To the Ends of the Earth

Shaoshan said everything about Mao: his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village, they were like many temples in China, where no one prayed any longer—just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion, and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.

*“These were the virtues of Confucius, as described by one of his disciples,” runs the commentary in Mao’s Selected Works. So Mao was also criticizing Confucius for not being of a revolutionary spirit.

The Great Wall

BECAUSE IT IS A FLAT, DRY, NORTHERN CITY, AT THE EDGE OF Mongolia, Peking has beautiful skies. They are bluest in the freezing air of winter. China’s old euphemism for itself was Tianxia, “All beneath the sky”—and, on a good day, what a sky! It was limpid, like an ocean of air, but seamless and unwrinkled, without a single wavelet of cloud; endless uncluttered fathoms of it that grew icier through the day and then at the end of the winter afternoon turned to dust.

Thinking it would be empty, I went to see the Great Wall again. Dr. Johnson told Boswell how eager he was to go to China and see the Wall. Boswell was not so sure himself. How could he justify going to China when he had children at home to take care of?

“Sir,” Dr. Johnson said, “by doing so [going to China] you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, sir.”

The Wall is an intimidating thing, less a fortification than a visual statement announcing imperiously: I am the Son of Heaven and this is the proof that I can encircle the earth. It somewhat resembles, in intention, the sort of achievement of that barmy man Christo, who giftwrapped the Golden Gate Bridge. The Wall goes steeply up and down mountainsides. To what purpose? Certainly not to repel invaders, who could never cling to those cliffs. Wasn’t it another example of the Chinese love of taking possession of the land and whipping it into shape?

Anyway, it was not empty. It swarmed with tourists. They scampered on it and darkened it like fleas on a dead snake.

That gave me an idea. “Snake” was very close, but what it actually looked like was a dragon. The dragon is the favorite Chinese creature (“just after man in the hierarchy of living beings”) and until fairly recently—eighty or a hundred years ago—the Chinese believed they existed. Many people reported seeing them alive—and of course fossilized dragon skeletons had been unearthed. It was a good omen and, especially, a guardian. The marauding dragon and the dragon slayer are unknown in China. It is one of China’s friendliest and most enduring symbols. And I found a bewitching similarity between the Chinese dragon and the Great Wall of China—the way it flexed and slithered up and down the Mongolian mountains; the way its crenellations looked like the fins on a dragon’s back, and its bricks like scales; the way it looked serpentine and protective, undulating endlessly from one end of the world to the other.

Mr. Tian

“IS IT COLD OUTSIDE?” I ASKED.

“Very,” said Mr. Tian. His eyeglasses were opaque with frost.

It was five-thirty on a Harbin morning, the temperature at minus thirty-five Centigrade and a light snow falling—little grains like seed pearls sifting down in the dark. When the flurry stopped, the wind picked up, and it was murderous. Full on my face it was like being slashed with a razor. We were on our way to the railway station.

“And you insist on coming with me?” I asked.

“Langxiang is forbidden,” Mr. Tian said. “So I must.”

“It is the Chinese way,” I said.

“Very much so,” he replied.

In this darkness groups of huddled people waited in the empty street for buses. That seemed a grim pastime, a long wait at a Harbin bus stop in winter. And, by the way, the buses were not heated. In his aggrieved account of his Chinese residence, the journalist Tiziano Terzani, writing about Heilongjiang (“The Kingdom of the Rats”), quotes a French traveler who said, “Although it is uncertain where God placed paradise, we can be sure that he chose some other place than this.”

The wind dropped but the cold remained. It banged against my forehead and twisted my fingers and toes; it burned my lips. I felt like Sam McGee. I entered the station waiting room and a chill rolled against me, as if my face had been pressed on a cold slab. The waiting room was unheated. I asked Mr. Tian how he felt about this.

“Heat is bad,” he said. “Heat makes you sleepy and slow.”

“I like it,” I said.

Mr. Tian said, “I once went to Canton. It was so hot I felt sick.”