Riding the Iron Rooster

The first sign of the city proper is the high wall around it, like a medieval fortification, built in the Ming Dynasty, fourteenth century, and recently restored. It has crenellations and sentry posts and towers with windows designed (like those on the Great Wall) for the width of crossbows. And like the Great Wall, it was built as much to keep some people in as to keep others out. The Xian city wall was high and bulky, and the train passed the North Gate, which looked like a temple, with red beams and a large arched roof. Near it was a big banner with two-foot characters, saying, Be Disciplined and Obey the Law.

Xian Station was new, the streets were broad, the city was well organized; it was as though it had been designed to be visited. As the capital of the brilliant but brief Qin empire and the starting point of the Silk Road, Xian had always been regarded as a visitable city. Even 8000 years ago, people lived here in reasonable comfort—the proof was at the excavated neolithic site at Banpo, nearby. Xian's most glorious associations are with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the man who unified China, burned the books; built the Great Wall; standardized the laws, currency, roads, weights, measures, axle lengths and written language; and ordered the now famous terra-cotta warriors to be made. That was well over 2000 yeats ago, and the warriors weren't uncovered again until twelve years ago.

"When I was young, no tourists came to Xian," Mr. Xia told me, as we walked around town. He was thirty-two years old, a local guide, one of the many I hired en route. "There were some visitors and foreign experts from East European countries. But we never saw Americans."

"When did they start coming?"

"Obviously, after the terra-cotta army was found. Then, people were very interested. More and more things were unearthed. In 1980 some diggers found the bronze horse and chariot. People wanted to see these things."

That was wonderful for the Chinese. They probably realized that the value of a tourist lies in his attention span. Sight-seeing is perfect for a dictatorship—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The nonsightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency and has to be deported. Also, typically, the nonsightseer is not a big spender and, in his or her unregulated way, is quite a dangerous person to have around.

I hated sight-seeing in China. I felt the Chinese hid behind their rebuilt ruins so that no one could look closely at their lives. And the rebuilding was poor—usually botched and too sloppily painted. The places were always impossibly crowded and noisy. The Chinese were so desperate in their courtships that they went on tourist outings in order to hide and canoodle. Every holy mountain and famous pagoda had more than its share of motionless couples hugging and (sometimes) smooching. It was no good saying a particular place was hideous or pointless. It was the ritual of visiting—the outing—that mattered.

Xian was one of the few exceptions I found. It was genuinely interesting and pretty, and rather a stately and dignified place—different in that respect from most other Chinese cities, which were sooty and badly made and industrial. But Xian knows it is important. Hotels were being put up quickly to accommodate tourists, and in what had been for hundreds of years a very provincial city, off the beaten track, people seemed aware of the city's new celebrity as a tourist attraction.

The stall holders of Xian's market are relentless in their hectoring. They plead, they beg, they bargain. They hawk cast figures of the warriors, and mats, and puppets cut out of cowhide, and horrible little coasters, and they push them in your face and shriek, "Ming Dynasty!"

Tourists and the free market economy arrived at about the same time, which meant that the first tourists found rapacious individuals waving handicrafts and haggling.

A small proportion of the merchandise is not junk. It is stuff from attics and old chests—the family jewels, knickknacks that have been around for years, filthy little incense burners, cracked jade seals, tobacco boxes made out of hammered silver, rags of silk, very old and beautiful clothes made of silk and embroidery, and bonnets, jade wine cups, old brass padlocks, wooden images of gods and goddesses, silver fingernails, elaborate hairpins, perfume jars, snuff containers, pewter jars, pretty teapots, chipped dishes and plates, ivory chopsticks and mortally wounded vases.

Entirely off their own bat the Chinese turned the free market into a flea market. The trinkets and treasures have come out of the woodwork, and the stall holders or improvisational market people have become pestering hagglers for the first time in the People's Republic.