Riding the Iron Rooster

2. The Inner Mongolian Express to Datong: Train Number 24

Whenever I heard the Chinese word for railway I thought my name was being mentioned. Tielu (literally "iron road") sounds something like a Chinese person attempting the French pronunciation of Theroux. The word never failed to turn my head. What were they saying about me?

The word for train is huoche ("fire wagon"). This one took us across the border to Erlian. I was aiming to go through the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. Xanadu is in Inner Mongolia, but Kublai Khan's stately pleasure dome exists only as a few acres of broken mud walls. Inner Mongolia is an immensity of grass, and is such a quiet place that the arrival of the train makes Mongolians stare.

Erlian is only a few miles from the border town of Dzamïn Uüd in Outer Mongolia, but the places were very different. Dzam¨n Üüd was a wreck of a town set on glaring sand and was so lacking in events that when a camel went by everyone watched it. But Erlian was a tidy town of brick buildings and flower beds. New saplings lined the streets. The post office was open, the telegraph office worked, the shirt factory was in operation, and the hotel welcomed us. It was not an elegant place, but it was orderly. A work gang was painting an iron fence green.

"Look, Rick. They're smiling. They're waving!"

"Hi there!"

"It's been ages since anyone smiled. The Russians never smiled. I'm going to get a picture of that."

The travelers on the train were completely won over by the smiles. But were they smiling? It seemed to me that this work gang of Mongolian painters was simply dazzled by the sun, though they might well have been smiling in recognition at our exact match of the Chinese slang for foreigners: dabidze ("big noses").

It was a very hot day in May, and the whole town shimmered in the heat. Christmas decorations (holly, tinsel and strings of tiny lights) had been put up in the station and in the hotel. The train was shunted into the shed to have its wheels changed. But it was not just the wheels — the whole undercarriage was unbolted and replaced, Chinese-style, by hoisting the train, looping it with cables and pulling it apart until ninety tons of cast iron were swinging back and forth.

The arrival of a train was something of an occasion. There were only two trains a day, but they tended to carry some foreigners — people with money to spend or hard currency to exchange. These passengers were either leaving China or just arriving — in any case, a little unsteady and anxious. The Chinese, seeing an opportunity, offered them food and souvenirs. No Chinese destination is complete without a restaurant, and the Chinese do not consider that they have visited a place until they have eaten there. So Erlian had a hotel with a big dining room, and eight-dish meals were served to the train passengers, who ate gratefully and with a sense of relief: China was tidier than they had imagined, and if the rest of it was no worse than this they might even end up liking it.

Bud Wittrick said, "Aw, it's great. They're friendly, they're warm…"

He meant that the Chinese knew how to scuttle around and pour tea. They knew how to be polite, but that did not keep them from staring at our big noses and our huge flapping feet. This fascination — or perhaps horror — was mistaken for affection; and every grimace was interpreted as a Chinese smile.

The Westbetters waved at three passing Chinese. The Chinese fluttered their fingers in imitation.

'They're waving back at us!"

Which was worse — hearing right-wing tourists curse the Russians, or hearing them gush about the Chinese? No one cared about the rotten political systems, but only whether the people smiled at them or not. In a simple and clumsy way the Chinese knew how to manipulate these visitors, but it was so obvious it was like children making friends with other children.

I walked around for three and a half hours, waiting for the train to return with new wheels.

A plane went overhead, flying west in the clear sky. With glasses of Krug champagne in their hands, the First Class passengers were studying the menu: parfait of pheasant and goose liver, smoked salmon mousse and fresh squid salad, and a frisée salad with smoked duck julienne, followed by turbot with prawns and apples, roast rack of Iamb, or crab leg and prawn ragout, and someone was saying, "How is the quail breast today?"

Down here in Inner Mongolia, an old man squatted holding a bowl against his nose and flicking rice grains into his mouth with chopsticks.

If any of the passengers in the plane looked down, they saw nothing more than a light brown land, yellower where the grass was. It was practically all empty space, but I did not know then that empty space is the rarest landscape in China.

We set off again, to cross the plains. It was a long hot afternoon, with only the merest glimpse of people or animals. I saw camels grazing, and herds of horses, and sparrow hawks. At the railway stations with Mongolian names — Qagan Teg and Gurban Obo — the buildings were frugally built but freshly painted, with tiled roofs and flared eaves. Chinese travelers were lined up in an orderly way on prearranged spots as the train pulled in, but when the train stopped the people broke ranks and began fighting for the doors. They were dressed differently from the way I had remembered: fewer blue suits, more color and sun hats, sunglasses and bright sweaters, some women in skirts. All of this was new to me, and I wanted to see more; I was glad that I had come. Towards dusk there were hills in the distance, the limit of the province of Inner Mongolia and the beginning of Shanxi.

That provincial border is marked by a section of the Great Wall. We clattered along the Wall for a while and then, in darkness, passed through it. The Wall is broken and sloping and piled up here — a muddy-looking heap of brown bricks and rubble. We had arrived at the big brown city of Datong.

The Chinese guide said, "We were going to put you up at the Datong guest house, but it is not very clean these days. Now, only Chinese people stay there."

We were taken to the locomotive works, which was one of those Chinese factories that is so self-contained it is like a city. It was formerly a commune; it had schools and a hospital and stores, and a wall around it. It had a hotel, The Datong Locomotive Works Hotel, and that was where we stayed.

After all those weeks of getting there, China seemed shabby and busy and orderly, with great crowds of people, and glaring lights and the sharp smell of burning coal. It seemed odd for a place seemingly so battered and depleted to have such a buzz.

And it was dark and dusty, so that being in Datong was like being in an old movie, in black and white. Chinese clothes were part of the same effect — low hemlines and white blouses and sensible shoes, and men in pin-striped suits, and most of them wearing hats. Chinese-made cars were like the black limousines in old gangster movies. And the streetlights were high, on fluted iron lampposts, and they weren't very bright. The skyline was all factory chimneys — no sign of the Great Wall. The smoky air and flickering lights made it seem like an old movie, too. But that was Datong.

I fell asleep reading and woke late. When I went downstairs breakfast was over, and waiters and waitresses were clearing the table — about ten of them picking up plates. One was eating the leftovers. He was wolfing the bread and hard-boiled eggs that no one had touched. He stopped chewing while I looked around, and then I pretended to be busy and he resumed, stuffing himself and carrying plates and cups. He moved in a rapid, scavenging way.

A morning walk which I took intending to see the famous Nine Dragon Screen involved me in detours, and then I was fooled and lost. I was deceived by the simple city map into thinking the distances were not so great. But I was much more content looking at half-obliterated slogans that had once said Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong! Large and small, they were everywhere, and there were too many to rub out. But it was clear from the way they had been vandalized — because the Chinese don't vandalize anything ("Love Public Property" is one of The Five Loves) — that people frankly hated these painted mottos from the Cultural Revolution.

There were people working by the roadside — tinsmiths, carpenters, people drying beans and washing clothes and processing rags and sorting spinach. And repairing vehicles: it is the commonest sight on a Chinese road, people pumping tires, or fiddling with engines, or welding an axle; the bus jacked up and the mechanic's legs sticking out from under it.

The yellow smog in Datong was a combination of desert dust and fog and industrial smoke. It is a coal-burning city, and one of the largest open-pit mines in China is just outside the city limits. The fog was thick and sulphurous in the early morning, and it made the buildings look ghostly and ancient and the people wraithlike. But the buildings weren't old and the people were well fed and fairly friendly.

The biggest difference between this first Chinese city and all the other cities I had seen since West Berlin was that the shops were full of food and goods, and the market was piled high with fruit and vegetables. I kept thinking of the empty shelves and the dented cans in Warsaw, Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator; the women in black shawls carrying string bags and pleading to buy a peck of wrinkled potatoes or six inches of withered sausage. In Moscow I had seen long lines of people — thirty or more to a line — trying to buy tomatoes from hawkers on the street. The tomatoes had just arrived, overripe and soft, from the Caucasus; and they were scarce. After all that, China seemed a land of plenty.

The Chinese are the last people in the world still manufacturing spittoons, chamber pots, treadle sewing machines, bed warmers, "quill" pens (steel nibs, dunk-and-write), wooden yokes for oxen, iron plows, sit-up-and-beg bicycles, steam engines, and the 1948 Packard car (they call it "The Red Flag").

They still make grandfather clocks — the chain-driven mechanical kind that go tick-tock and bong! Is this interesting? I think it is, because the Chinese invented the world's first mechanical clock in the late Tang Dynasty. Like many other Chinese inventions, they forgot about it, lost the idea, and the clock was reintroduced to China from Europe. The Chinese were the first to make cast iron, and soon after invented the iron plow. Chinese metallurgists were the first to make steel ("great iron"). The Chinese invented the crossbow in the fourth century B.C. and were still using it in 1895. They were the first to notice that all snowflakes have six sides. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding calipers, porcelain, the magic lantern (or zoetrope) and the stink bomb (one recipe called for fifteen pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane and cantharides beetles). They invented the chain pump in the first century A.D. and are still using it. They made the first kite, 2000 years before one was flown in Europe. They invented movable type and devised the first printed book — the Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra in the year 868. They had printing presses in the eleventh century, and there is clear evidence that Gutenberg got his technology from the Portuguese who in turn had learned it from the Chinese. They constructed the first suspension bridge and the first bridge with a segmented arch (this first one, built in 610 is still in use). They invented playing cards, fishing reels and whiskey.

In the year 1192, a Chinese man jumped from a minaret in Canton (Guangzhou) using a parachute, but the Chinese had been experimenting with parachutes since the second century B.C. Gao Yang (reigned 550–559) tested "man-flying kites" — an early form of hang glider — by throwing condemned prisoners from a tall tower, clinging to bamboo contraptions; one flew for two miles before crash landing. The Chinese were the first sailors in the world to use rudders; Westerners relied on steering oars until they borrowed the rudder from the Chinese in about 1100. Every schoolboy knows that the Chinese invented paper money, fireworks and lacquer. They were also the first people in the world to use wallpaper (French missionaries brought the wallpaper idea to Europe from China in the sixteenth century). They went mad with paper. An excavation in Turfan yielded a paper hat, a paper belt and a paper shoe, from the fifth century A.D. I have already mentioned toilet paper. They also made curtains and military armor of paper — its pleats made it impervious to arrows. Paper was not manufactured until the twelfth century in Europe, about 1200 years after its invention in China. They made the first wheelbarrows, and some of the best Chinese wheelbarrow designs have yet to be used in the West. There is much more. When Professor Needham's Science and Civilization in China is complete it will run to twenty-five volumes.

It was the Chinese who came up with the first design of the steam engine in about A.D. 600. And the Datong Locomotive Works is the last factory in the world that still manufactures steam locomotives. China makes big, black choo-choo trains, and not only that — no part of the factory is automated. Everything is handmade, hammered out of iron, from the huge boilers to the little brass whistles. China had always imported its steam locomotives — first from Britain, then from Germany, Japan and Russia. In the late 1950s, with Soviet help, the Chinese built this factory in Datong, and the first locomotive was produced there in 1959. There are now 9000 workers, turning out three or four engines a month, what is essentially a nineteenth-century vehicle, with a few refinements. Like the spittoons, the sewing machines, the washboards, the yokes and the plows, these steam engines are built to last. They are the primary means of power in Chinese railways at the moment, and although there is an official plan to phase them out by the year 2000, the Datong Locomotive Works will remain in business. All over the world, sentimental steam railway enthusiasts are using Chinese steam engines, and in some countries — like Thailand and Pakistan — most trains are hauled by Datong engines. There is nothing Chinese about them, though. They are the same gasping locomotives I saw shunting in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1948, when I stood by the tracks and wished I was on them.

The Datong factory was like a vast blacksmith's shop, the sort of noisy, filthy and dangerous factory that existed in the United States in the 1920s. Because none of it is automated, it is indestructible: if a bomb dropped on it today they could be back at work tomorrow. It is essentially just a complex of sheds, but one that covers a square mile. Men squat in fireboxes, hunched over blowtorches; they crawl in and out of boilers, slam bolts with hammers, drag axles and maneuver giant wheels overhead using pulleys. You have to look at the locomotive works very hard to see that it is an assembly line and not pandemonium. And you have to step carefully: there are gaping holes in the floor, and sharp edges, and hot metal; few of the workers wear hard hats or boots. Mostly it is cloth caps and slippers — thousands of frail but nimble workers scampering among hunks of smoking iron to the tune of "The Anvil Chorus."

These workers earn 100 yuan a month, basic pay — about $40—but there are bonus and incentive schemes for high productivity.

Mr. Tan, a worker who was showing me around, said, "Workers in higher positions earn more."

"I thought everyone earned the same."

"Not anymore. The basic pay might be the same, but one of the reforms in China is the bonuses. They vary according to your position and the kind of work you do, and also to where you live and what prices are like."

This sliding pay scale was more or less heretical, but it was the way the Chinese economy now operated. I asked Mr. Tan if this reform of the pay structure had been successful.

He was very open with me. He shrugged and said, "Datong is behind in many ways — say, with regard to pay and conditions. This is an out-of-the-way place. There are many things that can be improved here. Other parts of China are much better off, particularly in the south."

As we talked, donkey carts carried heavy iron fittings through the factory, the donkeys sniffing the fires of the forges and looking miserable but resigned.

Mr. Tan gave me more statistics. At best statistics are misleading, but Chinese ones are like hackneyed adjectives — a million of this, two million of that — and ultimately meaningless and improbable.

"Eighty-six blocks of flats," he said, but so what? The flats are dark and dingy, in bad repair, with coal piles stacked against the kitchen door, and cracked walls, and painted-out slogans, and two beds in every room. The rarest room in China is one that does not contain a bed.

"This hospital has one hundred and thirty rooms," he said. But the hospital is not a pretty place: it is drafty, and not particularly clean, and it is very noisy.

The oddest feature of the Datong Locomotive Works is the portrait of Chairman Mao in the visitors' room. There are very few portraits of Mao on view in China, though another grand Chinese statistic is that there were 70 million Mao portaits hanging at the time of his death in 1976. Deng Xiaoping regards all portraits as feudal and instituted a no-portrait policy in 1981 at a Party Congress that summed up the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution.

"What did you do with your Mao portraits?" I asked Mr. Tan.

"Threw them away."

"Why didn't you keep them with your souvenirs?"

"Because I didn't want to remember."

The slogans on the banners in the factory were not political. Many were about safety, and others about working together. One said Workers Should Go All Out for the Three Greatest Goals. I asked what these goals were and was told: timing production so that no work was wasted; keeping the right mental attitude; and increasing productivity. Their virtue was their vagueness. In the past — the recent past — factory slogans had been concerned with Mao worship and smashing imperialists and their running dogs.

It seemed to me that, as this was a machine shop, any machine could be made here. The same technology that produced these boilers and pipes could produce military tanks and cannons.

'That's true," Mr. Tan said. "But we already have a factory that makes tanks in Datong."

I did not know whether his telling me this military secret was deliberate candor or simple innocence, but whatever it was I liked him for it; and I asked him more questions.

Mr. Tan was about thirty, but looked older. The Chinese look young until their mid-twenties and then they begin to look very haggard and beaten. A certain serenity returns to their features when they are in their sixties, and they go on growing more graceful and dignified and become not old, but ageless. Mr. Tan had been through the Cultural Revolution and had been a Red Guard in Datong.

"But I was a follower, not a leader."

"Of course."

"I'm glad it's over. When Mao died, it ended, but then we had a few more years of uncertainty," he said. And then, glancing around the great clanging factory, he added, "But there are people on the Central Committee who would like to take over from Deng and run things their way."

"Is that bad?"

"Yes, because they would set themselves up as dictators."

"Do people write about this in the newspapers?"

'The papers don't write about democracy. Even the very word 'democracy' is regarded as bad. If you say it you're in trouble."

"How do you know that?"

He smiled and said, "I used to write for The Datong Daily. But they changed my articles and turned them into propaganda. It wasn't what I had written, so I stopped being a reporter."

"How could you stop, just like that?"

"They stopped me, I mean. I was criticized and given a different job to do with less money. But I don't care. What is the point of writing stories if they are changed when they are published?"

We talked about the rich and the poor — people who stayed in good hotels and people who lived in caves (Shanxi and Gansu provinces were full of cave dwellers). Mr. Tan said there was a big gap, but that you would not necessarily be respected merely because you had money.

"These Chinese people who have money we call 'secondhand sellers.'" He meant hustlers, peddlers, junk dealers. "They don't read or go to museums or temples. They have money, that's all."

I taught Mr. Tan the word "philistine."

I went to the Yungang Caves outside Datong, where travelers used to draw chalk circles on the beautiful frescoes and Chinese workmen would hack them off the wall and wrap them up; and where another lively business was the beheading of Buddhas. Even so, there are plenty of Buddhas left — and several in the larger caves are as tall as a three-story building. But there is something predictable about Chinese sight-seeing, and even the best attractions — which these Buddhist caves were — have been renovated and repainted until all the art is lost. What travelers had begun to destroy by snatching and plundering, the Red Guards finished in the Cultural Revolution, and the only reason the Red Guards were not totally successful in wiping out the sculptures in the Yungang Caves was that there were too many of them. So they survived, but they were not quite the same afterward.

The same was true of the Hanging Temple, the "midair monastery," an odd Wei Dynasty structure of steep stairs and balconies built against the vertical side of a ravine at Hengshan, about forty miles south of Datong. The Chinese flock to it; tourists are encouraged to visit. But it too had been wrecked by Red Guards, and it too had been rebuilt, and a great deal had been lost in the restoration. It looked garish and clumsy and patched.

Sight-seeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel, and in China it is one of the least rewarding things a traveler can do — primarily a distraction and seldom even an amusement. It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.

Much more interesting to me on this visit to the Hanging Temple was the Valley of the Lings, a great dry gorge in which most of the Lings lived in caves. They had hollowed out parts of the steep walls where there were ledges, and scooped out passageways and chopped windows into them. A few lived in mud huts on the floor of the valley, but the rest inhabited the terraces of cave dwellings with their crudely cut doors and windows in the reddish rock. The place looked very strange and primitive, but walking around, I could see that life was going on as normal — the people tended vegetable gardens, they fished, they did their laundry and cooked and aired their mattresses and ran a few shops and had a school and a brickworks. And they were located in a dramatic cleft in the mountains and must have known how lucky they were to have this space and this good air.

One of the weirder Chinese statistics is that 35 million Chinese people still live in caves. There is no government program to remove these troglodytes and put them into tenements, but there is a scheme to give them better caves. The China Daily (19 May 1986) described how a farsighted architect, Ren Zhenying, had designed "an improved cave" by making the caverns larger and adding bigger windows and doors and ventilators. One model cave had forty-two rooms, and a number of three-bedroom apartments. He was quoted as saying, "It stays cool in summer and warm in winter and saves energy and land that could be used for farming."

It seemed to me a kind of lateral thinking. Why rehouse or resettle these cave dwellers? The logical solution was to improve the caves. That was very Chinese.

It was a bit like steam locomotives — those brand-new antiques that they turned out year after year. The design was not bad — it just looked old-fashioned, and in a coal-producing country, the steam locomotive was very economical.

If this was a time warp it was a very reassuring one. My hotel bedroom had a spittoon and a chamber pot. The armchairs had slipcovers and antimacassars, and the varnished desk was covered by an embroidered cloth, and it held a water jug, a propped-up calendar and a vase of plastic flowers. In the drawer was a small bottle of ink, and a penholder with a steel nib. None of it could be called modern, but most of it was unbreakable.

It seems comic and perhaps absurd to most Westerners; but it is not a joke — not in a society where they fish in rivers using nets designed 2000 years ago. China has suffered more cataclysms than any other country on earth. And yet it endures and even prospers. I began to think that long after the computers had exploded and the satellites had burned out and all the jumbo jets had crashed and we had awakened from the hi-tech dream, the Chinese would be chugging along in choo-choo trains, and plowing the ancient terraces, and living contentedly in caves, and dunking quill pens in bottles of ink and writing their history.