Riding the Iron Rooster

"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.