholes that had been used successfully since the Western Han Dynasty, about 2000 years ago. There were also parts of this desert surrounding Turfan that had an undersea look, as of an ocean floor after the tide went out for good. Everyone called it the gobi\ the waterless place. Rainfall is unknown in Turfan.

In this shallow green valley in the desert, in which all the water came from underground, there were no Chinese high rises, and most of the houses were small and square. There were grape arbors suspended over most of the streets—for the shade and also for the prettiness of them. This valley is the chief source of Chinese grapes—there is even a winery in Turfan—and thirty varieties of melon grow in the area. That intensifies the relief on having come from one of the wildest deserts in the world. Turfan is the opposite of everything that lies around it, with its water and its shade and its fresh fruit.

Mr. Fang still tagged behind me, keeping his distance, sometimes speaking an ominous sentence.

One of the most ominous for the traveler in China is: It is a new hotel. That sometimes struck fear into my heart. It implied peeling wallpaper, plush chairs, exposed wires, lights that didn't work, a hairy carpet, hard beds and a bathroom with no water, loose tiles, sticky glue on the sink, no shower curtain, and a cistern you had to fix yourself by twisting the ballcock. The doors on the fake-wood cabinets were usually stuck, the curtains were thin, the doorknobs loose, the coat hangers misshapen, the telephone didn't work, and neither did the radio. There was always a color television and a bunch of plastic flowers. Such places smelled of fish glue and failure, and they were terribly expensive. In all cases in China I preferred an old hotel. They weren't pretty but they worked.

But Mr. Fang said the old place in Turfan was full, and he put me in the new, as yet unnamed hotel. It was half-finished, and it was empty. Its odor was powerful: fresh cement. In the rubble of the courtyard there was a fountain which contained hot dust and a stiff little mouse. I stood, a little dazed from the heat, and heard a donkey bawl.

Because of Peking time, breakfast was served at nine-thirty, lunch at two, and dinner at nine in the evening. What are civilized hours in a place like Sandwich, Massachusetts, are very inconvenient in Chinese Turkestan. I woke hot and hungry at about six in the morning, and I had no appetite in the evening. But the eating hours were official and inflexible, and the local people woke late and went to bed late. Nothing I could do persuaded anyone to galvanize himself early, in the cool part of the day.

"We will miss breakfast," Mr. Fang said.

"Does that matter?"

"We must have breakfast."

I thought, What good are you? But it was not only that mealtimes were sacred. The food was paid for and therefore had to be eaten. And the Chinese are an oral people—that was another reason. Most of all, the Chinese are at their freest when they are eating. A meal is always a relief and a celebration.

Yet I never wanted breakfast—noodles, thin rice gruel, meat dumplings, maybe mushrooms, and warm milk. As a foreigner I might be offered orange soda or a Pepsi with my breakfast noodles.

In Turfan I bought the local raisins made from white grapes—the best in China—and apricots. And I sat in my room, eating that stuff and drinking my Dragon Well green tea and writing my notes, until Fang and the driver had had their fill of gruel, and then we set off down the dusty roads.

Turfan was often a furnace. But on overcast mornings it was pleasant, with low clouds and temperatures only in the nineties. I liked the town. It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest. There were very few motor vehicles, and it was quiet and completely horizontal.

It was a Uighur town, with a few Chinese. There were also Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tadzhiks and Tungus around the place, bowlegged and in high boots, in the Mongolian fashion. They were leathery faced, and some looked like Slavs and some like gypsies, and most of them looked like people who had lost their way and were just stopping briefly in this oasis before moving on. Half the women at the Turfan bazaar had the features of fortune-tellers, and the others looked like Mediterranean peasants—dramatically different from anyone else in China. These brown-haired, gray-eyed, gypsy-featured women in velvet dresses—and very buxom, some of them—were quite attractive in a way that was the opposite to the oriental. You would not be surprised to learn that they were Italians or Armenians. You see those same faces in Palermo and Watertown, Massachusetts.

Their gazes lingered, too. And some women came close and reached into the velvet and withdrew rolls of bills from between their breasts and said, "Shansh marnie?"

They put this Chinese money into my hand—the money still warm from having been in their deep bosoms—and they offered me four to one. They had gold teeth, and some looked like foxes, and they hissed at me when I said no.

It was wonderful, that market in Turfan, just what you would expect of a bazaar in Central Asia. They sold embroidered saddlebags, and leather holsters, and homemade jackknives, and baskets and belts. The meat market dealt exclusively in lamb and mutton—no pigs in this Islamic place; and there were stalls selling shish kebab. Much of the produce was the fresh fruit for which Turfan is well known—watermelons and Hami melons and tangerines. And there were about twenty varieties of dried fruit. I bought raisins and apricots, almonds and walnuts: it struck me that dried fruit and nuts were caravan food.

There were tumblers and fire-eaters at the Turfan market, too, and a man doing card tricks on an overturned wheelbarrow. There was something medieval about the market—the dust and the tents, the merchandise and the entertainers, and the people who had gathered there, the men in skullcaps, the women in shawls, the shrieking children with wild hair and dirty feet.

Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city. 'This was once a great capital," people say, pointing to fallen walls and broken streets and dust. Then you stand in the silence of the lifeless place and think of Ozymandias, King of Kings, covered by a sand dune and forgotten. It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies—only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world. Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities. There is something wearying and demoralizing about a lost city, but it can also give you a healthy disregard for real estate.

Gaocheng was perfect in its ruin and decrepitude. It had been a renowned city for well over a thousand years, and now it was a pile of dust and crumbling mud. So far it had been spared the final insult—tourists—but one day, when the Iron Rooster turned into a streamlined train, they would find even this place, east of Turfan, twenty-five miles into the desert. It had had half a dozen different names—Karakhoja, Khocho, Dakianus (from the Roman Emperor Decius), Apsus (Ephesus), Idikut-Shahri (King Idikut's Town) and Erbu (Second Stop). Gaocheng had come to be its accepted name, but it hardly mattered, because there was not much left of it. Yet enough remained for anyone to see that it really had been an enormous place, a city on a grand scale, which was why it looked so sad. It had the melancholy emptiness of all great ruins.

Its walls and fortifications were mostly gone, but the ones that still stood made it seem a remarkable citadel. It had been an ancient capital of this region, and then a Tang city, and then a Uighur city, and at last the Mongols had captured it. The Uighurs didn't want the place destroyed, so they had surrendered without a struggle and let the Mongols take charge, as they had over the rest of China. It was the period of Mongol rule, the Yuan Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the first Westerners began traveling widely in China—among them, Marco Polo.

By then Gaocheng was Muslim. It had previously been Buddhist. It had also been a center of heretics—first Manichaean, then Nestorian. It is impossible to consider these heresies without reaching the conclusion that they make a certain amount of sense. The Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Manes, believed that there is good and evil in all humans, and that life is a struggle between these interdependent opposites, the light and the dark, the spirit and the flesh. The Nestorians were Christians who had been declared heretics for their belief that there were two separate persons in the incarnate Christ, denying that Christ was in one person both God and man. They went on to argue that Mary was either the mother of God or the mother of the man Jesus; but she couldn't have it both ways. For this the Nestorians were persecuted and exiled, after the Council of Ephesus (in 431, in present-day Turkey), and they ended up in the seventh century, at the last stage of the Silk Road, deep in China, where the first Nestorian church was founded in 638, in Changan—Xian.

What made this all the more fascinating to me was that there was nothing left—no church, no heretics, no books, no pictures, no city. There was only the sun beating down on the mud bricks and the broken walls, and all the religion, trade, warfare, art, money, government and civilization had turned to dust. But there was something magnificent in the immensity of this dumb ruin. I kept on seeing this desert as a place where an ocean had been, a gigantic foreshore of smooth stones and seaside rubble; and this city of Gaocheng was quite in key with that, looking like a sand castle that the tide had mostly floated away.

The only live things here were goats. The frescoes and statues had been stolen—and sold or else removed to museums. Farmers had dismantled many of the buildings so that they could use the bricks, and when the local people found pots or vases or amphoras (and they were good ones, for there was both Greek and Roman influence at Gaocheng), they used them in their kitchens, so that they wouldn't have to buy new ones.

I went to a nearby village of Uighurs and asked them whether they knew anything about Gaocheng. "It is an old city," they said. The people I asked were brown-faced hawk-nosed men whose village was shady and totally off the map. They had donkeys, they had a mosque and a small market, but they didn't speak Chinese or any language other than Uighur. The place was called Flaming Mountain Commune, but that was merely a euphemism. The village had gone to sleep. The women watched me through the folds in their black shawls, and I saw one who looked exactly like my Italian grandmother.

Mr. Liu, my guide, did not speak Uighur, though he had lived not far away for twenty years. I had the impression that these desert-dwelling Uighurs did not take the Han Chinese very seriously. When we started away there was a thump against the side of the car, and the driver slammed on the brakes and chased after the laughing kids. He made a fuss, but no one came to help—no one even listened. And then, a further insult. He stopped to ask directions to an ancient burying ground, the necropolis at Astana, and when he put his head out of the car window, two children stuck feathery reeds into his ears and tickled him. They ran away, as he got out and raged at them.

'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 600 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?"

I hated to leave Turfan. It was the first town I had seen in China that didn't look Chinese, and I wondered why this was so. It was the hottest place I had been, the lowest, the strangest, in the middle of nowhere, with sulky old men and rapacious women and stone-throwing kids. I didn't find any of it threatening—in fact I liked seeing people resisting Chinese dullness, and setting their faces against humorless and canting politicians. It was unusual that such a place had managed to keep its pride and its culture intact, even if its culture was little more than melons and tambourines and Islamic prostrations. It was a green island in lifeless wilderness: very exciting to arrive at on a train, and even better that it was on a gasping, drooling steam train.

I took that same train out of Turfan, Mr. Fang by my side, and headed west through the desert towards Urumchi, which everyone called "Woolamoochie." It is only a hundred miles or so from Turfan, but the trip is slow because of the circuitous passage through the Tian Shan—The Heavenly Mountains. The series of intersecting valleys contain some of China's most beautiful scenery—cliffs, mountain streams, boulder-strewn gullies and deep gorges. The train labors through each of the twelve tunnels and then bursts into one of these valleys in the blinding Xinjiang sunshine, and the rushing water of the Baiyang River drowns out the gasps of the locomotive.

At one point a black and white crane, five feet tall, gathered itself up and leaped out of the suds of the fast river, folded its legs and neck and beat itself slowly towards the cliffs. After several hours of these brilliantly lit valleys and bouncing clouds, the tracks straightened and we headed across brown desert to the large smoking city of Urumchi, the last place in China that is reachable by train. The next big town west of this is Alma-Ata, in the Soviet Union Republic of Kazakhstan. Horsemen and nomads don't recognize national frontiers. There are plenty of Kazakhs in Urumchi, along with Tatars, Uzbeks, Tazhiks and Mongols; but more than a third of the city's population is Uighur, and the railway station is in the Uighur style, the station sign in the Uighur script.

It is almost impossible to find any traveler offering a kind word for Urumchi. What began as a Han outpost on the Silk Road, developed into a Tang trading center and then was captured by Huns and finally Mongols. It became the capital of Chinese Turkestan, but with a strong Russian flavor. For most early travelers it was the first stop in China and something of a disappointment ("no one leaves the town with regret"), because it was lacking in any cultural interest. The treasures, the tombs, the lost cities—all the good places to loot—lay farther east. Urumchi was merely political. Here were the offices, the interrogation centers, the jails, the bureaucrats, the spies. That was the case at the turn of the century, and at the time of the Russian Revolution, and it is pretty much the case now.

Still it had a certain ugly charm, this city of a million and a half people, very few of whom were Han Chinese. It was surrounded by big brown mountains, and it had wide streets and shish kebab parlors. Many shops had rare animals strung up outside. It was very hot in the daytime, and one of the popular recreations was playing pool and billiards under the trees—there were pool tables all over Urumchi, in the open air.

Mr. Fang disappeared when we reached the hotel, but his place was taken by Mr. Yang, who—when I asked about Russians—said there was a large Russian community here which dated from the 1930s. I had just missed their Easter celebration—the Chinese government had given them permission to hold it for the first time since Liberation.

There were so many different ethnic groups in Urumchi I wondered what the Cultural Revolution had been like.

"It was very bad here," Mr. Yang said. "But the minorities were not interested. They did not participate in the Cultural Revolution. Very few of them were Red Guards."

"If they didn't participate, then they must have been persecuted," I said.

"Oh, yes," Mr. Yang said, readily agreeing. "They were persecuted! Islamic religion was declared illegal. Praying was illegal. Mosques were considered bad. The Red Guards went in and smashed up the mosques. And people were punished."

"How did they punish the Muslims?"

"They made them raise pigs."

Typical, I thought; and perfect in its way. It was always said that the Chinese under Mao were a forgiving bunch—believers in redemption and reeducation. But it seemed to me uniquely vindictive to make physicists assemble crappy radios, and to force literature teachers to hoe cabbages or shovel chicken shit, and to put Muslims to work in pigsties. That was on the same order as putting hysterical schoolkids in charge of the middle schools; the result was easily predictable, and in the event the little brats persecuted their teachers and passed in blank examination papers to prove they were good Maoist anti-intellectuals.

"I'll bet the minorities didn't like that very much," I said.

Mr. Yang shrieked with laughter. It was the Chinese laugh that means You said it!

He said, 'They wanted to protest, but they didn't dare. They wanted to have a counterrevolution!"

"Do they want to have a counterrevolution now?" It was a delicate question, because there were always rumors of Uighur discontent; and anyone who saw these frowning, disapproving and uncooperative Uighur faces all over Xinjiang could easily reach the conclusion that here were people who were not entirely sold on the aims of the People's Republic.

Mr. Yang laughed again, a slower warning honk that meant: Do not ask that question. But that particular laugh was also a noise I interpreted as a complex yes.

But I was stuck with Mr. Yang. He asked me what I wanted to see in Urumchi.

I said, "Something memorable."

We drove to Nanshan, the South Mountain Pasture. It was only twenty minutes out of Urumchi but it looked like western Uganda, a great green plain with the "Mountains of the Moon" rising out of it, several snowcapped peaks. What distinguishes these mountainsides from others in China are the spruce forests, tall, cool and blackish-green. On some of the meadows there were goatherds and shepherds with their flocks, and Kazakhs living in mud-smeared huts and log cabins. There were yurts, too, and near them men wearing fur hats with earflaps, and boots and riding breeches; and there were women in shawls and dresses and thick socks. They looked like Russian babushkas, and unlike the Chinese, these women were long nosed and potbellied. They tended vegetable gardens near their cabins, and they had donkeys and cranky dogs and snotty-nosed kids who, because of the cold, also had bright red cheeks.

To avoid talking to Mr. Yang for a while, I walked fast up the slope and found a waterfall. Beneath it, in the stream, there was ice—big yellow crusts of it, and solid thick shelves of it frozen to the rocks. Twenty minutes down the road the townsfolk of Urumchi were perspiring and playing pool under the trees, and here it was freezing.

I found a Uighur, Zhu Ma Hun—Hun means mister and the rest was the Chinese version of the Muslim name Juma (Friday—the Muslim sabbath). He seemed to claim that he had been the Chinese ambassador to Syria, but he may have meant that he worked in that embassy. His Chinese was as limited as mine. On the other hand, he spoke Turkish and Arabic as well as his native Uighur.

He said he came from Tacheng, on the border of Soviet Kazakhstan, about 500 miles from Urumchi and about as far west as anyone can live in China and still be regarded as Chinese. That gave me an idea.

"You're not Chinese, are you?"

"Yes! I'm Chinese!"

He was big and friendly, fat faced. He might have been a Turk, a Smyrna merchant, or a pasha with a big paunch. He said he had been to Mecca on the hajj.

We were strolling along the mountain road. We passed a public toilet—the Chinese tend to erect them in the middle of all beauty spots—and though we were forty feet away, the thing gave off an overpowering stink. Every public toilet I saw in China was so vile it was unusable. Every foreigner mentioned them; the Chinese never did spontaneously—not because they were fastidious but because they were ashamed and phlegmatic, and preferred to suffer in silence.

"I think you don't have many of those in the States," Zhu Ma Hun said.

"Right," I said, thinking he meant the brick shit house, but I saw that he was pointing to a yurt, where an old nomad—possibly a Tadzhik—was lugging a bucket of water.

"But do you have any tents?" he asked.

"Not as many as you," I said.

The Chinese idea of a picnic lunch is an assortment of dry sponge cake and stale cookies. Mr. Yang had given me a box in the car, and I had not realized what was in it until I was some distance up the mountain. I fed the whole thing to some cows.

That afternoon, still hungry, I looked for something to eat in the market at Urumchi. My favorite street food was a kind of stuffed pancake called jiaozi or else fried dumplings. But the treat here was lamb kebabs and flat loaves of bread they called nang, probably from the same root word as the Urdu nan, familiar to anyone who has eaten in an Indian restaurant.

There are so few Western travelers in Urumchi that Uighurs become animated when they see them. They stare, they gabble, they proffer dried fruit and bunches of fresh grapes. One man tried to interest me in his medicines: dried and splayed lizards (for high blood pressure), deer antlers (for potency), snakes, frogs, and birds' beaks, and a hideous little bundle of twiggy things that he said were the umbilical cords of donkeys.

"They are very good for you," he said vaguely, when I asked what they were for.

The traders in the market, selling the carpets which are woven in Urumchi and the clothes that arrive by train, were either bearded men in skullcaps or fat women in brown dresses. They held up their merchandise, they beckoned me over, but whenever I got close they breathed on me and snatched my wrist and spoke the Uighur greeting.

"Shansh marnie?"

There were more dead animals elsewhere in Urumchi. It is a measure of how deep in the hinterland the town is that there are still many wild animals in the surrounding countryside. At one shop I saw the usual snakes and dried lizards and umbilical cords, but also wolf pelts, fox furs, a half a dozen bearskins and the carcass of an eagle—a white-shouldered Imperial Eagle (so my bird book said), with a wingspan of about six feet. This beautiful bird was a great deal bigger than the Uighur woman selling it.

"Do you want to buy it?" she said.

"What would I do with it?"

"You take the feathers and rub them on your skin. It's good medicine."

"What about this?" I said, pointing to the skull of a gazelle, to which two lovely horns were attached.

"Medicine. Grind it into powder. It makes you strong."

There were any number of Western scientists who claimed that traditional Chinese medicine could be efficacious; but what this woman was saying—and the man in the market with his donkeys' umbilical cords—was surely complete nonsense?

I was prepared to believe that the Chinese had the herbal solutions to high blood pressure, and that acupuncture had its practical uses; but when they scrunched up a dead owl and said, Yum, yum—good for your eyes, I wanted to say Bullshit. If I didn't, it was only because I didn't yet know the Chinese word for it.

There are a handful of tigers in China, some in Hunan, some in the far northeast. Needless to say, they are an endangered species. There is so little food for them that when they're very hungry these tigers will eat insects and frogs. In a copy of a Chinese magazine (China Today) I read the following: 'The [Chinese] tiger is a kind of treasure. The hide of the tiger can be made into an expensive coat. The bones, the kidneys, the stomach and the penis are very valuable medicine. The medicine made from the ribs of the tiger is a very good and effective medicine for curing rheumatoid arthritis."

It was bad enough that they were killing the few animals they had left, but they were doing it for the stupidest reasons. But it was probably true that the most accurate epitaph for creatures that have become extinct is: It Tasted Good.

I tried to get Mr. Fang to teach me how to say, "That is merely a superstitious belief with no scientific basis to support it," but we got nowhere. He asked me why I wanted to be able to say this, and I mentioned the Chinese habit of making the lovely little Asian Barred Owlet into soup. He said there were two good reasons for that: They tasted good and they were good for your eyesight.

He was bewildered that anyone with sense should care for the life of a bird or an animal. I did not argue with him. The Chinese themselves often lived in such cramped and uncomfortable conditions that they could hardly be expected to sympathize with animals that lived the same way. Indeed, the way the Chinese lived and died bore a remarkable resemblance to their animals.

Mr. Fang surprised me further by saying, "Mr. Jiao wants to see you."

"Who is Mr. Jiao?"

"General Manager of the Urumchi Branch of China Railways."

"How does he know I'm here?"

"I told him," Mr. Fang said, and looked sad in his sea-lion way. "He wants you to eat with him."

Mr. Jiao Xi Ku was a dark, tough-looking man from the far-eastern province of Shandong. He had a short neck and a broad face, and as the evening advanced and he drank more and more Xinjiang white wine, his dark face was suffused with a kind of alcoholic blush and his eyes became smaller and very red, like two boiled berries.

We were joined by his assistant, Mr. Jie, who—because he was an underling—did not say very much. After the formalities ("We are honored to have you") I realized that this would be a large meal. The cold dishes were set out and ignored; that meant there were about a dozen more courses to come.

I asked Mr. Jiao about the railway. What were the problems in building and maintaining it? He said the worst problem was the sandstorms, the wind that often grew to force 9 or 10. A cold wind met a hot wind in the gobi and caused great turbulence. And then there were the tunnels through the Tian Shan—they had taken years to cut.

"You see, we did all this by ourselves. We had no help."

"I thought the Soviets helped," I said.

"They planned the line to Urumchi. They did the survey—but it was an aerial survey. They didn't foresee all the difficulties. And of course our friendship with them was broken in 1960."

"So you were on your own then?"

"Yes. And what made it especially hard was that they took all their materials away. The tracks, the equipment, the wood, everything. Just loaded it and took it across the border. And they took their plans, too! Rolled up their plans and went home with them. No one helped us!"

"But you stuck to the original plans?"

"We had no choice. We kept to the same route and finished the line in 1963."

I said, "The line is headed straight for the Soviet border."

"That was the idea," Mr. Jiao said. "And we're still building."

"You're going to connect the line to one in the Soviet Union?"

"Yes. At Alataw Shankou [the Dzungarian Gate]. We have built as far as Usu. There's some dispute about who is supposed to build the connecting line, but we expect it to be done by 1990."

Then Mr. Jie piped up, "There used to be a slogan, This year Urumchi, next year the border!'"

"When was that?"

"Nineteen fifty-eight."

Meanwhile, dishes of food were being put on the table, and sampled, and replaced with others. There was peppery Xinjiang chicken, and lamb, and cucumbers with red peppers, and mushrooms and white fungus, and the best dish I had in China, which was chili duck smoked in jasmine tea, rubbed with rice wine, air dried, sprinkled with scallions, steamed and then deep fried. I made a note of the name: zhang cha yazi.

"You like the duck," Mr. Jie said, noticing my greed and heaping my plate with more.

I said, "If I met someone who could make that dish I would marry her."

The two men stared at me and nodded, which was probably what I deserved for the silly remark.

To change the subject, I said, "Do Hans ever marry Uighurs?"

"Very seldom. You see, the Uighurs are afraid that if they marry outside their people it will reduce their numbers. They try to avoid it. Of course, sometimes a Uighur man marries a Han girl. But a Han man cannot marry a Uighur girl."

"What do you mean 'cannot'?"

"It is against the law. The government forbids it."

I guessed that he meant the Xinjiang Uighur government. This was an autonomous region, with its own peculiar laws and its own parliament in Urumchi.

"Anyway, they're Muslims and we're not," Mr. Jiao said.

He said that he had been in Urumchi for twenty-eight years—had come as a sort of pioneer in a voluntary Maoist scheme. I asked him whether he spoke Uighur.

"Very little," he said.

"It's a very hard language," Mr. Jie said. He had been in the region for thirty-one years—he was also from the east, Dalian, on the Gulf of Bohai.

Both men shared the Han conceit, like the British in India, which this Chinese rule in Xinjiang strongly resembled: better that these local folks learn to speak Chinese than that we should grapple with their language.

We were still eating. It was local food, they boasted. And I realized as we reached the last of the dishes that they were paying me the highest possible compliment: it was a meal without rice or noodles or bread. Such stodge was usually offered to plump out a poorer meal; but this was all delicacies.

"Will you go back home when you retire?"

"No, I'm staying here," Mr. Jiao said. "My children are here. This is my home now. I will die here."

We talked about the best railway routes through China. They said they liked going to Xian because that route took in the most interesting parts of China and was the most atmospheric.

"You're talking about the Silk Road," I said. "Ancient history."

Mr. Jiao said, "Yes. Recent history is not very interesting."

Remembering what Mr. Yang said about the Cultural Revolution in Urumchi, I asked whether it was true that it had been violent here.

"It was very bad," Mr. Jiao said. His eyes had become very red and tiny. He made a sweeping gesture with his dark hand. "Very bad."

"Did it disrupt the trains?"

"Yes! For twenty-four days at one time. That was in 1968. But there were lots of disruptions and much worse things. You see, the Red Guards were not one group. There were a number of different factions. Two factions were fighting in Urumchi."

"Fighting in what way? You mean arguing?"

"First it was arguing—over the correct interpretation of what Mao had said. One work unit claimed to be better Maoists than the other. They accused the others of being rightists. And then, after the arguments got them nowhere, they fought with guns. Yes, guns. Bang-bang. People died." His eyes went weepy looking, but it was the wine. "It was very bad."

"Do you think it will come back—a second Cultural Revolution?"

"Absolutely not!" he thundered. "Never!"

"Did Mao ever visit Urumchi?"

"No. Too busy, I think," he said, and glanced at Mr. Jie. "But Zhou Enlai came here and traveled all over." He said it in the affectionate way that Chinese always referred to Zhou. "And recently Deng Xiaoping visited here. He had a good time. He was really impressed."

By now we were all drunk enough to talk about war and friendship. I mentioned the Japanese and said I thought they were planning to take over the world by dominating the world economy because they had failed to do so by military means. And how did it feel as a Chinese to be occupied again by a nation that had been driven out in the 1940s?

"We have a saying in China," Mr. Jiao said. "'You can't attack everyone, so you have to be careful of everyone.'"

The last dishes were taken from the table. Mr. Jiao stood up a little unsteadily and we thanked each other. There were no other formalities; no small talk; no lingering. Nothing is more abrupt than the end of a Chinese banquet.

In succeeding days I discovered that this part of Xinjiang was being opened up for oil exploration. Already it was producing an enormous amount of oil—some oil was being exported to the United States. To the southeast, in the Lop Nor Desert, atom bombs were being tested. There had even been a noisy protest in Peking by university students, but the police had put a stop to that, and the atomic testing had continued.

Most of China's minerals came from Xinjiang, and from the numerous radar dishes on the mountains it was easy to conclude that, strategically, it was an important area. I went to factories and became gloomy, seeing women painstakingly making silk carpets with very ordinary designs: one square yard a month, a whole year to make a not-very-pretty carpet. And there were jade carvers in Urumchi who were doing something similar, taking weeks to make fifty-dollar grinning Buddhas in jade, or six months of cutting and polishing to make a jade dish. I had the impression the stuff didn't even sell particularly well.

No one seemed to mind. Urumchi was in a little time warp, everything happening late. Breakfast was at nine-thirty, dinner at nine at night. At about ten-thirty every night the sun broke through the clouds and shone brilliantly until after eleven, and then at midnight the whole place suddenly went cold.

I went into the desert to look at camels, and then northeast to the Bogda Shan, with their peaks like rocky steeples, and then to Tianchi (The Heavenly Pool), a lake about 2000 feet up a mountainside. Above it, the snowy peak of Bogda Feng (18,000 feet) and the other peaks in the range looked like the lower jaw of a wolf, white and black fangs in a long, angular jaw. There were noodle stalls and Young Pioneers and Chinese tourists at the end of the road, but fifty feet beyond that there was no one—nothing but whispering pines and birds singing. I had not seen anything prettier than this, and while such a piney wilderness did not look Chinese, it did not look European either: the settlements on the road and in the woods were Mongolian yurts and cabins and tiny villages, with those same bowlegged horsemen in boots and women wearing shawls and red-cheeked children. I spoke Chinese to a man who might have been a Kazakh and he just laughed.

I met a Chinese man named Mr. Cheng near the lake. He had given himself the English name "Tom" after reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and when he had done so everyone in his office decided to do the same thing—take on an English first name. He worked in The Agricultural Bank in Altay, in the distant north of Xinjiang, in a little corner of China that was pinched by Russia on one side and Outer Mongolia on the other.

In that place (the bank), Tom Cheng said, "We have Mike, Julian, Jan, Wayne and Bob."

Tom said he was thirty-four, which was just the age of the generation that had been involved in the Cultural Revolution—he would have been about sixteen at the height of it. But had the Cultural Revolution penetrated to the remote town of Altay?

"Oh, yes!" Tom said. "We had it there. I was in middle school."

"Did you have Red Guards?"

"Yes. I was a Red Guard! In my own school! I was an organizer!"

Tom Cheng wore a yellow sweater and Chinese blue jeans and white sneakers. He carried a portable radio and a plastic holdall stenciled Shanghai. All this was regarded as stylish. All he lacked was sunglasses.

I said, "Did you criticize your teachers for being rightists?"

"Yes!" he said eagerly.

"Did you have a Little Red Book?"

"Yes. The Thoughts of Chairman Mao."

"Did you sing songs?"

"Oh, yes. 'The East Is Red' and the others—all the songs."

"Did you criticize running dogs and people who took the capitalist road?"

"Yes!" Why was he smiling?

"Did you break things in Altay?"

His face fell. He paused a moment and peered at me, looking sheepish, and took a deep breath. He said, "You were in China then, eh?"

8. Train Number 104 to Xian

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 mottos. 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 to the horrors of air travel in China. I had a small dose 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, at 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 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 the Chinese can be optimistic) a toothpick. Two hours later a girl wearing an old mailman'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 thought, 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.

"What you think of Chinese airplane?" Mr. Fang asked in a rare burst of English.

"Lamentable."

"Thank you!" he said. "Maybe we take plane to Xian?"

"You take the plane. I'll take the train."

"Tomorrow?" he said hopefully.

"Tonight."

Mr. Fang seemed weary. If I tired him out he might leave me alone. He was not actively offensive; but it made me uneasy always to see him ten steps behind me, silently looking on, clutching his dictionary, and now probably looking up the meaning of the word lamentable.

There was a dwarf at Lanzhou Station—an exceedingly small dwarf, less than three feet tall. At first I thought he was a child, but he had a wrinkled face and a sort of frowning and anxious expression; a tiny hat, tiny slippers. He walked very briskly. That was the first giveaway—children never walk with such conviction. And then people began to stare. I followed this dwarf through the station.

People pointed, some shrieked and called out. A Chinese man fumbled with a camera but was not quick enough to take a picture. A child saw the dwarf and yelled to his mother. And then, strangest of all, he was seen by a group of about fifteen deaf-and-dumb people. They were enthusing noiselessly and wildly signaling—pointing at the stern little man. They tried to surround him as they gesticulated and mimed their fascination, not realizing how grotesque they were in their dumb-show ridicule and that this dwarf was just a person on his way home. Then there were hoots of laughter, from Chinese who found the deaf-and-dumb people funny and the dwarf hilarious. The dwarf hurried away, while the crowd stared at these handicapped people who were speaking to each other like Siamese dancers, flicking their fingers. The Chinese never seemed to hide their interest in anything. They stared frankly—they put their faces against my book as I read it; when I opened my wallet, they peered in; when I unzipped my bag, a crowd gathered to look at my laundry. Chinese were seldom alone; usually they were part of a watching crowd, which made it all possible. They were riveted by the freakish and the pathetic.

In front of Lanzhou Station there were about thirty young people standing in a long line, just at the exit door. They carried red banners with gold characters inscribed on them, and long streamers and placards and flags. They were silent, standing patiently, like mourners. And I thought perhaps they were mourners, awaiting a catafalque from Train 104. It was eleven at night, and as this was Lanzhou, very chilly and damp.

"What are they doing, Mr. Fang?"

"They are welcoming the delegates," he said, without hesitation.

"Which delegates?"

"From the conference."

"Which conference?"

"There are so many conferences," he said.

I felt I was being fobbed off with a lame explanation. I pressed Mr. Fang a bit harder.

"Perhaps an agricultural conference," he said.

His perhaps made me suspicious. I then suspected that they were striking, protesting, making some sort of fuss. If so, that was interesting, because fusses and strikes were never reported in the China Daily. In fact, the demand of most demonstrations—when they occurred, which was rare—was that the demonstration be reported in the Chinese news media.

"What do those signs say, Mr. Fang?"

"I can't read them without my glasses."

"Please put on your glasses," I said. "I am very curious."

"Hah! Hah! Hah!" he howled, pushing his glasses on and leaning forward. "Hah! Hah! Hah!"

This grunting mirthless laugh meant: I have just made a jackass of myself.

Then he removed his glasses and became very solemn. Chinese laughter often had a sobering effect. It was more than explanatory; it was also cathartic.

'They are advertising a hotel."

"One hotel?"

"Many hotels."

"How many?"

"Many, many," he said sadly. "When the passengers come out of the station they will look up and see the banners. This hotel offers good food, that one offers good rooms, this one is nearby. They are in competition. They are doing it for business."

Mr. Fang was surprised that such go-ahead commercial sense existed in distant Gansu. And I think it was news to him so many restaurants, guest houses and hotels were available in Lanzhou. It suggested more than the free market; it hinted at bourgeois ideas and competitive instincts.

I said, 'They are taking the capitalist road!"

Mr. Fang replied coldly, "We do not use that expression any more."

He always winced when I trotted out expressions such as "class enemy" (jieji diren) and "running dog" (zou gou).

We bypassed the clamor of two hundred travelers trying to push through the Hard Sleeper turnstile, and we knocked at the Soft Sleeper Waiting Room door. The room attendant admitted us and showed us to the overstuffed chairs. I made a mental note to add antimacassars to my list of antiquated Chinese manufacturing (washboards, quill pens, corsets, backscratchers, fish glue, spittoons, steam locomotives, etc.), and I asked Mr. Fang for his dictionary.

Capitalist road was in it under road, and so was running dog ("a lackey, a flunky, a stooge"). I looked up ziyou, "freedom, liberty," and found a series of definitions, each with its own explanatory sentence. I copied the most interesting ones into my notebook.

Citizens of China enjoy freedom of speech, correspondence, the press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration, and the freedom to strike.

Bourgeois ideas must not be allowed to spread unchecked.

The petty [sic] bourgeoisie's individualistic aversion to discipline.

Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective.

We can't decide this matter for ourselves; we must ask the leadership for instructions.

This official Chinese dictionary, reprinted by the state publishing house in 1985, contained definitions and illustrations that all contradicted life in China in fundamental ways. I thought: When that book is revised and rewritten I will believe that China has changed. It was clearly out-of-date, but like much else that was said—the guff about Marxism-Leninism and the guiding spirit of Mao's Thought—it was ineffectual. Such sentiments were dead but they wouldn't lie down.

Around midnight, the train drew in. There was a commotion outside as the hotel touts and agents jostled for attention. I went to the sleeping car. Mr. Fang vanished. I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy. My own gooseneck lamp, plastic flowers, thermos, pillow, quilt and comforter. There was a tablecloth on the little side table, and a five-foot crocheted antimacassar on the seat back.

The only disquieting part of it was the music. I couldn't twist the knob with my rubber-band trick, so I took out my Swiss army knife and unscrewed the loudspeaker from the ceiling, disconnected it, replaced the plate and was able to read in silence. I was reading Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" because a Chinese woman had said that the story revealed the Chinese national character. So far it was about Ah Q's pompousness, foolishness, pretense and cowardice—and he had the farcical misapprehension of Mr. Pooter. Was that the point? ^*

I read on, soothed by the ponderous motion of the train and the melancholy cry of the steam whistle.

There had been a bucket of dead eels next to the hopper in the toilet cubicle. I had glimpsed the creatures in the middle of the night. That was memorable—and a good thing, too, because the next morning I went to the dining car and asked what was on the menu, and the chef said, "Eels!"

He said the train was operated by the Qingdao Railway Board and had just come from the coast. It made a great loop through China, bringing with it Shandong specialties—seafood, jelly candy and China's best beer.

We were still in Gansu, going southeast towards 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 river itself was muddy, flat, shallow, full of sandbanks this time of year.

"There are no fish in the Wei," a man told me at Baoji, the railway junction where we stopped at noon. And then he loudly cleared his throat and spat a gob on the platform and in a reflex of politeness scuffed it with his shoe.

Everyone hawked, everyone spat, sometimes dribbling, sometimes in a trajectory that ran like candlewax down the side of a spittoon. They tended to spit in wastebaskets or against tree trunks; but not even a government campaign restrained some from spitting on floors, and I saw people spit on carpets, always remembering politely to grind it in with the sole of their foot.

I noticed on the platform at Baoji how they walked scuffingly, sort of skating, with their arms flapping, with narrow jogging shoulders, or else hustling puppetlike, with their limbs jerking. They minced, they plodded, they pushed, keeping their hands out—straight-arming their way—and their heads down. They could look entirely graceless—unexpected in Chinese.

And they talked very loudly in that deaf, nagging and interrupting way, as if no one ever listened to them and they had to shout to be heard. The radios and televisions were always turned too loud, too, the volume at maximum. Why? Was there a national deafness, or was it just a rather unfortunate habit?

The Chinese left doors open—that was a national habit. And they liked sitting in their underwear on the train. They were naturals for relaxation, and could turn even the shortest journey into a pajama party. They were very tidy in the way they dressed and packed their bags, but they were energetic litterers, and they were hellish in toilets. It was strange seeing a neatly dressed mob leaving a railway car that they had befouled.

They spat, they shouted, they stared and undressed in public; and yet with all this they seldom quarreled. They were extremely shy—timid even—modest and naive. "Modesty helps one to go forward," Mao said, "whereas conceit makes one lag behind." On trains they often looked contemplative.

We were now through the Wei Gorges, and after Baoji the land opened up and became flatter. It was spread with wheat fields in which people were scything and bundling and carting away the stalks. It had grown very hot and hazy, and though it was humid, too, this midafternoon the fields were full of people, because of the harvest. They stood chest-high in the wheat, and they disappeared when they bent over with their sickles.

The villages here were tumbledown, but even the poorest houses had tall TV antennas. In some countrified places there was that other Chinese conundrum, of ugly tenements and barracklike buildings in a pastoral setting. We stopped at Xianyang, where China's first emperor had 460 of his critics buried alive, and then we crossed the Wei again—two shallow here for even the smallest boat—and through more wheat fields to the city of Xian.^*

The first sign of the city proper is the high wall around it, like a medieval fortification, built in the Ming Dynasty, fourteenth century, and recently restored. It has crenellations and sentry posts and towers with windows designed (like those on the Great Wall) for the width of crossbows. And like the Great Wall, it was built as much to keep some people in as to keep others out. The Xian city wall was high and bulky, and the train passed the North Gate, which looked like a temple, with red beams and a large arched roof. Near it was a big banner with two-foot characters, saying, Be Disciplined and Obey the Law.

Xian Station was new, the streets were broad, the city was well organized; it was as though it had been designed to be visited. As the capital of the brilliant but brief Qin empire and the starting point of the Silk Road, Xian had always been regarded as a visitable city. Even 8000 years ago, people lived here in reasonable comfort—the proof was at the excavated neolithic site at Banpo, nearby. Xian's most glorious associations are with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the man who unified China, burned the books; built the Great Wall; standardized the laws, currency, roads, weights, measures, axle lengths and written language; and ordered the now famous terra-cotta warriors to be made. That was well over 2000 yeats ago, and the warriors weren't uncovered again until twelve years ago.

"When I was young, no tourists came to Xian," Mr. Xia told me, as we walked around town. He was thirty-two years old, a local guide, one of the many I hired en route. "There were some visitors and foreign experts from East European countries. But we never saw Americans."

"When did they start coming?"

"Obviously, after the terra-cotta army was found. Then, people were very interested. More and more things were unearthed. In 1980 some diggers found the bronze horse and chariot. People wanted to see these things."

That was wonderful for the Chinese. They probably realized that the value of a tourist lies in his attention span. Sight-seeing is perfect for a dictatorship—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The nonsightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency and has to be deported. Also, typically, the nonsightseer is not a big spender and, in his or her unregulated way, is quite a dangerous person to have around.

I hated sight-seeing in China. I felt the Chinese hid behind their rebuilt ruins so that no one could look closely at their lives. And the rebuilding was poor—usually botched and too sloppily painted. The places were always impossibly crowded and noisy. The Chinese were so desperate in their courtships that they went on tourist outings in order to hide and canoodle. Every holy mountain and famous pagoda had more than its share of motionless couples hugging and (sometimes) smooching. It was no good saying a particular place was hideous or pointless. It was the ritual of visiting—the outing—that mattered.

Xian was one of the few exceptions I found. It was genuinely interesting and pretty, and rather a stately and dignified place—different in that respect from most other Chinese cities, which were sooty and badly made and industrial. But Xian knows it is important. Hotels were being put up quickly to accommodate tourists, and in what had been for hundreds of years a very provincial city, off the beaten track, people seemed aware of the city's new celebrity as a tourist attraction.

The stall holders of Xian's market are relentless in their hectoring. They plead, they beg, they bargain. They hawk cast figures of the warriors, and mats, and puppets cut out of cowhide, and horrible little coasters, and they push them in your face and shriek, "Ming Dynasty!"

Tourists and the free market economy arrived at about the same time, which meant that the first tourists found rapacious individuals waving handicrafts and haggling.

A small proportion of the merchandise is not junk. It is stuff from attics and old chests—the family jewels, knickknacks that have been around for years, filthy little incense burners, cracked jade seals, tobacco boxes made out of hammered silver, rags of silk, very old and beautiful clothes made of silk and embroidery, and bonnets, jade wine cups, old brass padlocks, wooden images of gods and goddesses, silver fingernails, elaborate hairpins, perfume jars, snuff containers, pewter jars, pretty teapots, chipped dishes and plates, ivory chopsticks and mortally wounded vases.

Entirely off their own bat the Chinese turned the free market into a flea market. The trinkets and treasures have come out of the woodwork, and the stall holders or improvisational market people have become pestering hagglers for the first time in the People's Republic.

A thought that occurred to me back in Xinjiang was that the Uighurs were reverting to what they had always been—travelers, nomads, bargainers, inflexible Muslims and "shansh marnie" people. So it was elsewhere, too. Scholars who had had to pretend to be political parrots for the sake of Mao were re-forming themselves into that old distinguished class of scholar gentry; gamblers and drinkers were reemerging, and so were family farmers, and tinkers and pot wallopers, and small businessmen; and these folks living at the margins of the big cities—the market traders. Especially them.

What choice had they? Politics was closed to them. They couldn't emigrate. They couldn't criticize the government. The Communist Party was like a Masonic order, just as mysterious a brotherhood, possibly sinister, and just about unjoinable—you had to be chosen, and the most supine and robotlike yes-men were the likeliest candidates.

In such circumstances, who wouldn't dig out the family silver and flog it to tourists?

"This is old—very old!" they squawked. "Early Qing Dynasty! Ming Dynasty! Fifty kuai! How much you pay? Make me an offer!"

That fascinated me. No fixed prices, no fixed location, no overheads. Just a wild-eyed person clutching my arm and pushing a string of old beads at me.

What made the whole enterprise even more interesting was that the stuff ranged from certifiable treasures to outright fakes. I went to Mount Li to look at the man-made hill which is probably the tomb of the first emperor—and it is probably just as likely that the tomb was looted in 206 B.C., the year his dynasty ended.

A man lurking in the market near that hill hissed at me and pointed to a bulge in his shirt, indicating that he had something wonderful inside.

"You want to sell me something?" I said.

He shushed me, making a worried face. And with great caution he showed me what he had. It was a brass jar, with a lid, about five inches high, with markings on it.

"Two hundred yuan," he said.

I laughed at him, but he persisted. "Look," he said. "The sides. The top. Look closely."

There were erotic carvings on it, five sexual positions, tiny inscriptions, and bits of flummery and decoration. Also, I could see that it was old—not ancient, but old. Qing. Nineteenth century. Maybe a little earlier than 1850. Dao Guang period, according to my book.

"I'll give you fifty."

He laughed at me, harder than I had laughed at him.

"What is it?"

"For special medicine," he said, and leered.

He meant aphrodisiacs—what else would you put in such a thing?

He dropped his price to 150 and then to 100. Then I showed him 80 yuan in foreign exchange certificates, and our illegal bargain was sealed. It was not a treasure, but it was unusual, and it was a damned sight more interesting than the dusty hill on the tourist itinerary.

The fakes were not difficult to spot, but the whole idea of people knowingly selling fakes said a great deal for this new burst of Chinese enterprise. Sometimes they were little stone statues, often they were clumsy bronze copies, but the majority of the bogus merchandise was in the form of marble or limestone heads or carvings that had been made to look as though they had been hacked off a temple wall. "Very old," the traders said. "Song! Ming! Qing!"They quoted high prices and dropped them. Fifty other people were selling identical stuff, but that did not stop anyone from claiming the items were ancient, when, as was very obvious, they had all been made in a factory that specialized in fakes.

A very large market, selling all these things—fakes, treasures and flea-market knickknacks—had just been specially built and recently opened adjacent to the site of the terra-cotta army. It is the government's way of admitting that such free-lance traders are here to stay. Some stalls have roofs, and are rented for a small fee; but the rest of the market is in the open air, set up on tables and benches.

"When the foreigners come, business is very good," a man told me, after selling me a pretty perfume bottle for about a dollar. "But the Chinese people don't buy these things. They don't like antiques."

They are proud of the terra-cotta warriors, though.^*

When I was there, thousands of visitors were looking at the figures, and very few of these people were from overseas. The majority were Chinese tourists who had come great distances in rickety buses that had been hired by their factory or cooperative or work unit. They were poorly dressed and perspiring in the summer heat, they hurried to and fro in little trotting groups; they grinned for pictures, striking poses in front of the hangarlike building that houses the warriors. They were photographed by foreign tourists, and some of them returned the compliment—or insult—and took pictures of the foreigners.

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.

The rare quality of the terra-cotta warriors is that, unlike anything else on the tourist route in China, they are exactly as they were made. They were vandalized by the rebellious peasants in the year 206 b.C., when these people invaded the tomb to steal the weapons—crossbows, spears, arrows and pikestaffs (they were all real)—that the clay warriors were holding. After that the figures lay buried until, in 1974, a man digging a well hit his shovel against a warrior's head and unearthed it and the disinterrment was begun. The warriors are the one masterpiece in China that has not been repainted, faked and further vandalized. If they had been found before the Cultural Revolution instead of after it, they would undoubtedly have been pulverized by Red Guards, along with all the other masterpieces they smashed, burned or melted down.

Chinese tourists also flock to Xian to see the hot springs, the Hua Qing Pool, a sort of Tang Dynasty resort that is associated with the two-week arrest in 1936 of Chiang Kai-Shek, the so-called Xian Incident. They crowd around the sign saying This Is the Window that Chiang Kai-Shek Jumped Out Of and say, "Where are the bullet holes?"

They go to the Big Goose Pagoda, the Drum Tower, the Temple of the Recumbent Dragon, and the Banpo neolithic site, where a sign reads People in this primitive society with low productivity couldn't understand the structure of the human body, living and dying and many phenomena of nature, so they began to have an initial religious idea.

They go to the Great Mosque, Qinzhen Si, where many people still do have religious ideas. This mosque was founded 1200 years ago, and enlarged, vandalized, demolished and rebuilt many times since. It was in the process of being restored when I visited. I asked an old man how many believers there were in Xian. He said there were hundreds and that a few dozen had been to Mecca. He also said that during the Cultural Revolution the mosque had housed animals—pigs, mainly—which seemed the most popular way of insulting Muslims. When I left him he said, "We are Sunni. Not Shi'ites. No Khomeini. Ha-ha!"

That was a ha-ha I hadn't heard before, and seemed to mean Death to the infidels.

Walking among the gates and pillars with their Arabic inscriptions, I saw an old man.

"Salaam aleikum," I said. "Peace and blessing be upon you."

"Wa-aleikum salaam," he replied, returning the greeting. "Are you from Pakistan?"

"No. America."

"Are there Muslims in America?" he asked, using the word Mussulmen in his Chinese.

"Yes. Quite a few," I said. "Why did you think I was from Pakistan? Did you think I looked like a Pakistani?"

"Maybe," he said, and shrugged. "I don't know. "I've never seen one."

9. The Express to Chengdu

I became sad, looking at Mr. Fang's lopsided expression of longing, one eye screwed up and one spiky patch of his hair sticking up. He could be so silent. He merely followed me, perhaps hoping that I would do something wrong. He looked so grateful when I asked for his help. Now we were in the Soft Class Waiting Room at Xian Station, killing time with magazines, and I became sadder when I saw him trying to work out with a dictionary a page in China Products Monthly. I had the same magazine, and that page was an ad for "Jiangsu Ceramics"—small, ugly statues of angels, Santa Clauses, snow-covered churches, Mickey Mouses, choirboys with lyres; and what Mr. Fang was trying to read, described the ceramics as "Ingeniously conceived! Vividly modeled! Freshly colored! Boundlessly interesting!"

He looked up and smiled at me, which depressed me even more, because I suspected that he was sad. Then I decided that he was not sad at all. He was like so many other Chinese—reserved and fatalistic and steeling themselves against disappointment. Yes, the Great Wall was a masterpiece and the Tang Dynasty had been glorious and they had managed to thrash the Japanese, and they invented poison gas, toilet paper and the decimal point; but they also had a long history of convulsions and reverses. Never mind that they forgot they invented the mechanical clock. Look at the upheavals that had taken place in just the past hundred years or so: the Taiping revolt, the humiliating colonialism of Europe and Japan, the Boxer Rebellion, the fall of the empire in 1911, the republic of Sun Yat-sen, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the battling between Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang and Mao's communists, The Great Leap Forward and all the other witch-hunts and hysterical purges that followed the emergence of the People's Republic, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Who wouldn't be uneasy? And these sudden agonies were undoubtedly the reason that few people ever showed confidence in the future. It was better not to think about it. And it was a loss of face to seem disappointed, which was another reason the Chinese never opened presents in front of the giver (nor commented on the gift, no matter how large or small), and why their impulse when startled was always to laugh.

Mr. Fang, who was a Russian specialist, who had lectured on Pushkin and acted as interpreter in Moscow and Leningrad at a time when the Russians and the Chinese had been comrades, had been howled at in the 1960s for teaching a bourgeois foreign language and forced to carry boulders in a sort of chain gang. And now he was shadowing an ungrateful American through central Sichuan. Instead of screaming What next! he looked up and shyly smiled.

He pretended not to see me board the train, but I called out to him, "I'll see you in Chengdu."

The train pulled out at about five-thirty in the bright early evening, and passed the wheat fields and the harvesters. It also passed a great number of mounds and tombs and tumuli, probably all of them looted (though no one took treasures to the Government Antique Exchange anymore, where they were paid a pittance for the object which was then sold for a high price at a state shop). I had heard at my hotel that another pit near Xian had just been excavated and was full of yet more terra-cotta figures. I asked for information on this, but either no one knew about it or else they had decided to keep it a secret.

As the sun drooped and the steam train went chik-chik-chik-chik- chisssss at a siding, a dark, perspiring Chinese man threw the compartment door open and entered, dragging four big bags.

"I am from Kowloon," he said.

He looked very sick. He was out of breath, he fumbled with straps and zippers. He jangled a bunch of keys that hung on a chain from his thick leather belt. His track shoes stank. He constantly said sorry, both in Mandarin and English. His eyes were narrow wounds.

"I drink too much last night."

He abruptly left his bags and ran out of the compartment. When he returned, he cleared his throat and said, "I vomited in the toilet."

Another man entered the compartment. This coming and going was quite usual. Travelers sauntered through the train looking for empty berths and free seats. When they located one they paid a surcharge on their ticket and claimed the place. An empty compartment did not stay empty for long; and the coming and going went on all night, too.

This new man was youngish and rather tough looking, beefy faced, with a big belly and big feet.

"I want to sleep here," he said, slapping the berth on which I was sitting.

"This is mine," I said. "I am sleeping here."

He didn't like my saying that. He was in a sort of uniform—army pants and a khaki jacket. He had the look of a pushy, bullying Red Guard. There was no question in my mind but that he was a Party hack.

I ignored him and continued to write in my diary, pleasant thoughts about Xian. This Red Guard grumbled to the man from Kowloon.

"He says he has to sleep there," the man from Kowloon said.

"Sorry," I said.

Because I had been in the compartment first, and this was my berth, I had the use of the table, and this corner seat. I knew he coveted it when the man from Kowloon said, "He has to write his report."

"I have to write my report," I said.

"His is very important."

"So is mine."

"His report is for the government."

"Then it must be a load of crap."

"He is not writing about a road," the man from Kowloon said.

The two men took out cigarettes and filled the compartment with smoke. I told them to cut it out—a recent ruling on Chinese railways had said that people could smoke only with the consent of other passengers. It was late, and "hot, and stifling in this small compartment.

"It's against the rules," I said.

They put their cigarettes away and began to talk—very loudly, shouting in fact, because the man from Kowloon had the Hong Konger's characteristically poor command of Mandarin, and the Red Guard was from Urumchi and spoke a rather debased version of Mandarin. This language problem didn't stop them yakking, but it meant that most of the time they were interrupting each other and repeating things constantly. I opened the window because of the heat. Smoke from the engine blew in and gagged me, and the chik-chik-chik made my teeth rattle.

"He says he has to write his report."

"First I have to finish mine," I said.

"He wants to smoke."

"Smoking isn't allowed in the compartment unless everyone agrees," I said. "I don't agree."

"He wants to know why there is a smoking box on the wall," said the man from Kowloon, clicking an ashtray on the wall.

"Why not ask the fuwuyuan or the lieche yuan?" I said, because these room attendants were passing our door.

"Each room has smoking boxes," the Red Guard said to me, in an intimidating way. "What are they for?"

"For putting out cigarettes," I said, trying to stare him down.

"We must have cooperation," he said.

This meant: Stop being a pain in the ass.

"For the sake of friendship," he said.

This little formula was spoken through gritted teeth.

"I am minding my own business, so why don't you mind yours?" I said. "Fish face."

I went back to my diary, but their shouting back and forth made it impossible to concentrate, so I went to the dining car. It was past eight o'clock, late by Chinese standards (they usually ate dinner before six-thirty or seven), but the menu was recited to me in the usual way, and I ordered. No food came. I asked why.

"There are some foreigners on board," the waiter said.

"I'm a foreigner."

"But you are alone," he said. "We must wait for the group."

We stopped at Baoji, the junction we had passed through a week before; but this time we turned south towards Sichuan. No food came. It was after eight-thirty. The waiter said, "Foreigners ... Group."

I told him I was hungry and to bring the food soon. "Dying of hunger" was a phrase sounding like ursula. Still no food came.

Then the group of foreigners appeared: fourteen chunky Swedes, with sunburned arms and whitish hair. One had a video camera. As he poked it and whirred it, the others put their elbows on the sticky dining-car tables. Their guide bought all the beer, before I could order any. Then the food came—to them and finally to me. It was after nine o'clock. The Swedes ate slowly, trying to pincer their slippery noodles. Then the train stopped at Liangkou with such a jolting halt the noodle bowls shot into the Swedes' laps.

"I'm still hungry," I said to the waiter. "Is there any more food?"

"We have some sausages."

"Pork?"

"No. Horse."

I had four of them. They were not bad. The meat was dark and tough, with a strong smoky taste.

When I got back to the compartment it was full of men—the man from Kowloon, the Red Guard and three others. The corridor was crowded with men in pajamas, and children squawking, and some cardplayers. The fans rattled and buzzed; so did the train.

"He is from Xinjiang," the man from Kowloon said. "He is a student. He wants to know your name."

"My name is Paul. He is sitting on my bed. I want to go to sleep."

This disapproving tone had the effect of emptying the compartment very quickly. We turned the lights out, but the three others—a new man had joined us—went on shouting at each other in the darkness.

There was no dawn. The mist grew lighter, thinned slightly, and as we passed at that early hour from Shaanxi into the vast, populous province of Sichuan, small knobby trees became visible, and so did the faint outlines of mountains and hills; and people appeared as small dark brush strokes in this simple Chinese watercolor.

The mist hung over the mountains, and as the sun heated it and made it thinner, a greenness came into it, and there was a lushness, the rice fields, beneath it. It was like looking at a landscape through etched glass, seeing everything blurred, and now and then getting a clear glimpse of the beautiful contours of mountains, of fields and valleys. The sharpest line was the path that always led around the hillside, a packed narrowness that looked bright and baked. In this blur, people were hoeing, and cycling, and leading hairy pigs to market.

The landscape was softened by the mist, but when the mist all burned away what had seemed idyllic looked senile. And the farmers had a hard routine this humid summer morning. Chinese farming is backbreaking, but it is some consolation to know that these days the farmers are well-off—much better off than any teacher or factory worker. The free market has helped them by guaranteeing them good prices: they no longer have to sell at fixed and punitive prices to the state. We had only gone a few hundred miles, from Shaanxi into Sichuan, but we had moved from a wheat-growing region to paddy fields. It was more southerly here, and wetter and warmer.

That was another virtue of traveling by train in China. It allowed one to make visual connections in a place that was otherwise full of shocks and bafflements. Every other mode of travel made the country seem incomprehensible. Well, even on a train it was incomprehensible at times. But doing it this way helped. It wasn't one countryside: it was a thousand landscapes and hundreds of crops. Sometimes, only an hour passed and everything was different.

Now there were cornfields, and harvesters flinging ears of corn into gunnysacks; and browsing buffaloes; and a brownish goose with an orange beak standing in the middle of a flooded field; and women yoked to buckets; and a human scarecrow—a boy frightening birds by waving a long stick with blue streamers on it; and a man on the bank of a canal, fishing Chinese-style, a fishing pole in each hand.

I could not understand the Red Guard's Chinese, so I asked the man from Kowloon whether he would translate my questions.

He said, "I am interested myself!"

"What does he do for work?"

The Red Guard was sulking in his bed.

"He works in an institute—agricultural. No. Language institute. In Urumchi."

"I was in Urumchi."

"He says, many people go to Urumchi."

I said, "What language does he teach at this institute?"

"He doesn't know the answer to your question."

"Does he speak foreign languages?"

"He says he works there—"

The Red Guard was gabbling in his berth.

"—he is not a teacher."

"What is his job?"

"He is a cadre."

An official. Why did they use this French word? Probably because they hated the word official—it smacked of feudalism and the class system.

"Is he a member of the Chinese Communist Party?"

"He is."

One of the few.

"Ask him when he joined."

"When he was eight years old."

"That's impossible."

Gabble, gabble.

"When he was sixteen, he says. He joined the Party then."

"Ask him if he was a Red Guard."

"Yes, he was a Red Guard."

I was pleased that I had spotted him. But why did he still look like one.

"Ask him if he was in the Gang of Rebellion." These brutes, the Zaofan Pai, were said to be the toughest, most thuggish of the Red Guards. They did battle with the Bao Huang Pai (Emperor's Gang) until long after the Cultural Revolution ended.

The question was translated, but with a mutter that meant That's enough questions, the Red Guard slid off his berth and hurried into the corridor, clacking his plastic sandals.

Nearer Chengdu, the man from Kowloon said that this was his first trip to China. His name was Cheung. He was exactly my age—he showed me his passport so that I would see his name written: we had the same birthday.

"The Year of the Snake," I said.

He was married, he had three children. He was a taxi driver in Kowloon and had come to China for the same sentimental reasons that so many overseas Chinese had for making the journey. And practical reasons, too: the discounts, the freebies, the brotherly goodwill, the ease in making arrangements as a Foreign Compatriot, and all the other angles that went under the general heading of ethnic nepotism. In Xian he had met some Chinese taxi drivers and they had bought him enough beer to get him plastered.

"In ten years you'll be able to drive your taxi from Kowloon into China."

"Yes," he said. "But I don't want to."

"Chinese taxi drivers make money—didn't they tell you that?"

And because no Chinese could afford to ride in a Chinese taxi, the customers were always foreigners. This was what the Party would call a pernicious influence, and I agreed. Chinese taxi drivers, as a breed, seemed to me stubborn and grasping. And they weren't particularly skillful drivers. It was very rare to spend any length of time in Chinese taxis and not experience an accident—usually your taxi crashing into a cyclist.

Cheung said, "They have to earn seventy yuan a day. After they make that amount on the meter they get a percentage of the rest. But they only have to work eight hours. In Hong Kong we all work twelve hours. It's a very hard life. Food is expensive, rent is expensive, everything costs too much."

"Maybe the Chinese government will straighten things out when they take over Hong Kong.

"No. They will ruin it. No democracy."

"There's no democracy there now. It's a British Colony. The governor-general is appointed. And the strange thing is," I said, because I had suddenly realized what a political anachronism Hong Kong was, "very few people actually speak English in Hong Kong."

"We speak Cantonese."

"That's the point. It's part of Guangdong province, really. British culture didn't sink in. It's all Cantonese."

Cheung did not want to argue. He said, "I don't care. I am going to the United States."

"You mean, for good?"

"Yes. I have a sister in San Francisco. I also am getting a visa from the American embassy in Hong Kong."

"Will you be driving a taxi in the States?"

"No. I will get a job in a restaurant."

"A Chinese restaurant?"

"Of course. There are many. In Chinatown."

"Have you ever been to the United States?" I asked.

"No," Cheung said. "But I have spoken to my friends. I can earn eight hundred dollars a week."

"Doing what?"

"Maybe cooking."

"What do you mean 'maybe'? Can you cook?"

"I am Cantonese. I can cook Cantonese food, I think."

"Why not stay in Hong Kong?" I said. "Are you really afraid that things will change when the Chinese take over?"

He thought a moment, then said, "In Hong Kong is too hard work. America is better. Better living."

"Why not England?"

"I don't want England. Not good living."

"Have you been to England?"

"No. But my friends tell me."

He was packing up his gear. It was near eleven in the morning, and rice fields slid by in this green, steamy place. We would be in Chengdu soon. Anyway, Cheung was sick of my questions. But I was fascinated by this man who had already decided to chuck his life in Hong Kong and immigrate to a wonderful new existence in America—a little paradise called Chinatown, where Chinese people fitted in, earned American salaries and never had to integrate or make any concessions to this big, sheltering republic. It also interested me that this British colonial had rejected Britain.

"Who is the prime minister of Britain?"

"I don't know."

"Who is the leader of the Chinese people?"

"Deng Xiaoping."

"Who is the president of the United States?"

This puzzled him for a moment, but only a moment. "President," he began thoughtfully, and drew a breath. "Nixon."

Nixon had been out of office for twelve years.

"You think Nixon is president of the United States right now?"

"Yes. I think so. I like him. Do you like him?"

"Not very much."

"Which party do you support? Liberty Party, or the other one?"

"Liberty Party," I said. "We call them Democrats." But Mr. Cheung was not listening. He had hoisted his bags for our arrival in Chengdu. I said, "By the way, who is the governor-general of Hong Kong?"

"Sir Something," Mr. Cheung said, and hurried off the train.

***

At a dark, noisy garagelike restaurant called Pockmarked Mother Chen's (Chen Ma Po, home of hot bean curd), I looked into a mirror and saw Mr. Fang staring at the back of my head. After my bowl of bean curd was served to me I was given a plate of hot dumplings. I liked them, but I hadn't ordered them. They weren't on the menu; they had been bought at a stall.

"That man bought them for you," the waiter said, pointing to the back of the room.

But by then Mr. Fang had gone. He had been very observant over these past weeks: he knew of my fondness for dumplings. But he had never mentioned it. I was touched by his gesture, but then I became suspicious. What else had he noticed about me?

The bean curd was flavored with oil and onion and chopped pork and flakes of red pepper the size of a thumbnail. The fried dumplings were filled with spinach. The rice was damp and lumpy, but that didn't matter—Chinese rice was made in huge tureens, so it was always stodgy. This was the Chinese equivalent of a fast-food joint. People popped in for a quick meal and they hurried away. Near me a blind man sat with his guide boy—the blind man had a tight grip on the boy's wrist. And satisfied eaters, having finished, were blowing their noses in their fingers, or hawking loudly, or spitting onto the floor.

Turning away from the sight of a man taking aim at a spittoon—was I a silly ethnocentric old fussbudget for finding a brimming spittoon unwelcome in a restaurant?—I saw a woman watching me.

"Are you an American?" she asked, hopefully, in English.

Her name was Mrs. Ji. She said she was pleased to meet an American because she had recently visited the United States—seeing relatives—and had had a wonderful time. She had spent most of her time in Seattle, but had also been to Los Angeles, San Francisco and even Las Vegas, where she had gambled and broken even.

In Shanghai I had met a Chinese woman who told me that the sight of Chinatown in Boston had depressed her. It seemed to her fatuous and antediluvian, a sort of Guangzhou ghetto. Didn't these people know better than to behave like sheep? I asked Mrs. Ji if she felt any of that exasperation.

"I know what she meant," Mrs. Ji said. "I don't like American food, so I ate at a lot of Chinese restaurants. They were all bad. And the so-called Sichuan restaurants—no good at all."

"But not much spitting," I said. 'These spittoons—"

"We spit too much," she said. "The government is trying to stop it."

The antispitting posters were everywhere, but it was really a campaign to encourage spitters to aim rather than to discourage spitting. The message was: Use a spittoon.

After a while—I was asking Mrs. Ji about her family—she told me that she was divorced.

"My husband met a younger woman a few years ago," she said, and volunteered the information that she herself was forty-eight years old.

"Was it easy to get a divorce?"

"Very easy."

"Are there many divorced people in China?"

"Many."

She didn't elaborate, and anyway it was a delicate subject. It was well known that there were a number of stresses in Chinese society: the shortage of money, the crowded households, the bureaucracy, the one-child family, and the husband and wife—quite a large proportion—who were separated for reasons of work: different factories, different cities, and sometimes different provinces. And many divorces resulted from the pairings-off between peasants and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps my questions made Mrs. Ji self-conscious. After being so candid, she became quite prim and hurried away—had she seen someone watching? I paid for my lunch and went for a walk.

Chengdu had a number of Buddhist temples and pretty parks. It was one of the many Chinese cities which in the past twenty years had lost its city walls and battlements and beautiful gates; but conversely it was one of the few that had a towering statue of Chairman Mao on its main street. In the course of time, those statues would be broken up. Chengdu's Mao statue was one of the largest in China. It had not been vandalized or pulled down. Mao's liking for the poetry of Du Fu meant that the Tang poet's cottage in a Chengdu park is now a national shrine. But the city was oversized and charmless, and though some of its markets and shop-houses remained, too many of them had been torn down to make room for workers' barracks and tower blocks.

Encouraging people to live in big cities and tall buildings made it easier to control their lives. Of course Chinese cities had always been crowded, but the policies of the People's Republic had robbed them of any interest and made them plainer and reminded people that they were merely "screws" in the vast machine. I had an inkling of this walking around Chengdu, getting the railway-induced kinks out of my muscles. Chinese cities made me feel small and insignificant: they were not places to loiter in. They were the corners of the greater labyrinth, and it was impossible to go very far without coming upon a barrier—the road ended, or there was a roadblock, or a checkpoint. No wonder people mobbed the railway trains. And it was not surprising that when the Chinese visited places like Seattle or San Francisco their inclination was to stay.

I passed the Sichuan People's Hospital one day, walking on the outskirts of Chengdu. It was a busy place, or perhaps I had gotten there during visiting hours; anyway, a great number of people were coming and going. Fruit and vegetable stalls had been set up across the street from the hospital, where people could buy presents for the patients. But among those stalls were a half a dozen medicine men, selling potions that ranged from the outright quackery of antlers and birds' bills and snakeskins, to herbal remedies that were accepted in many Chinese hospitals. It was an appropriate place for the quacks, and they apparently operated on the assumption that if someone was not happy with his treatment at the state hospital he could supplement his medicine with lizards and powdered deer antlers.

Mr. Fang followed me everywhere, in his hesitant way, hanging back apprehensively, and smiling when I caught his eye. But it was always a smile of fear.

I walked past a family-planning poster—a large billboard near the center of Chengdu. It showed a Chinese leader welcoming the birth of one baby girl (the parents handing it over for approval). The slogan underneath said, China Needs Family Planning.

When I turned around and addressed Mr. Fang, the poor man yelped. Then he recovered himself and laughed. His laugh said Sorry for screaming!

"That man looks familiar," I said. "Is that Zhou Enlai?"

"Yes. It is Zhou."

"Why him on a family-planning poster?"

"People like him. People respect him."

"Why not Mao Zedong?"

"On a family-planning poster!" Mr. Fang said. He was right to find it absurd. After all, Mao had encouraged the Chinese to breed like rabbits. "Not so good," Mr. Fang said.

I asked him whether people had a more respectful attitude towards Mao or Zhou these days.

"For myself, I prefer Zhou. And I think many others do, too. But 1 cannot speak for them."

"Why do you prefer Zhou, Mr. Fang?"

"He was honest. He was a good man. Also during the Cultural Revolution he suffered much."

"Was he criticized?"

"Not in public, but within. It was worse. People know that."

Before I set off again, I said, "Mr. Fang, why don't you go back to the hotel and rest? It's not necessary to follow me."

"It is the Chinese way," Mr. Fang said.

The parks in Chengdu attracted the newer sort of Chinese youth.

Observe the young couple entering People's Park in a suburb of Chengdu one June afternoon. The first thing that strikes you about the man is that he does not look anything like the man in the family-planning poster. He is smoking a king-size cigarette—it dangles from his lips—and in his hand he has a suitcase-style cassette recorder and radio, and the screechy music (probably a Hong Kong tape) thumps against it and drowns conversation and frightens the dusty starlings. The fellow wears a T-shirt saying Cowboy, and the motif on the shirt is a long-nosed man in a ten-gallon hat. He also wears tight blue jeans and platform shoes with womanish high heels. His hair has been professionally curled—the Canton fashion spread to Shanghai and has recently reached Chengdu. He wears sunglasses. He swings his radio and puffs his cigarette.

His girlfriend (if she were his wife he would not be trying so hard to impress her) wears a pink dress. It is light and fluttery. She might have made it herself. She also wears the nylon knee socks that younger women favor, and high-heeled shoes, and sunglasses with rhinestones on the frames.

This is their day off. They are spending it in the park. Later on they will look for a tree and hide behind it for a session of old-fashioned smooching. The parks and the boulevards are full of such couples. They are the new people in the People's Republic—the inheritors. But their motto is Get it while you can.

I asked Mr. Fang whether he had seen them. He said he had. He was very disapproving of these youngsters.

"It is the fault of the Cultural Revolution," he said. "They saw that it was a disaster. For that whole time there was disruption. No one obeyed. That is why, now, these young people have no manners, no discipline and no ideas."

"You sound angry, Mr. Fang."

He did not reply. He laughed—a sharp stuttering and explosive laugh that meant he was very angry.

He had said he disliked modern Chinese stories. He meant he was out of sympathy with them. Who were these spoiled brats and spendthrifts who appeared in the pages of Beijing Literature and Harvest and Monthly Literary Miscellany? Actually they were just the sort of youngsters you saw every day in the public parks, trying to be cool, which meant mimicking Western ways—sunglasses, curled hair, platform shoes, knee socks, flared trousers, blue jeans, transistor radios, earphones, and for a lucky few, motorcycles. The girls even had to have a fancy brassiere, probably the most superfluous garment in China.

In Xu Naijian's recent (1985) story, "Because I'm Thirty and Unmarried," the so-called spinster is told by her girl cousin, "What kind of bra is this you're wearing, so big and ungainly? Get yourself one of those bras from Xinjiekou. They're a nice shape—made in Guangzhou. You're so out of date..."

The puzzling conflict that arises when a Chinese person is faced with choosing between the East and the West was expressed by the Chinese traveler Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. "Of course we may laugh at those old folks among us," he wrote in Travel Impressions of Europe (1919), "who block their own road of advancement and claim that we Chinese have all that is found in Western learning. But should we not laugh even more at those who are drunk with western ways and regard everything Chinese as worthless, as though we in the last several hundred years have remained primitive and have achieved nothing?"

As Mr. Fang walked along with me (but a few steps behind), we passed a refreshment stand and heard loud singing—one uproarious voice trying to manage a twangling Chinese song. The singer, a man, was seated at a table, his back turned to us. His two companions, who were sober, wore terrified smiles. The man was at the final stage of Chinese drunkenness: red faced, singing and drooling. Another bottle of beer and his eyes would swell up, he would gasp for breath and soon be out cold.

"That is also a result of the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Fang said. "What does he care? He has lost all discipline. He has no pride. It is bad behavior."

Then the man stood up, still singing, and staggered a little. He turned aside. He did not see me, but I saw him. It was Cheung, the taxi driver from Kowloon.

10: The Halt at Emei Shan: Train Number 209 to Kunming

The biggest statue of Buddha in the world, and probably the ugliest, is three hours down the main Chengdu-Kunming line at Leshan, a riverside town. The Buddha and the surrounding temples make it a place of pilgrimage. The statue sits in a niche as big as a gorge, at the confluence of three rivers. It is said that this Buddha was erected there 1200 years ago because the turbulence created by the meeting rivers had drowned so many boatmen. Even now I could see men battling through the suds in their sampans as I watched.

But this Buddha was less an object of veneration than an example of the Chinese fascination with freakishness—the very big, the very weird, the highly unusual. This Buddha's ears were twelve feet long. Chinese tourists frolicked on his feet. You could park a car on the nail of his big toe. Close up he was Brobdingnagian—big, plain, disproportionate—with weeds growing from his cracks. I imagined he did not look so grotesque from the river. There were dragon-boat races on the river that week: more freakishness—oarsmen throwing panicky ducks into the water and then chasing them in the luridly painted boats.

There were dragon-boat men in the restaurant at Leshan. They were singing and swilling beer and engaged in drinking contests (the loser had to clip clothespins to his ears so that he would look like a total jackass). For lunch I had the specialties of this pleasant town—frogs' thighs and green bean seeds, and then I went to the holy mountain at Emei. Like Leshan, Emei is also a place of pilgrimage. It is considered an act of piety to climb the mountain—holiness at 10,000 feet, on this penultimate staging post to even holier Tibet.

I met a group of eight elderly pilgrims at Emei. They were all in their seventies and carried backpacks—ingenious wicker baskets—and walking sticks and food bundles. They were the classic instance of smiling and portable pilgrims.

"Where do you come from?"

"From Xitang."

Over three hundred miles away, in the northeast of Sichuan.

"Why did you come here?"

"To pray to our God."

"And we are now going to Wuhou Temple in Chengdu," one old woman said. "To pray."

The women wore a sort of nun's cap—a starched white cloth carefully folded and pinned; and they had thick socks, like leg warmers, and like the men they leaned on hiking staffs. They were bluff and hardy and very good humored. Some of the women smoked pipes, and one chomped on a cigar. The men wore cloaks with big sleeves. They said they had climbed to the top of the mountain. None of them wore anything sturdier than sandals or cloth slippers.

China has five holy mountains. It is the Chinese Buddhist's wish—and the wish of many foreign hikers—to climb them all. The trouble is that, being holy and being Chinese, they have been trampled for thousands of years. They have steps cut to the summit, and noodle stalls along the way, and kiosks selling postcards, monks selling strings of beads, hawkers, fruiterers and professional photographers who charge one yuan per pose. And along with the tough grannies toiling towards the top, there are the Americans in their Chinese T-shirts, Chinese in their American T-shirts, the Germans wearing rucksacks, and the French clutching the guidebook that says Chine. None of this makes the mountain less holy, but it makes the climb less fun.

For some reason, Emei was full of monkeys—frowning rhesus monkeys. They pestered pilgrims and snatched food and rode on the necks of their owners in a lazy and confident way, sitting on a man's neck, with their legs dangling over his chest. They picked their teeth as they rode along. On a back road near Emei I saw a man giving his monkey a piggyback ride, as he cycled—just like a father and child.

I stayed at what was described to me as the Railway University at Emei—it was Mr. Fang's doing. Actually it was the Institute of Communications, and it had 30,000 students. I was in the guest house, which, being new and "modern," had the bizarre touches that the Chinese reserve for their most expensive structures. And when these structures venture out of the realm of Chinese architecture altogether, they acquire things like concrete umbrellas on the terrace, padded velvet walls, fuse boxes in the dining room, murals of pandas, cactuses in the bathroom as a sort of suggestion that there is no water, very scary-looking bare wires protruding from the walls, water stains on the ceiling which take on the appearance of caricatures, and in the smallest rooms the most enormous sofas. The reflecting pool is another feature of such places. These pools were very entertaining—you never knew what you might find in them: dead fish, shoes, a bicycle wheel, rusty cans, chopsticks; but never anything as dull as algae. The one at Emei was full of water, and in the water a very large mirror that had plopped off the wall and shivered to pieces in the pool.

"What do you think of the guest house?" Mr. Fang asked me.

"Excellent," I said. "I want to stay longer."

But the cook sized me up and did one of the cruelest things any cook can do in rural China: he made me Western food—what he conceived to be Western food. Undercooked potatoes, pink chicken, boiled cabbage, and something so odd I had to ask its name.

"Bean—"

His English was like his cooking: strange mimicry. But I eventually found out what he was trying to tell me: wiener schnitzel.

Yet I enjoyed the place. I had felt the same in Inner Mongolia, at Jaiyuguan, Turfan and Urumchi—the wilder and emptier parts of China. I had had enough of Chinese cities. But this was pleasant, and it was possible to take long walks through the countryside, watching people hoeing or pigs wallowing, and in the far-off villages, the little kids doing homework in copybooks in front of the thatch-roofed huts.

***

The railway halt at Emei was at the end of a long, muddy road, and a market nearby sold fruit and peanuts to the pilgrims, who waited patiently, leaning on their walking sticks, for the train. And then, above the sound of sparrows and the whispers of bamboos, a train whistle blew. I liked these country stations, and it seemed perfect to sit there among the rice fields in the hills of Sichuan until, right on schedule, the big, wheezing train arrived to take me away, south into Yunnan. It was twenty-four hours to Kunming, and the train was uncharacteristically empty: I had a compartment to myself, and this one—because of the intense and humid heat—had straw mats instead of cushions.

"There are two hundred tunnels between here and Kunming," the conductor said when he clipped my ticket. No sooner had he gotten the words out of his mouth than we were standing in darkness: the first tunnel.

We were among tall conical hills that were so steep they were terraced and cultivated only halfway up. That was unusual in China, where land economy was almost an obsession. And the day was so overcast that waterfalls spilled out of the low cloud, and paths zigzagged upwards and disappeared in the mist.

So many tunnels meant that we would be among mountains the whole way—and hills and valleys, and narrow swinging footbridges slung across the gorges. The ravines were spectacular and steep, and the mountains were close together, so the valleys were very narrow. All of these magnificent geographical features had meant that the railway line had been difficult to build. In fact many of the engineering problems had been regarded as almost insurmountable until the early seventies when, with a combination of soldiers and convicts—a labor force that could be shot for not working—the line was finally finished.

The line could not go through the mountains of the Daxue range, and so it crept around their sides, pierced their flanks, and rose higher and circled until it had doubled back upon itself. Then you looked down and saw the tunnel entrances beneath you and realized that you had not advanced but had only climbed higher. Soon the train was in a new valley, descending to the river once again. The river was called the Dadu He (Big Crossing). It was wide and grayer than the sky above it. For most of its length it was full of boulders. Fishermen with long poles or ancient fish traps sat on its banks.

These were the densest, steepest mountains I had seen so far, and the train was never more than a few minutes from a tunnel. So, in order to read or write, I had to leave the lights burning in the compartment. One moment there was a bright valley with great white streaks of rock down its sides, and gardens near the bottom and vegetable patches sloping at a forty-five degree angle, and the next moment the train would be roaring through a black tunnel, scattering the bats that hung against the walls. This was one of the routes where people complained of the length of the trip. But it was easily one of the most beautiful train trips in China. I could not understand why tourists went from city to city, on a forced march of sight-seeing. China existed in all the in-between places that were reachable only by train.

"What do you want for lunch?" the chef said. This dining car was empty too.

"This is a Sichuan train, right?"

"It is."

"I will have Sichuan food then."

He brought me Sichuan chicken, hot bean curd, pork and green peppers, green onions stir-fried with ginger, soup and rice—a one-dollar lunch—and I went back and had a siesta. There were countries where train journeys were no more than a period of suspense, waiting to arrive; and there were countries where the train journey was itself an experience of travel, with meals and sleep and exercise and conversation and scenery. This was the latter. When I woke up in midafternoon I saw that the mist and cloud had dispersed. The long, hooting train had passed from low steep mountains into higher, broader ones.

I sat by the window and watched the world go by. Four black pigs, each one a different size, trotting in a file along a hill path. Some hills scarred with eroded gullies and others covered with scrub pine. Deep red valleys, the soil laid bare, and green bushy hills. The river was now the same red as that clayey soil. There were junipers at railway stations, fluttering and bowing, for it had now become windy. And five ranges of mountains visible, each with its own shade of gray, according to its distance. In a pretty valley town called Sham-alada, beyond the solid houses and tiled roofs, ten naked children turned somersaults on a mudbank and plunged into the red river. It was not late, but the sun slipped beneath the mountains, and then the valleys were full of long, cold shadows, as if the slopes had dragging cloaks.

Just before darkness fell, at the head of one valley, I saw a terrace below the rail line—a cemetery. It had a big stone gateway and a red star over the gate. That red star usually meant it had something to do with the People's Liberation Army. This one had fifty graves—rectangular stone boxes with flowers beside them. Except in the Muslim regions—like Xinjiang, or the Hui province of Ningxia—it was unusual to see cemeteries in China—new ones, at any rate. A cemetery is regarded as a waste of space. The dead are cremated and the ashes are put on a shelf in the family house, along with the tea leaves, the vase of plastic flowers, the photograph of Su Lin at the factory outing to Lake Hong, the combination thermometer-and-calendar and the needlepoint portrait of a white kitten playing with a ball of yarn.

I inquired about the cemetery.

The Head of the Train (Heche zhang), a man named Mr. He, said, "Those are the graves of the men who died while building the railway. It took ten years, you see."

Those ten years, from the early sixties to the early seventies, coincided with the period of patriotic fervor and intense jingoism. It not only had the largest number of self-sacrificing soldiers and workers, but also an enormous number of political prisoners. The efforts of these passionate people produced the Chengdu-Kunming line.

I slept, but fitfully, for each time the train entered a tunnel, the compartment howled with its noise and filled with smoke and steam from the engine. In the morning we were among bulgier, wetter mountains—the Yunnan valleys are cool throughout the year, because most of the province is at a high altitude.

A bad-tempered attendant banged at the door at seven. But knocking was only a formality. After a few knocks she used her own key to open the door, and she demanded the bedding. Hurry up! Get out of bed! Give me the sheets! Do it now! I thought: What nags these people can be.

"Why are the fuwuyuans in such a hurry to collect the bedding?" I ask the Head of the Train, Mr. He.

He said, "Because the train does not stay long in Kunming. Just a matter of hours, and then we turn around and go back to Chengdu."

That was why they were nags: they were overworked.

Mr. He had risen through the ranks. He had been a luggage handler, a conductor and a cook—all jobs at roughly the same salary level, about 100 yuan a month. He had joined when he was twenty—he said he hadn't had any education ("not much chance of it in the sixties") and I took that to mean that he was a casualty of the Cultural Revolution. He had chosen the railways because his father had been a railwayman. Now he was in total charge of this train.

"I was promoted by being appointed," he said. "I didn't apply for it. One day they simply came to me and said, 'We want you to be the Head of the Train,' and I agreed."

I asked him about travelers, because it seemed to me that one of the features of China now was the large numbers of people going cross-country.

"Yes," he said. "Especially in the last three or four years. Many travelers, of all kinds."

"Do they give you problems?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do they drink too much? Do they shout, or quarrel, or make disturbances?"

"No. They keep order. We don't have those sorts of problems. In fact, we don't have many problems. My job is easy. The Chinese obey the rules, on the whole. That's our nature."

"What about foreigners?"

"They obey the rules," Mr. He said. "Very few people break them."

"Are you a member of a union, Mr. He?"

"Of course. The Railway Workers' Union. Every worker is a member."

"What does the union do?"

"It offers opinions about conditions of work, and it discusses problems."

"Does the union discuss money?"

"No," he said.

"If conditions of work are bad—let's say if you're not given time for a nap or for meals—and if the union's opinions are not respected, would you consider going on strike?"

After a long pause, Mr. He said, "No."

"Why not? Railway workers go on strike all the time in Britain and the United States. There is a right to strike in China—it's in the constitution."

He rubbed his chin and became very serious.

"We are not serving capitalists," he said. "We are serving the people. If we go on strike the people won't be able to travel, and that will hurt them."

"That's a good answer, Mr. He. But now there are capitalists in China. Not only tourists from Western countries, but also the Chinese themselves are accumulating wealth."

"To me they are all passengers."

"I'm a capitalist myself, I suppose," I said.

"On my train you are a passenger, and you are welcome. Ha!" This Ha meant Enough of this line of questioning!

"Mr. He, you mentioned you have a son." A child of six, in a school in Chengdu, was what he had said. "Would you like him to follow you and your father and work on the railway?"

"I'll tell you frankly—I would. But it's not my choice. It's up to him. I can't tell him what to do. At the moment, he wants to be a soldier in the army."

In the corridor the passengers were flinging their luggage out of the windows onto the platform at Kunming.

The Chinese flock to Kunming to gape at the colorful natives—twenty-three separate minorities, all gaily dressed in handsomely stitched skirts and quilted jackets, boots and headdresses. They come from the far-flung parts of Yunnan to sell their pretty embroidery and their baskets. They are attractive and a bit wild, and they look uncompromisingly ethnic. Mao's stern, gray policies were merely a hiccup in their technicolor tribalism. For the Chinese, the minorities in Yunnan are somewhere between hillbillies and zoo animals.

What exactly do these minority people themselves think? Are they rebellious or downtrodden? Do they crave autonomy? Their numbers are very small: only 5000 Drung people in Yunnan, only 12,000 Jinuos and twice that number of Pumis. The Uighurs and the Yi people were another matter—there were millions of them. At about the time I was in Yunnan there were uprisings and riots among Soviet minorities—in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. I could imagine that happening in China—perhaps a Muslim rebellion like the one that raged through Xinjiang in the nineteenth century. And I could imagine the same result: it would be ruthlessly suppressed.

People also go to Kunming to visit the stone forest ("We call this one Chicken Tree—can you see why?") and to see the polluted lake and the temples above it, which are so relentlessly visited they are practically worn away from the successive waves of trampling feet, and those temples that aren't are buried under ice-cream sticks and candy wrappers and half-eaten moon cakes.

I went for walks. I even managed to lose Mr. Fang for a few days. I went to an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Zhou Enlai. There was a sort of Zhou Enlai cult growing in China. It was also the tenth anniversary of the death of Mao, but no such exhibition had been mounted for him. Of the thirty-odd photographs in the Zhou exhibition, only one showed Mao Zedong—in 1949, Liberation Year: Mao very small, Zhou very large.

At an antique shop near the exhibit I saw a very shapely bronze incense burner—a water buffalo. It stood among the junk jewelry, the broken pocket watches, the old forks with twisted tines, the Yunnanese tobacco pouches. I asked how much?

The price he quoted was seventeen thousand dollars.

I was still laughing as I strolled through the market in the Kunming back streets. It was there that I worked out a way of eating Chinese dumplings without risking infectious hepatitis or cholera or bubonic plague (there had been recent outbreaks of this medieval life-shortener in northern Yunnan and Qinghai). There are few dishes tastier than freshly fried or steamed Chinese dumplings, and they were tastiest in the open-air markets. But the plates they were served in were washed in dirty water, and the chopsticks were simply wiped off and reused.

My hygienic answer was to ask for them in a piece of paper—and to provide my own paper. And the chopsticks could be made safe by scorching them in the cooking fire—holding them in the flames for a few moments to kill the germs. But as a matter of fact many travelers in China carry their own chopsticks.

My favorite spot in Kunming was the park at Green Lake—though it was an unprepossessing park, with a go-cart track, a children's football field, and a pathetic circus in two brown tents (the star attraction was a tortured-looking bear pacing in a tiny cage). The lake itself had disappeared, dried out, grown weeds and grass: there was no water at all in it.

But that area had become the meeting place for people who wanted to kill time by singing, putting on plays or operas, or making music. It seemed very odd to me at first, the people in little groups—twenty or thirty such groups scattered throughout the park; and each gathering of people producing a play or listening to someone singing. There were duets, there were trios, and many were accompanied by men playing violins. Often the duet was an old man and an old woman.

"They are singing a love song," a bystander told me. His name was Xin. He agreed with me that it was very touching to see these people performing.

He said, "For ten years we hated each other and were very suspicious. We hardly spoke to each other. It was terrible."

He meant during the Cultural Revolution but didn't say it. Like many people he could not bear uttering the mocking words.

"This is like a dream to these people. The old ones can hardly believe it. That's why they are here. To talk and to remember. They don't want to forget the old songs. This is their way of remembering."

What made these musical performances especially unusual was their exuberance, because the Chinese are very shy and rather self-conscious, and find it an agony to be set apart and stared at (which was why the Red Guards' struggle sessions were so painful and so often ended in the suicide of the person "struggled"). The fact that some were performing solo was a measure of their energy and confidence. It is a great deal easier to stand alone and sing if you are happy.

Some of the people were telling stories in dialogue form, others were playing traditional songs. At least half the groups of old people were performing the Yunnan version of Peking opera, called dian xi. The most ambitious one I saw involved four or five singers who stood under the trees and acted out a sad love story from Zhejiang called Flower Lamp (Hua Deng).

"This is known all over China," Xin said, and he explained it.

It concerned a young man Liang Shanbo and his lover, Zhu Yingtai. The plot was not unlike that of Romeo and Juliet. The lovers' families were so opposed that it was impossible for the two to meet without using a subterfuge. Liang had the clever idea of dressing up as a woman (the man playing Liang in the park used a fan to suggest this), and in this way gained access to the lovely Zhu. The romance blossoms, but both families are against the marriage. After some complications ("The plot zigzags," Xin said) they realize they cannot marry. Zhu kills herself. Liang sings a pathetic love song on her grave, and then he kills himself. The end.

The motley groups in the park in Kunming liked this one best of all. It was performed among the bamboos, and accompanied by old violinists in faded blue jackets and caps. But even the skinniest old men and the most elderly women wore animated expressions—and they were all playful. Of all the people I saw in China, they were the happiest.

The trouble with China was that it was overrun with people and—except for the occasional earthquake or sandstorm—I rarely saw examples of man's insignificance beside the greater forces of nature. The Chinese had moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy. If there were enough of you it was really very easy to dig up a whole continent and plant cabbages. They had built a wall that was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Whole provinces had been turned into vegetable gardens, and a hill wasn't a hill—it was a way of growing rice vertically. Some of the ruination was not deliberate; after all, in Chinese terms prosperity always spelled pollution.

That was how I felt until I reached Yunnan. Then I saw the more familiar situation—and one I found more subtle and energizing—people dwarfed by nature, crowded by jungle, hemmed in by the elements, rained on and battered by the unpredictable tantrums of heaven and earth.

I saw such landscapes on my way to Vietnam. Kunming is only two hundred miles from the Vietnam border. Looking at a map one day, I saw a railway line leading south, and I looked for Mr. Fang to arrange for me to travel on it. Wasn't he shadowing me in order to offer Chinese hospitality? Hadn't he urged me to give him something to do? How thrilled he was when I asked him to translate for me, or commiserated with him about the spivs and the louts and said, "I blame their parents!"

But when I asked him to get me permission to take the narrow-gauge railway to the border, he turned ashen.

"It is forbidden," he said.

"The line is open as far as Bao Xiu," I said. I had checked in the railway timetable—there were two trains a day.

"But you are a foreigner."

"You said that you would help me. If you don't help me, what is the point of your being with me, Mr. Fang?"

"I will try." I knew he meant it, because he seemed very rattled: he was steeling himself to see a higher official.

That same night Mr. Fang came to me and said that permission had been granted for me to take the train south. But the line into Vietnam had been severed in 1979, so I would have to content myself with a journey about a third of the way—to Yiliang—and then come straight back. I said that was fine with me.

"Mr. Wei will go with you."

"Who is Mr. Wei?"

"You will see tomorrow."

The train left at seven in the morning: Mr. Wei was at the station. He had already bought the tickets, and before I could say anything, he was apologizing for the train—just a little one, he said, tiny coaches, steam engine, uncomfortable seats, no dining car. Mr. Wei was a small malnourished-looking man in his thirties. But he was not as sulky as he seemed—he was merely nervous. He said he hated these little trains and these jungly places.

I wanted to tell him that I liked seeing examples of man's insignificance beside the greater forces of nature. But I decided not to. I had brought a pound of peanuts (35 cents in Kunming market) and spent the early part of the trip eating those until Mr. Wei relaxed.

The French had built this line. At about the turn of the century, after they had consolidated their hold on Indochina, they decided to open up the interior. There was money to be made by selling French products in these Chinese provinces. And there was a great deal the French wanted to buy—silks, minerals, furs, leather goods, precious stones. And they had a vague idea of extending their influence into China. The railway was finished in 1910, and until fairly recently it was easier to ship goods to Kunming from Shanghai via Hanoi than it was cross-country.

Mr. Wei didn't think much of this train, but to me it was practically ideal—like the best kind of sleepy branch-line train that creaked through the countryside. Europe and America had gotten rid of them, but they still sauntered through China. People played checkers and smoked the pipes that were big lengths of bamboo that looked like drainpipes. They were all farmers—no sunglasses or platform shoes here, no Guangzhou brassieres or cassette recorders.

After a while, Mr. Wei began talking. He said, "I missed out on my education," and I knew he was referring to the Cultural Revolution, so we talked about that. "I hated it," he said. "It was bad in Kunming."

"Because they smashed the temples?"

"Not only that. They fought. One factory fought another factory. They fought in the streets—people screaming. They had sticks, they had guns. They set fires. People died."

"Hundreds or thousands?"

"I don't know. Hundreds maybe."

"Were you a Red Guard?" He was just the right age—about thirty-five now.

"No," he said, almost vehemently. "I didn't like them."

"Do you think they are bad men when you see them now, the ones who were Red Guards?"

"Now? No, I don't. They are not bad men. They weren't protecting Mao. That's what they said. Each one thought he could do a better job. That's why they fought."

"They killed people, though."

"We can't blame them for that. That is the responsibility of the leaders."

That was the usual line, and a useful one too: all the blame had been put on the Gang of Four. Having such scapegoats was probably another example of Chinese economy. What was the point in tearing the country apart when in a ritualistic way (the trial had been televised) all the blame could be put on four people who were then promptly purged.

When we had gone ten miles, Mr. Wei (whom I now realized was no lackey) relaxed and pointed out the sights. That was Running Horse Hill (Pao Ma Shan), where there was a complex of buildings called the Fire-Bury Works (Huozang Chang): the local crematorium.

"People send their dead body to the works," Mr. Wei said. "The men put gasoline on the body. They burn it. They get ashes. They put the ashes in a small box. The people take it home and put it on a desk."

"Everybody does this?"

"Most people do it. A few take the ashes to the mountains—to a Buddhist temple. But we take it home. I have my mother's sister in a box."

These burial rites of the Chinese were bad news to American entrepreneurs of the 1970s who tried to export coffins to the People's Republic. In the same fortune-hunting spirit, in the nineteenth century the Sheffield Silver Company sent vast shipments of forks and spoons to China, hoping to tempt the Chinese away from their chopsticks.

Beside the rail line were beehive huts which, when I looked closer, I saw were actually tombs. Mr. Wei said that thirty or forty years ago people were buried like that; but no more.

I saw people walking through the cool, yellow woods, and farmers on their way to market who had stopped near the railway to wash their vegetables in the ditch water—which was foul. In a shady spot a man was unhurriedly tearing open a buffalo's throat, slaughtering it. The creature was on its back, with its legs in the air, and its wounded neck was bright red, with a bib of flesh hanging down, and its blood running into the railway ditch.

An old woman got on the train at one of the many small stations. She had a little girl with her, and then a younger woman joined her. She had a baby slung on her back.

We fell into conversation—Mr. Wei translating their rustic Yunnanese dialect. It seemed that the young woman had given birth to a little girl. But she and her husband were disappointed. They decided to take the drastic step of having another child. As soon as the woman became pregnant she was fined 1000 yuan, a penalty called a fa kuai; but she paid up willingly in the hope that the child would be a boy. It was indeed a boy.

These were the poorest people imaginable—lined faces, threadbare clothes, cracked hands, and wearing bonnets and broken slippers. And this woman had stumped up what was for most city dwellers a year's wages to have a second child. (The fact that the second child in China is nearly always a boy leads many people to conclude that female infanticide is quite common.)

"The city people don't have extra children," Mr. Wei said. "They are happy with one. But the country people want more children—to help them with their farming and also to look after them when they are old."

The one-child policy was instituted in 1976, and seemed to work well, although the population has continued to grow at unanticipated rates. The fear these days is that there will be a great number of old people in China at the end of the century—a sort of mushroom effect; and that the one-child family will create a nation of small spoiled brats. Already there is a creature in China which has appeared for the first time in vast numbers: the fat, selfish little kid with rotten teeth, sitting in front of a television set, whining for another ice cream.

The train was traveling in a narrow groove cut just below the summit of these pretty hills, and buttresses had been built to prevent landslides. They hadn't worked. Man was insignificant here. Nature gave him a very hard time. Well, that was the way of the world, wasn't it? It was unnatural that other Chinese people had turned a dramatic landscape into a cabbage patch.

Mr. Wei said that he had managed to get a few years' education in the technical institute in Changsha. His Cultural Revolution job had involved mending boxcars in a factory in Kunming. He said he hated the work and was no good at it. He had always wanted to go to university and he had spent all those years holding a welder's torch and cursing.

I said that I planned to go to Changsha myself and wanted very much to visit Mao's birthplace, Shaoshan, near that city. Had he been there?

"I went ten years ago. In 1976." He made a face.

"What did you think?"

"I didn't like it," he said. "It is not good for the people. It is a bad place."

"But Chairman Mao was born there."

"I know," he said, enigmatically.

"Wasn't he a good leader?"

"Mao did harm. The Cultural Revolution delayed our development. Shaoshan is not a good place."

He told me that with such solemnity that I was determined to go there.

"Which Chinese leader do you respect the most?"

"Deng is not dead yet, so he might make mistakes. Better to mention a dead one. Zhou Enlai is liked by many people."

"Do you like him?"

"Yes. Very much."

"Where is his village?"

"It is Huai'an, in Jiangsu Province"—far away, in the east, some distance north of Shanghai.

"What do you think of Zhou's village?"

"In my heart I like it. I would like to go there."

"Why do so many people respect Zhou?"

"Because he worked hard for the Chinese people."

"Isn't Deng Xiaoping working for the Chinese people?"

Mr. Wei frowned. "As I said, he is not dead yet. There is still time for him to make mistakes."

As the sun climbed towards noon and the foliage thickened by the tracks, the landscape became tropical—bamboos and bird squawks. And some houses came into view. They were not Chinese houses. They were stucco, with green shutters and heavy verandahs—just the sort of houses that you see in the French towns of Vietnam. I had seen such houses in Hue and Da Nang and in the back streets of Saigon: it was French government housing, for the colonial officers—in this case, railway personnel. It was so strange, this touch of Frenchness, deep in the hills of Yunnan, still intact—still lived in—after almost a century.

And that was Yiliang. A sign at the station said, the people's railway is for the people (Renmin Tielu Wei Renmin).

"I am hungry," I said.

"You cannot eat here," Mr. Wei said.

What?

Before I could complain, he rushed me out of the coach and onto the platform. My feet had hardly touched the ground before I was on my way back to Kunming—I was still breathless when we were under way. I had scarcely seen Yiliang. And I had wanted to stroll around the old French town, look into the houses, talk to the people, loiter in the market.

Mr. Wei said he had just been following orders. It was Mr. Fang who explained. I had insisted on taking this train, although the train was off limits to foreigners. Foreigners were not allowed in the deep south of Yunnan because it was a security risk—the Chinese were fighting the Vietnamese on the border. But Mr. Fang had explained that it was the train I was interested in, not the towns. And so the railway authorities had said that, as long as I did not stop in any of the towns to look around or eat, I could take the train. But at a certain stage of the journey I had to stop and be spun round and sent straight back to Kunming, without looking left or right. That was how I took the train without violating the law. It was a very Chinese solution.

11: The Fast Train to Guilin: Number 80

The young girl and boy entered the railway compartment holding hands, which was very unusual. But they had a Chinese explanation.

"We got married this morning," the boy said. "We are going to Guilin for a few days."

Honeymooners! He was in his twenties—very thin, rather furtive, but stylishly dressed in a leather jacket and pointy shoes. She wore a dress. In a train a dress was just as unusual as hand-holding. It was blue satin, with a fringe of lace, and though it matched strangely with her yellow ankle socks and red shoes, the hemline was high enough so that I could see her legs. It was not their shapeliness that interested me, it was their very existence. Women's legs are a rare enough sight in China for them to be a complete novelty.

"Do you want me to go into a different compartment?" I asked. "I'd be glad to."

"Why?" the boy said.

"So that you can be alone."

"We can be alone up here," the boy said, flinging his bag on the upper berth and hoisting his bride on the one opposite.

And there they sat until long after we left Kunming Station. It was late evening, about nine, and this was perhaps their first night together. It was certainly their first as man and wife. Was I sincere in saying that I'd be glad to leave them alone in the compartment? Of course I wasn't. I was trying to get the measure of this place; but it's bigness often baffled me. I needed luck in trying to uncover the truth, which was why I looked into women's handbags when they opened them just to see what was inside; and opened drawers in people's houses, and read their mail, and searched their cupboards. When a man took out his billfold, I tried to count his money. If a taxi driver had his sweetheart's snapshot pinned to his dashboard, I scrutinized it. If I saw someone reading a book or magazine, I noted down the title. I compared prices. I copied down graffiti and slogans that I saw on walls. I got people to translate wall posters, particularly the ones that gave the sordid details of a criminal's career (these details were set out and advertised just before the doomed man was shot). I memorized the contents of refrigerators, of travelers' suitcases, I remembered the labels in their clothes (White Elephant tools and Pansy brand men's underwear and Typical sewing machines stick in my mind). I searched brochures for solecisms and collected Rules of the Hotel for Guests (example: "Guests may not perform urination in sink basin"). And just for the record, I asked endless pestering questions. So, really, would I willingly pass up a chance to spend the night with a honeymoon couple?

They smoked, they muttered a little, they rattled magazines. I wrote: 10:16 P.M. No activity from the honeymooners. Contented breathing. Could be snores. One might be asleep. Anticlimax.

The cigarette smoke bothered me, and on this banged-up train of the Shanghai Railway Board, nothing worked. The fan was dead, the lock had been torn off the door, the arms had been twisted off the seats, the luggage rack was broken, and the window could not be raised. This last matter was the most serious: the compartment was now very hot and smoky. It was a good thing that the honeymooners were either asleep or else ignoring me, because I took out my Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the window locks, removed the window frame, levered the window up six inches, then put the hardware back on, so that no one would suspect I had tampered with it. Dire punishments were threatened for anyone who messed with the train, and if you so much as chipped your Chinese Railways teacup you were charged for it.

There was silence all night in the upper berths. Nothing to report except that I seemed to have more proof that the Chinese were very phlegmatic.

I woke to find myself in the rocky province of Guizhou, all pyramidal limestone hills and granite cliffs. The landscape was green and stony, like Ireland, and the people lived in rugged Irish-looking stone cottages, and houses with rough-hewn beams. They were the strongest houses I saw in China, and around them, marking the limits of their land, were beautifully built dry-stone walls, symmetrical and square.

Among these great slanting slablike hills, there was very little arable land and not many flat places for farming. The gardens were made by balancing walls and building terraces, and by all the other useful things that could be made from the chunks of stone—bridges, aqueducts, roads, dikes and dams. The villages were thick with villas and two-story houses (it was rare in the country to find more than one floor), all of them stone-built, with slate roofs. And their grave mounds were just as solid and built with the same granite confidence: the cemeteries were miniature versions of the villages.

While the honeymooners nipped down to the dining car for the breakfast of rice gruel and noodles, I ate some bananas I had bought in Kunming and drank my green tea. We passed Anshun ("once the center of the opium trade") and we stopped a while at Guiyang, where I met Mr. Shuang.

Mr. Shuang was in his late sixties, plum faced and whiskery, with a shapeless cap and a red armband that showed he was a railway worker. But he was a retired man who, out of boredom, had gone back to be a platform supervisor.

"I was sick of staying at home," he said. "I've been doing this job for half a year. I like it. But I don't need the money."

He said he earned 130 yuan a month.

"What do you spend it on?"

"I don't have children or a family, so I buy music." He smiled and said, "I love music. I play the harmonica."

"Do you buy Chinese or Western music?"

"Both. But I like Western very much."

"What kind?"

He said in a neatly enunciating way, "Light orchestral music."

That was the kind that was played in the train and in the railway stations when they weren't playing Chinese songs. They played "The Skaters Waltz" and "Flower of Malaya" and selections from Carmen.

"Do you get many travelers in Guiyang?"

"Unfortunately, very few people come here. This province was closed to foreigners until 1982. Some people pass through but they don't stop. And yet we have many places to see—some very nice temples, and the Huangguoshu Falls and the hot springs. Please come back to Guiyang and I'll show you around."

It seemed that the more remote and countrified the place in China, the more hospitable the people were.

For the onward journey the honeymooners had changed their clothes: he wore a jacket and sunglasses, she wore a tweed skirt. They smoked and slumbered. Maybe this fatigue meant it was the end of their honeymoon?

By midafternoon we were in the southeast of Guizhou, among greener hills showing the scars and broken terraces of having once been farmed. The route to Guilin was roundabout because of all the mountains. They were an obstruction, but they were very pretty—velvety and shaggy with grass and trees. It was much hotter now, and most of the train passengers were asleep, barely stirring at Duyun; that place looked like Mexico, with a big yellow-stucco station and palm trees under a clear blue sky.

Farther south the landscape changed dramatically: the gray hills here were shaped like camel humps and chimney stacks, and stupas with sheer sides. They were the oddest hills in the world, and the most Chinese, because these are the hills that are depicted in every Chinese scroll. It is almost a sacred landscape—it is certainly an emblematic one. It had happened all at once: the hills looked squarish and ancient, like a petrified city. We had entered a new province, Guangxi, and from here to the city of Guilin, two hundred miles or more, it was all the landscape of the Chinese classical paintings.

It was a rice-growing area, but there wasn't much water available. This was probably the reason I saw such ingenious pumps and irrigation in Guangxi. I saw about ten different kinds of water movers. I saw the chain pump being pedaled by two children. This pump, Professor Needham says, is unchanged in its design since its invention in the first century A.D. All the pumps I saw were mechanical—no motors, no hoses even. The largest and weirdest was a gigantic spoon, about ten feet long and made of wood, which a woman used to move water from a lower field to a higher one. She didn't simply lift and dump the water; she scooped and splashed very quickly, and it was like a laborious form of playing.

Amid these limestone stacks and buttes there was a limestone village with the same look of eruption. But there was no railway station to serve these stone houses—not even a platform, nor a grade crossing. The village was in a low place, and its muddy streets were in shadow. What was remarkable was the number of horses in the place. People were buying and selling them, riding them, tethering them to trees, hitching them to carts. It was market day, late afternoon, and the traders were winding things up. For the next little while, along the railway tracks, I saw pony carts making their way home. It was unusual to see Chinese horsemen, but I inquired and discovered that these were people of the Miao minority, who are fairly numerous in Guangxi—there are five million of them altogether. The Chinese are respectful of such people, but are more mystified by their customs and habits than they are by those of Westerners. They stared, fascinated, but still they didn't understand. They never seemed to understand the strengths of these little nations in their autonomous prefectures (Guangxi had two minority states within its borders), and so they never seemed to take the minorities seriously. They treated them like exotic pets.

An eerie sight in Guangxi were the caves in those gray limestone hills. The hills had come to look like fat columns and towers, and the caves made them seem hollow. Later I learned that Guangxi is full of caves. Some are underground dripping caverns, but these above-ground things—many of them at any rate—had been converted into homes. The strangest ones looked like gaping mouths, with white stalactites showing like teeth.

In a shallow pool among those towerlike hills there was a gray and white crane, the sort the Chinese regard as an auspicious bird, representing long life. The train startled the bird, and off it went, soaring and circling, as we rumbled on through a painting of mountains that was being endlessly unrolled.

In the kitchen of the dining car, a young woman was scrubbing pots and singing in Chinese.

I know that you love me

I am waiting

But where do you want me to go?

The pot she scrubbed with a stiff brush was nearly as big as she was. And the kitchen was a primitive thing: it was black, with a black coal stove, and a cracked sink. At mealtimes it looked more like a blacksmith's forge than a kitchen. The meals on this train had been terrible. Lunch had been bad dried fish, disgusting fatty ham, rancid prawns and rubbery rice. But I had my bananas, and I still had peanuts I had bought back in Sichuan.

As I loitered, listening to the kitchen girl singing, a young man introduced himself. He was Chen Xiangan, from Shanghai. He worked in the dining car. He spoke no English at all. He asked me, Could I help him with his problem?

"Gladly," I said.

"I want you to give me a name—an English one."

That was not an unusual request. English names were coming back into fashion, now that people were reasonably sure they wouldn't be attacked by Red Guards as bourgeois capitalist-roaders and harbingers of revisionism for calling themselves Ronnie and Nancy.

"It must sound like my Chinese name," he said, and that was when he told me he was called Xiangan.

I pondered this. Xiangan sounded Irish to me—like Sean or Shaun. I suggested that but then told him that Sam was simpler, and Sam Chen seemed like a good Shanghai name to me.

He thanked me, and later I saw him pushing a food trolly. He wore only a T-shirt and blue underpants and an apron. He was saying over and over again, "Sam Chen, Sam Chen, Sam Chen."

In her nasal, twanging voice, the kitchen girl was still singing her love song.

I know that you love me

I am waiting...

We came to Mawei, a station amid the limestone stacks and dark pine trees. There was no town. There were villages scattered nearby. The passengers dashed off the train and rushed outside the station where, at tables, about fifty people were selling fresh plums—yellow and purple ones—and dusty bananas and round watermelons. This was the longest stop I ever made at such a small place, and I was sure it was deliberate—a fruit-buying stop.

The honeymooners bought a watermelon. They crawled into one berth and cut it open with a jackknife and ate it with a spoon, taking turns and slurping. It was like sex. For once the girl had stopped chain-smoking her Gold Medal cigarettes, and once they were together, eating this watermelon on the rumpled bunk, they stayed together.

The kitchen girl was still singing, plonkingly and with feeling.

I know that you love me

I am waiting...

At sundown we entered the heights above a wide valley that was darkened and in shadow because of the setting sun. The valley's rim was all rounded peaks that were slowly blackening, but the other side was distant, perhaps thirty miles away. The sky slumped into this space as the sun passed behind the last hill, and the valley was so deep I couldn't see its floor, only its shadows, which made it look bottomless. We were still climbing, but before we got all the way up, the orange and all the flamboyant Are of the sunset had vanished. Then night fell and we were traveling in darkness.

I lay on my mat in the heat and read Kidnapped, and dropped off to sleep at about eleven. The lights were still on when I woke again and fixed the sliding door with a rubber band. The lights went out. I heard that melon-eating sound again from the berth above, where the honeymooners were lying together. But I knew it wasn't that—they had finished their melon hours ago. And yet this was a rich, satisfying sound, with a deep breath, like the sigh you hear from someone with a hearty appetite. They were devouring each other in the dark.

They were still at it, at four in the morning, when the train arrived at Guilin.

"In China, we have a saying," Mr. Jiang Le Song said. "Chule feiji zhi wai, yangyang dou chi." Looking very pleased with himself, he added, "It rhymes!"

"We call that a half-rhyme," I said. "What does it mean? Something about eating planes?"

"'We eat everything except planes and trains.' In China."

"I get it. You eat everything on four legs except tables and chairs."

"You are a funny man!" Mr. Jiang said. "Yes. We eat trees, grass, leaves, animals, seaweed, flowers. And in Guilin even more things. Birds, snakes, turtles, cranes, frogs and some other things."

"What other things?"

"I don't even know their names."

"Dogs? Cats?" I looked at him closely. I had overheard a tourist objecting to the Chinese appetite for kittens. "You eat kittens?"

"Not dogs and kittens. Everybody eats those."

"Raccoons?" I had read .in a guidebook that raccoons were also popular in Guilin.

"What is that?"

Raccoon was not in his pocket English-Chinese dictionary.

He became very confidential, glancing around and drawing me close to him. "Maybe not lackeys. I have never heard of eating lackeys. But many other things. We eat"—and he drew a meaningful breath—"forbidden things."

That had rather a thrilling sound: We eat forbidden things.

"What sort of forbidden things?"

"I only know their Chinese names—sorry."

"What are we talking about?" I asked. "Snakes?"

"Dried snakes. Snake soup. They are not forbidden. I mean an animal that eats ants with its nose."

"Scaly anteater. Pangolin. I don't want to eat that. Too many people are eating them," I said. "It's an endangered species."

"Would you like to eat forbidden things?"

"I would like to eat interesting things," I said, equivocating. "How about sparrows? Pigeons? Snakes? What about turtles?"

"Those are easy. I can arrange it."

Mr. Jiang was young. He was new to the job. He was a little too breezy. He had the jokey and insincere manner of someone who has been dealing with elderly foreigners who enjoy being joshed as they are being deferred to. I felt his obsequiousness was a deliberate ploy to undermine me.

I had told him I didn't want to go sight-seeing, and yet within an hour of our meeting he took me to the caves outside Guilin, where there were hundreds of shuffling Chinese tourists.

"What are we doing here?" I asked.

"I am so sorry," he said. "We will leave immediately. I thought you might want to see our famous Reed Flute Cave."

What was the point of looking at these humdrum and hackneyed marvels? And having just come through hundreds of miles of Guizhou and Guangxi I had seen enough rock formations to last me a lifetime. I had liked them because I had felt I'd discovered them for myself—I hadn't been led there by someone burbling, "Look!"

"Let's look at them," I said.

Like so much in China on the tourist route—like the terra-cotta warriors and the Ming tombs, the Reed Flute Cave was discovered by a man digging a well. This fellow's shovel opened the way to a vast limestone cave, with chambers and corridors and grottoes. That was in 1959. Lights, signposts, balconies and stairways were installed, and then it became domesticated and acceptable to the Chinese.

It looked grotesque and Disneyish, a piece of natural vulgarity—a tasteless act of God. It could have been made out of polyester or papier-machi. It dripped. It glugged. Chunks of slimy limestone dropped from the ceiling. It was the spelunker's version of Sunset Strip or the Shanghai Bund. People crowded through it, skidding on the greasy floor, listening to a guide explaining its variety of crazy shapes.

"We call this the lotus rock. This is the conch shell. This is the elephant's foot—can you see why? This is the carp..."

I ditched Mr. Jiang—and Mr. Fang, who was still with me—and went down to the river Li to look at the boats. Some of the houseboats were for hire, so I took one that was owned by two old women. We floated downstream, past some lumpy and lovely stone hills and temples. After some time they said they couldn't go any farther or else they wouldn't be able to pole the boat back. But the river winds south, to other rivers, the Gui Jiang and Xi Jiang, and then to Canton. I asked them whether they had been that far.

"Yes, but not in a boat like this." They had the gargling and quacking Cantonese accent, and their Mandarin was nearly as bad as mine. "We went in a big boat."

"Why not this one?"

"You would never get back in this one." She meant you couldn't pole upstream from Canton to Guilin. Well, that was reasonable.

But I became possessed by the idea of taking a small boat—say, a collapsible kayak—to China, and setting it up in a place like Guilin and paddling from river to river, and sleeping under trees. It would be a way of seeing the country from an entirely different angle, and of avoiding people like Fang and Jiang. And when I got sick of it I would simply go gurgling into the estuary of one of these muddy rivers, and then into the South China Sea.

Taking a break from the arduous poling the old women moored our boat to the south bank of the Li, near a fishing village. In the shallows were simple raftlike boats made of six or seven big curved bamboos lashed together, and also sampans and houseboats. There were cormorants on many of the boats. The women called the birds wang and also yu-ying.

The first Western traveler after Marco Polo described these birds. This man was the missionary Friar Odoric, from Friuli in Italy. He left his Franciscan convent in Udine in the year 1321 to travel in the East for three years. He went barefoot. He was very tough, very pious, and severe with himself. He wore a hair shirt the whole time.

After traveling thirty-six days from the coastal town of Fuzhou, he stayed with a man who said to him, "Sir, if you would see any fish being caught, go with me."

That was over 660 years ago, but the Chinese haven't changed their methods of using cormorants for fishing; and so Friar Odoric's description still stands.

"Then he led me to the bridge, carrying in his arms with him certain dive-doppers or water-fowls [cormorants], bound to perches, and about every one of their necks he tied a thread, lest they should eat the fish as fast as they took them... He loosened the dive-doppers from the pole, which presently went into the water, and within less than the space of one hour, caught as many fish as filled his three baskets; which being full, my host untied the threads from about their necks, and entering the second time into the river they fed themselves with fish, and being satisfied they returned and allowed themselves to be bound to their perches, as they were before."

A boat near ours had seventeen of these birds roosting on it. A young boy sluicing out a muddy bucket said that the birds cost 300—400 yuan each, but the two old women said the true figure was closer to a thousand. Whatever it was, between $150 and $300, it was a huge amount, and so the birds must really earn their keep. These fishermen used them by placing a ring, instead of a thread, around the birds' necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish.

So far, I had felt the Chinese were rather cruel to animals; but they are also practical. It was not just cruel but also very stupid to abuse these valuable creatures. It was all right to torment pigs by stacking them in carts when you took them to market, or to herd buffalos into freight cars and ignore their piteous moos when they were being sold, or to tie chickens into bundles, so that the buyer could carry them home; but an expensive cormorant had to be coddled. A man on one boat was scratching his bird like a cat and playing with it affectionately, and another man was feeding his flock and stroking their feathers and nuzzling them.

All these birds were exiles. They are the Great Cormorant (Phal-acrocorax carbo), the only one used for fishing, and are caught in the distant coastal province of Shandong. They had been brought here in baskets on a freight train.

When we continued on our way, poling the houseboat, I took the port side with one of the poles. But the boat slid into a fast current, and although I was twice as big as my poling partner, I wasn't much use. The other old woman relieved me, and when I was out of their way, they propelled the boat harmoniously and swiftly back to town.

The next day I saw another side to Mr. Fang. I was asking Mr. Jiang my usual questions about the Cultural Revolution and he was replying in a rather bland and noncommital way when Mr. Fang began speaking very fast. I was sure he was reprimanding the young man.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I told him to tell the truth," Mr. Fang said. "It is important to know the truth about the Cultural Revolution. Foreigners must be told. We must face the facts. It was a disaster, so what is the point of smiling and pretending we don't care?"

That was very good. In a quiet way, Mr. Fang was stubborn and truthful, and I knew that he despaired of the vacillating yuppies like Mr. Jiang.

Mr. Jiang struggled to tell me something, but he was only twenty-two. He said he didn't have a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution.

"I know my father was regarded as too right wing," he said. "My family was sent for reeducation, to a remote place, to plant rice. My father had been an English teacher in a middle school. The family worked on the land, learning from peasants, for six years. It was very hard for them. I was too young to notice. For the first year we had no house. We lived in a sort of barn—a place where grain was stored. We had no crops. We ate the local leaves and roots, living like animals."

"Is your father angry about it?"

"He doesn't talk about it," Mr. Jiang said.

"Never?"

"Never. Nothing. He doesn't say anything."

"Why not?"

"Because it was a bitter period."

Mr. Fang said, "He is making a mistake. He should talk about it. He should tell these people what it was like." And with his sad, swollen face turned on me, Mr. Fang said, "Disaster."

It was a few days before I saw Mr. Jiang again, and in that time I walked the streets and browsed in the market (it was full of exotic birds and pretty turtles, all languishing in cages). I took a tourist boat down the river Li to Yangshuo, past the droopy, dumpy limestone hills—more like cones and camel humps than hills—that rise straight out of their dull reflections in the green river. The boat was crowded, the tourists were bumptious—"What a place for a condo!" 'They should call that one 'Dolly Parton Hill'!"—but the place was so weirdly pretty nothing else mattered. Among these blunt hills and bamboos, there were children swimming, and men fishing, and buffalos wading in the river up to their noses, occasionally ducking and snaffling weeds off the bottom.

Even in the rain, even with rambunctious tourists, it was sixty miles of magnificence. At Yangshuo the boat turned slowly, giving a sort of panning shot of the small town on the low bluff of the river. The stone landing stages had elegant roofs, and colorful Chinese stood waiting for the boat to put us ashore. But as the passengers disembarked, the town exploded, and we were mobbed by traders and marketeers and old women waving bamboo back scratchers. They had been waiting for two days for the boat to arrive, and time was of the essence: tourists did not linger in Yangshuo.

Wrinkled Chinese men in black pajamas and lamp-shade hats balanced shitting cormorants on their shoulders, and when tourists took their picture they demanded a fee of one yuan. There were people selling kites, pot holders, aprons, napkins, fans and carved salad bowls. I was attracted by pairs of handmade eyeglasses, the kind that transform anyone who wears them into a Chinese scholar. I bought a pair. I bought a silver box and an old wooden puppet's head. It was a typical tourist market—mostly junk, some charming handicrafts, and a few treasures from damp attics, being sold illegally. The tourists seemed surprised by the Chinese ferocity in pricing and bargaining. Surely after decades of isolation and communism these people ought to be a little naive? They had no right to know the real value of the stuff in their stalls. As was frequently the case in China, it was the tourists who were naive. The traders hardly budged from their prices, and when the tourists shouted at them, the Chinese hissed back. There were no bargains, even in this distant bend in the river Li, on the muddy riverbank. It was true of China in general, and was perhaps a key to their survival. I thought: The Chinese wake up quickly.

That night Mr. Jiang emerged from behind a potted palm at my hotel to introduce me to a small monkeylike man.

"Our driver," Mr. Jiang said.

"Qi," the man said, and smiled. But it was not a smile. He was only saying his name.

"I have fixed everything you requested," Mr. Jiang said. "The driver will take us to Taohua—Peach Flower restaurant."

The driver slipped on a pair of gloves, and whipped the door open for me. Mr. Jiang got into the front seat, beside the driver. The driver adjusted his mirror, stuck his hand out of the window to signal—although we were in a parking lot and there were no other cars in sight—and drove into the empty road. After perhaps fifty yards he stopped the car.

"Is there anything wrong?" I said.

Mr. Jiang imitated a fat man laughing: Ho! Ho! Ho! And then in a bored voice added, "We have arrived."

"There wasn't much point in taking a car, was there?"

"You are an honored guest! You must not walk!"

I had learned that guff like this was a giveaway in China. When anyone spoke to me in this formal and facetious way I knew I was being taken for a ride.

Before we entered the restaurant, Mr. Jiang took me aside and said, "We will have snake soup. We will have pigeon."

"Very nice."

He shook his head. "They are not unusual. They are regular."

"What else are we having?"

"I will tell you inside."

But inside there was a fuss over the table, a great deal of talk I did not understand, and finally Mr. Jiang said, "This is your table. A special table. Now I will leave you. The driver and I will eat in the humble dining room next door. Please, sit! Take no notice of us. Enjoy yourself!"

This was also an unmistakable cue.

"Why don't you join me?" I said.

"Oh, no!" Mr. Jiang said. "We will be very comfortable at our little table in the humble dining room reserved for Chinese workers."

This was laying it on a bit thick, I thought; but I was feeling guilty about this meal, and eating good food alone made me feel selfish.

I said, "There's room at my table. Please sit here."

"Okay," Mr. Jiang said, in a perfunctory way, and indicated that the driver should follow his example.

It was quite usual for the driver to be included—in fact, it is one of the pleasures of Chinese life that on a long trip the driver is one of the bunch. If there is a banquet he is invited, if there is an outing he goes along, and he is present at every meal along the road. It is a civilized practice, and thinking it should be encouraged, I made no objection, even though the driver had taken me only fifty yards.

"Special meal," Mr. Jiang said. "We have crane. Maybe a kind of quail. We call it anchun. We have many things. Even forbidden things."

That phrase had lost its thrill for me. It was a hot night, this young man seemed unreliable, and I was not particularly hungry.

"Have some wine," Mr. Jiang said, pouring out three glasses. "It is osmanthus wine. Guilin means 'City of Osmanthus Trees.' "

We gulped our wine. It tasted syrupy and medicinal.

The food was brought in successive waves—many dishes, but the portions were small. Perhaps sensing that it would go quickly, the driver began tonging food onto his plate.

"That is turtle," Mr. Jiang said. "From the Li River."

"And that is forbidden," he said, lowering his voice. "Wawa fish— baby fish. Very rare. Very tasty. Very hard to catch. Against the law."

The fish was excellent. It was a stew of small white lumps in fragrant sauce. The driver's chopsticks were busily dredging for the plumpest fillets.

Mr. Jiang crept closer and mumbled a word in Chinese. "This is muntjac. From the mountains. With onions. Forbidden."

"What is a muntjac?" I asked.

"It is a kind of rabbit that eats fruit."

As all the world knows, a muntjac is a small deer. They are regarded as pests. You see them on golf courses outside London. Marco Polo found them in The Kingdom of Ergunul and wrote, 'The flesh of this animal is very good to eat." He brought the head and feet of a muntjac back to Venice.

I sampled the pigeon, the snake soup, the muntjac, the crane, the fish, the turtle. There was something dreadful and depressing about this food, partly because it tasted good and partly because China had so few wild animals. These creatures were all facing extinction in this country. And I had always hated the Chinese appetite for rare animals—for bear's paws and fish lips and caribou's nose. That article I had read about the Chinese killing their diminishing numbers of tigers to prepare—superstitiously—remedies for impotence and rheumatism had disgusted me. I was disgusted now with myself. This sort of eating was the recreation of people who were rich and spoiled.

"What do you think of this?" I asked Mr. Jiang.

"I like the turtle with bamboo," he said. "The muntjac is a bit salty."

"You've had this before?"

"Oh, yes."

I was trying to describe to myself the taste of the snake and the crane and the pigeon. I laughed, thinking that whenever someone ate something exotic they always said it tasted like chicken. "What does he think?" I asked.

The silent driver endlessly stuffing himself, made a dive for the turtle, tonged some into his bowl and gobbled it. He did the same to the wawa fish.

"He likes the fish," Mr. Jiang said.

The driver did not glance up. He ate like a predator in the wild— he paused, very alert, his eyes flicking, and then he darted for the food and ate it in one swift movement of his clawlike chopsticks.

Afterwards, slightly nauseated from the forbidden food, I felt like a Hindu who has just eaten hamburger. I said I would walk home. Mr. Jiang tried to drag me into the car, but I resisted. Then, hiding his sheepishness in hearty guffaws, he handed me the bill: 200 yuan.

That was four months' salary for these young men. It was a huge amount of money. It was the foreigner's airfare from Guilin to Peking. It was the price of two of the best bicycles in China, The Flying Pigeon Deluxe. It was a night at The Great Wall Sheraton. It represented a good radio. It was two years' rent on a studio apartment in Shanghai. It was the cost of an antique silver bowl in the bazaar at Turfan.

I paid Mr. Jiang. I wanted a reaction from him. There was none. That was for form's sake. The Chinese make a practice of not reacting to any sort of hospitality. But I persisted.

"Is the driver impressed with this meal?"

"Not at all," Mr. Jiang said. "He has eaten this many times before. Ha! Ha!"

It rang in my ears—one of the few genuine laughs I heard in China.

It meant We can always fool a foreigner.

I was the hairy, big-nosed devil from the back of beyond, a foreigner (wei-guo ren) one of those whom the Chinese regard as the yokels of the world. We lived in crappy little countries that were squeezed at the edges of the Middle Kingdom. The places we inhabited were insignificant but bizarre. Once, the Chinese believed that we tied ourselves into bunches so that we would not be snatched away by eagles. Some of our strange societies were composed entirely of women, who became pregnant by staring at their shadows. We had noses like anteaters. We were hairier than monkeys. We smelled like corpses. One odd fenestrated race had holes in their chests, through which poles were thrust, when we carried one another around. Most of these notions were no longer current, but they had given rise to self-deceiving proverbs, which sometimes seemed true And then the laughter was real.

12: The Slow Train to Changsha and Shaoshan "Where the Sun Rises"

I boarded the Changsha train at Guilin Station and found it rather empty and haunted looking. It was an old-fashioned train with antiquated coaches. It had come from a strange place, too—Zhazhang on the coast of Guangdong, heading for Wuhan on the Yangtze. It was just after sundown, but very hot. I put on my pajamas, started reading Kidnapped and went to sleep dreaming that I was on this very train.

In my dream the train stopped at a station in a darkening landscape among leafless trees. It was a big wooden building, not like any I had seen, with high rooftops and balconies. I knew this was not my destination and yet I got off the train and went inside the place. The walls were whitewashed, there were potted palms here and there, and the tracks went across the lobby—two or three platforms near the ticket windows. I found this very confusing.

"What station is this?" I said, meaning to make a note for my diary.

A Chinese man said, "Ask the people here."

There were workers in greasy overalls, hammering the tracks. They were black—or rather, half Chinese, half black.

Someone near them said, "This station was built by the British."

None of the black workers spoke English. In Chinese one of them said, "Zhe shi shenme difang Kong Fuzi."

This made no sense to me. I looked closely at the men. They were like the blacks in old Hollywood movies, light skinned, with pale eyes and a penetrating gaze.

I realized that I had been there too long and that my train was leaving. I became panicky. Some tourists blocked my way. A stout woman confronted me.

"Are you Paul Theroux?"

"No," I said, and slid past her.

I went in the wrong direction, to Track Seven. My train was on Track Five. I ran back and forth.

One of the tourists was laughing at me, and another said, "The British named this station after Confucius."

In the nick of time I caught my train, and I woke up perspiring in the rocking berth. It was midnight. The coal smoke and clanging at the window was the coal smoke and clanging from my dream.

The train arrived in Changsha before dawn. The wide streets were hot and dark. Mr. Fang was just behind me, murmuring.

"What's wrong, Mr. Fang?"

"Trains!" he said, and he laughed. At that hour of the morning it was a terrifying laugh. He made the noise again and said, "Trains!"

He was weakening.

It was not only the train that bothered Mr. Fang; it was also Changsha itself. The city was associated in the minds of all Chinese with the memory of Chairman Mao. Mao had been born nearby, at Shaoshan. He had been educated here. He had taught school here. He had helped found the Communist Party in Changsha, and had given speeches and recruited Party members. Changsha was his city and Hunan his province. For years and years, whenever the Chinese had permission to travel they came here in a pious way, in homage to Mao, and they finished the tour by journeying to Shaoshan.

Mr. Fang was sick of Mao, sick of political talk, disgusted with political emblems and songs. He was not interested in the Party either. He wanted to get on with his job—he had work to do in Peking. It would have been the height of rudeness for him to say that he was sick of following me around on this trip, but I knew he was at the end of his tether. He groaned when we boarded trains these days, and his cry of Trains! at Changsha Station convinced me that he was on the point of surrender.

Another train and more Mao: that was Fang's nightmare.

His distress put me into a fairly good frame of mind. And I was glad to be here. All along I had intended to visit Mao's birthplace and interrogate the pilgrims. No one seemed to have a good word for Mao these days; but what did they think in Changsha?

"He made very few mistakes, and the mistakes were very small," Mr. Ye said, showing me the Mao statue at the birthplace of Chinese communism. The statue was gigantic—Mao in an overcoat and cap, waving.

"Are you proud of him?"

"Yes!" Mr. Ye said defiantly. "We are proud of many things he did."

Mr. Shao said, "Most of the Chinese people are proud of him. A few don't agree."

"Deng Xiaoping called him a great man!" Mr. Ye protested.

I said, "Shall we go to the Mao Museum?"

"It is closed," Mr. Shao said.

"Really? Why is it closed?"

The men fell silent, and their silence meant: Don't ask.

"What about the middle school where Mao taught?" I said.

Mr. Ye frowned and said, "It is ten kilometers from the city. We can drive by it, but we cannot go in. It is not very interesting."

People used to make pilgrimages here!

"I suggest we go to the Hunan Museum of History," Mr. Shao said. "There is a woman in it who is two thousand years old."

She lies naked in a Lucite coffin filled with formaldehyde, her face is hideous from decay and dissection, her flesh is pruney white and her mouth gapes open. She died in the Han Dynasty after eating a watermelon. The seeds taken from her stomach are on view. Indeed, her stomach is on view—all her internal organs are in jars. The Chinese throng this museum for much the same reason that, as a schoolboy, I used to go to the Agassir Museum at Harvard. I was fascinated by the pickled head of a gorilla in a big jar and the way one of his jellylike eyes had come loose and floated to the top of the jar. Horror-interest.

One of the pitfalls of long journeys is the tendency of the traveler to miniaturize a big city—not out of malice or frivolity, but for his own peace of mind. Confronted with a stony-faced and charmless Chinese city I tried to simplify it and make it interesting to me. Changsha was a good example of that. I knew it had several universities, a number of technical institutes, hospitals and medical schools—most Chinese cities were equally well equipped. They are a tribute to China's determination to be self-sufficient, healthy and literate. And such projects and institutions are seen as so necessary that the Chinese cannot understand why African and other Third World countries indulge themselves in meretricious enterprises like luxury airports or super highways. The Chinese are contemptuous of showy projects and regard aid recipients who spend money this way as pathetic and backward. On the whole, the Chinese are baffled by people who are unwilling to make sacrifices. That is admirable. But it is very tiring constantly to be subjected to Chinese sacrifice. After the twentieth hospital and fortieth university campus, I began to give them a miss.

So Changsha was rather more than Maoist memories and the two-thousand-year-old pickled woman; but the rest was not compelling. I found it hard to distinguish the hotels from the colleges and the hospitals from the prisons. Chinese architecture, which is all-purpose and excruciating, makes it almost impossible to tell these places apart. One of the most common experiences a foreigner has in China (outside of the three or four major cities) is of waking in a dreary room, seeing the water-stained ceiling, torn curtains, dented thermos bottle and rotting carpet and not knowing whether he is a student, a guest, a patient or a prisoner.