To the Ends of the Earth

The corpses in the underground tombs at Astana were six hundred years old, but perfectly preserved, grinning, lying side by side on a decorated slab.

“You want to take a picture of the dead people?” the caretaker asked me.

“I don’t have a camera.”

She paid no attention to that. She said, “Ten yuan. One picture.”

Mr. Liu said, “I hate looking at dead bodies,” and hurried up the stone stairs, fleeing the burial chamber.

When he was gone, the caretaker said, “Shansh marnie?”

Fear of Flying

CHINESE TRAINS COULD BE BAD. IN TWELVE MONTHS OF traveling—almost forty trains—I never saw one with a toilet that wasn’t piggy. The loudspeakers plonked and nagged for eighteen hours a day—a hangover from the days of Maoist mottoes. The conductors could be tyrants, and the feeding frenzy in the dining car was often not worth the trouble. But there were compensations—the kindly conductors, the occasional good meal, the comfortable berth, the luck of the draw; and, when all else failed, there was always a chubby thermos of hot water for making tea.

Yet whatever objections I could devise against the trains, they were nothing compared with the horrors of air travel in China. I had a small doze of it when I left Urumchi for Lanzhou—there was no point in retracing my steps on the Iron Rooster. I was told to be at the airport three hours early—that is, seven in the morning; and the plane left five hours late, at three in the afternoon. It was an old Russian jet, and its metal covering was wrinkled and cracked like the tinfoil in a used cigarette pack. The seats were jammed so closely together that my knees hurt and the circulation to my feet was cut off. Every seat was taken, and every person was heavily laden with carry-on baggage—big skull-cracking bundles that fell out of the overhead rack. Even before the plane took off, people were softly and soupily vomiting, with their heads down and their hands folded, in the solemn and prayerful way that the Chinese habitually puke. After two hours we were each given an envelope that contained three caramel candies, some gum, and three sticky boiled sweets; a piece of cellophane almost concealed a black strand of dried beef that looked like oakum and tasted like decayed rope; and (because Chinese can be optimistic) a toothpick. Two hours later a girl wearing an old postman’s uniform went around with a tray. Thinking it might be better food, I snatched one of the little parcels—it was a key ring. The plane was very hot, and then so cold I could see my breath. It creaked like a schooner under sail. Another two hours passed. I said: I am out of my mind. An announcement was made, saying in a gargling way that we would shortly be landing. At this point everyone except the pukers stood up and began yanking their bundles out of the racks; and they remained standing, pushing, tottering, and vaguely complaining—deaf to the demands that they sit down and strap themselves in—as the plane bounced, did wheelies on the runway, and limped to Lanzhou terminal. Never again.

Handmade Landscape

WE WERE STILL IN GANSU, GOING SOUTHEAST TOWARD Shaanxi Province (not to be confused with Shanxi, a bit northeast), and we had just left the town of Tianshui. The landscape was unlike anything I had seen in Xinjiang or even the rest of Gansu. It was the carefully constructed Chinese landscape of mud mountains sculpted in terraces which held overgrown lawns of ripe rice. The only flat fields were far below, at the very bottom of the valleys. The rest had been made by the people, a whole countryside that had been put together by hand—stone walls shoring up the terraces on hillsides, paths and steps cut everywhere, sluices, drains, and carved-out furrows. There was even more wheat than rice here, and bundles of it were piled, waiting to be collected and threshed—probably by that black beast up to his nose in the buffalo wallow.

The whole landscape had been possessed and shaped and put to practical use. It was not pretty, but it was symmetrical. You couldn’t say, “Look at that hillside,” because it was all terraces—mud-walled ditches and fields, and mud-walled houses and roads. What the Chinese managed in miniature with a peach stone, carving it into an intricate design, they had done with these honey-colored mountains. If there was an outcrop of rock, they balanced a rice paddy on it, and the steps and terraces down the steep hills gave them the look of Mayan pyramids. There had not been much of that in the west of China. It was huge, the sort of complicated mud kingdom that insects created, and it was both impressive and appalling that everything visible in this landscape was man-made. Of course you could say that about any city in the world, but this wasn’t a city—it was supposed to be the range of hills above the river Wei; and it looked as though it had been made by hand.

The Terra-cotta Warriors