Riding the Iron Rooster

The Chinese guidebook to Qingdao begins, "Qingdao is a relatively young city with only eighty years of history. It used to be a small village. Since 1949, rapid developments have been made." So much for the imperial designs, the foreign occupation and two world wars. Even the U.S. Marines and the American Seventh Fleet had a spell in Qingdao. None of these humiliations is forgotten; they are simply not mentioned. The city is actually overrun with Japanese businessmen. I met Germans in my hotel (I asked them what they thought of the German buildings; they said, "Too old, too hard to heat"), and the Seventh Fleet was invited back in 1986, forty years after it had backed the wrong side (it had helped Chiang Kai-shek), and was given a warm welcome.

The Chinese history of Qingdao was available, but the German history was obscure. I asked Mr. Ling, a university student, what he knew about it—how big was the German settlement, what was the population, how did they put up all these large buildings and suburbs?

"There are no figures," said Mr. Ling.

"There must be," I said.

"Yes. But the authorities do not release these figures. It might seem too humiliating if we knew how few Germans there were occupying the town. It is bad history—that's what we think."

"Do you really think it is bad history?"

"No," he said. "I am interested in knowing the truth, but we have no books."

That was a Chinese phenomenon. There was the distant past, the glorious anecdotal history; and there was the recent past, mostly Mao. In between, a thousand years of Chinese history, everything was obscure. Perhaps it was politically questionable, or humiliating, or contradictory, or, like the years that had been expunged from the Mao Museum in Shaoshan, a hideous embarrassment.

In its way, Qingdao was as weird in its monuments and structures as the lost city of Gaocheng, in the boondocks of Xinjiang. Instead of a mud monastery or a crumbling mosque in the desert, Qingdao's counterparts were churches. The largest of them was the Catholic cathedral, built in a sort of twilight period in the early 1930s, when the city was under the control of the Nanking government and abounded with missionaries.

It was a big bare church, made of gray stucco, with two spires. It had been completely renovated—freshly painted, regilded statues and crosses, the Stations of the Cross newly touched up, the ornamented nave picked out in gold—everything bright and pious looking, with baskets of fresh flowers on the altar. There was room for 600 people here and it was said to be full on Sunday, but there were only 3 people praying on the day I went. It was midafternoon on a weekday; the kneeling people whispering their prayers were elderly. Over the high altar was a scroll painted on the wall: Venite Adoremus Domine. The Mass in Qingdao is said in Latin.

"I remember when they tore the crosses off the steeples of this church, during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Bai said. He was a young man who had recently graduated from Shandong University. He had been only nine years old in 1967, but he had a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution, which had been fierce in Qingdao: this city was full of poisonous foreign influences, and such malignant and feudalistic harbingers of the right-deviationist wind (so to speak) had to be smashed by the vanguard of Mao Zedong's shining thought. It was well known that the Red Guards had kicked the shit out of foreign-looking Qingdao.

But the steeples on the cathedral were very high.

"How did they get up there?" I could not understand how they had scaled these steeples. And the crosses towered eight feet above them, so that was another problem.

Mr. Bai said, "The Red Guards held a meeting, and then they passed a motion to destroy the crosses. They marched to the church and climbed up to the roof. They pulled up bamboos and tied them into a scaffold. It took a few days—naturally they worked at night, and they sang the Mao songs. When the crowd gathered they put up ladders and they climbed up and threw a rope around the Christian crosses, and they pulled them down. It was very exciting!"

After that, they did the same thing to the other three churches, a sort of Venetian-looking one and a vast, solid Lutheran one with a witch's hat for a steeple. They stacked the crosses at the Red Guard headquarters, but pious people stole them and took them away, burying them in the hills east of the city. These crosses were only disinterred a few years ago, when the reforms came into force. But the change is dramatic. For example, I bought a locally made crucifix—they were mass-producing them now in Qingdao—for seventy-five cents.

Mr. Bai said he had vivid memories of the Cultural Revolution because he had not had to go to school. He chased after the Red Guards, watching them destroy houses and persecute people; he had found it all thrilling, and he had always been part of the crowd when some spectacular piece of vandalism was unleashed.