Riding the Iron Rooster

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").