Riding the Iron Rooster

He meant the 10 yuan lunch. It was a worker's week's pay. The dishes kept coming, the food was good, and there was so much food I made a tally of it. It was the largest meal I had on any Chinese train and might have been the best one. How odd that it should be served on this slow train in this out-of-the-way place. There was first a cold dish, sliced meat and white seaweed; and then shredded pork with carrot and bamboo slivers; shrimp and Chinese cabbage; diced chicken and celery; reconstituted dried fish; deep-fried eggs; Chinese spinach; egg-drop tomato soup, and a big basin of rice. I ate some of it and I marveled at the remainder of the $2.70 meal.

My ticket had cost me less than $2. This was all a bargain. But there were other prices to pay. It took seven hours to go the 150 miles, so our average speed was about 20 miles an hour. We stopped every five minutes, literally that. Steam trains have a sort of jerky clanking way of stopping and starting—an indecisive motion—and all day, to this slow conga, clouds of smoke from the stack tumbled past the windows, as we crossed the flatness of Shandong in a reddening winter sun. We traveled through all the daylight hours, slowly, like a branch-line train moving through a backward shire in rural England, the train full of bumpkins, everyone talking and eating and enjoying themselves, and we stopped everywhere.

We had crossed the peninsula—it had the shape of a turtle's head, and Qingdao lay on the south coast, the bottom of the beak. They said it was the coldest night of the year. There were frost crystals glittering in the air under the glaring lights. And in the swirling steam of the engine, the German station and its tower and its stopped clock produced that nightmare feeling I got in China when I was among European buildings in dramatic weather. After all, a nightmare is the world turned upside down, and thousands of Chinese mobbing a German railway station on a frosty night is a good example of that. It was a tangle of the familiar and the absurd to produce fear. And all around it was very dark.

At the edge of the darkness, braving the cold, young men and women with flags and loud-hailers and megaphones called out, "Come to our hotel—!" "You are welcome at our guest house!" "We have good food and hot water!" They tried to outshout each other, in the spirit of competition and free enterprise, as they touted for business among the arriving passengers.

The irrational dreamlike quality of Qingdao did not vanish when the sun came out the next day. It looked almost as odd in the daylight as at night, though less menacing. I don't feel at home in non-European cities that have been heavily influenced by European buildings. When homesick imperialists put up granite mansions and Baptist churches and Catholic cathedrals with spires, and semidetached houses with prim front gardens, I find it all a bit scary. It is out of place, it disorients me; anyway, what are all these Chinese doing here? I think. Or what is that stately Lutheran church doing near those noodle stalls? I am fascinated by such architectural capriccios (the gothic spires among the pagodas, the Chinese faces at the windows of the English-style bungalows), but it is no more relaxing than the bad dream it strongly seems to mimic.

It is intensely reassuring to imperialists to build versions of their fat and monumental buildings, whether they fit the place or not. The Germans used a feeble pretext in the 1890s to threaten the Chinese and finally to force them to hand over various valuable concessions. In 1898 the Germans stuck a German town onto a small fishing village. One of the strangest buildings in China is in Qingdao, the former residence of the German governor, modeled on the Kaiser's palace. I went inside and looked around until the caretakers chased me away. It is palatial; it has ramparts, granite and stucco balconies, Tudor-style beams, glazed tiles, circular staircases, porticoes and galleries (on the inside, under the high vaulted ceiling) and a conservatory. It was built in 1906. It is in perfect condition. It looks as though it will last forever. Chairman Mao stayed in it when he visited Qingdao in 1958. For that reason, the Red Guards, who had a field day smashing up the evidence of diabolical foreign influences in Qingdao, left the governor's palace alone. It remains unoccupied. It serves no useful purpose.

The Chinese in 1898 were browbeaten into granting the Germans a ninety-nine-year lease, but less than twenty years later—just after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914—the Japanese occupied Qingdao. It is amazing that the Germans managed to accomplish so much in such a short time. Virtually all their buildings still stand, the railway still runs to Jinan, and the brewery produces the best beer in China—and sticks to the old spelling, Tsingtao beer.