Riding the Iron Rooster (33 page)

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.

A thought that occurred to me back in Xinjiang was that the Uighurs were reverting to what they had always been—travelers, nomads, bargainers, inflexible Muslims and "shansh marnie" people. So it was elsewhere, too. Scholars who had had to pretend to be political parrots for the sake of Mao were re-forming themselves into that old distinguished class of scholar gentry; gamblers and drinkers were reemerging, and so were family farmers, and tinkers and pot wallopers, and small businessmen; and these folks living at the margins of the big cities—the market traders. Especially them.

What choice had they? Politics was closed to them. They couldn't emigrate. They couldn't criticize the government. The Communist Party was like a Masonic order, just as mysterious a brotherhood, possibly sinister, and just about unjoinable—you had to be chosen, and the most supine and robotlike yes-men were the likeliest candidates.

In such circumstances, who wouldn't dig out the family silver and flog it to tourists?

"This is old—
very old!
" they squawked. "Early Qing Dynasty! Ming Dynasty! Fifty
kuai!
How much you pay? Make me an offer!"

That fascinated me. No fixed prices, no fixed location, no overheads. Just a wild-eyed person clutching my arm and pushing a string of old beads at me.

What made the whole enterprise even more interesting was that the stuff ranged from certifiable treasures to outright fakes. I went to Mount Li to look at the man-made hill which is probably the tomb of the first emperor—and it is probably just as likely that the tomb was looted in 206
B.C.
, the year his dynasty ended.

A man lurking in the market near that hill hissed at me and pointed to a bulge in his shirt, indicating that he had something wonderful inside.

"You want to sell me something?" I said.

He shushed me, making a worried face. And with great caution he showed me what he had. It was a brass jar, with a lid, about five inches high, with markings on it.

"Two hundred yuan," he said.

I laughed at him, but he persisted. "Look," he said. "The sides. The top. Look closely."

There were erotic carvings on it, five sexual positions, tiny inscriptions, and bits of flummery and decoration. Also, I could see that it was old—not ancient, but old. Qing. Nineteenth century. Maybe a little earlier than 1850. Dao Guang period, according to my book.

"I'll give you fifty."

He laughed at me, harder than I had laughed at him.

"What is it?"

"For special medicine," he said, and leered.

He meant aphrodisiacs—what else would you put in such a thing?

He dropped his price to 150 and then to 100. Then I showed him 80 yuan in foreign exchange certificates, and our illegal bargain was sealed. It was not a treasure, but it was unusual, and it was a damned sight more interesting than the dusty hill on the tourist itinerary.

The fakes were not difficult to spot, but the whole idea of people knowingly selling fakes said a great deal for this new burst of Chinese enterprise. Sometimes they were little stone statues, often they were clumsy bronze copies, but the majority of the bogus merchandise was in the form of marble or limestone heads or carvings that had been made to look as though they had been hacked off a temple wall. "Very old," the traders said. "Song! Ming! Qing!"They quoted high prices and dropped them. Fifty other people were selling identical stuff, but that did not stop anyone from claiming the items were ancient, when, as was very obvious, they had all been made in a factory that specialized in fakes.

A very large market, selling all these things—fakes, treasures and flea-market knickknacks—had just been specially built and recently opened adjacent to the site of the terra-cotta army. It is the government's way of admitting that such free-lance traders are here to stay. Some stalls have roofs, and are rented for a small fee; but the rest of the market is in the open air, set up on tables and benches.

"When the foreigners come, business is very good," a man told me, after selling me a pretty perfume bottle for about a dollar. "But the Chinese people don't buy these things. They don't like antiques."

They are proud of the terra-cotta warriors, though.
^*

When I was there, thousands of visitors were looking at the figures, and very few of these people were from overseas. The majority were Chinese tourists who had come great distances in rickety buses that had been hired by their factory or cooperative or work unit. They were poorly dressed and perspiring in the summer heat, they hurried to and fro in little trotting groups; they grinned for pictures, striking poses in front of the hangarlike building that houses the warriors. They were photographed by foreign tourists, and some of them returned the compliment—or insult—and took pictures of the foreigners.

The terra-cotta warriors (which cannot be photographed) were not a disappointment to me. They are too bizarre for that. They are stiff, upright, life-sized men and horses, marching forward in their armor through an area as big as a football field—hundreds of them, and each one has his own face and his own hairstyle. It is said that each clay figure had a counterpart in the emperor's real army, which was scattered throughout the Qin empire. Another theory is that the individual portraiture was meant to emphasize the unity of China by exhibiting "all the physical features of the inhabitants of mainland east Asia." Whatever the reason, each head is unique, and a name is stamped on the back of every neck—perhaps the name of the soldier, perhaps that of the potter-sculptor.

It is this lifelike quality of the figures—and the enormous number of them—that makes the place wonderful, and even a little disturbing. As you watch, the figures seem to move forward. It is very hard to suggest the human form in armor, and yet even with these padded leggings and boots and heavy sleeves, the figures look agile and lithe, and the kneeling archers and crossbowmen look alert and fully human.

This buried army was very much a private thrill for the tyrant who decreed that it be created to guard his tomb. But the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was given to grand gestures. Until his time, China was fragmented into the Warring States, and bits of the Wall had been put up. As Prince Cheng, he took over from his father in 246 b.c. He was thirteen years old. Before he was forty he had subdued the whole of China. He called himself emperor. He introduced an entirely new set of standards, put one of his generals—and many of his convicts and peasants—to work building the Great Wall, abolished serfs (meaning that for the first time, the Chinese could give themselves surnames), and burned every book that did not directly praise his achievements—it was his way of making sure that history began with him. His grandiose schemes alienated his subjects and emptied his treasury. Three attempts were made to kill him. Eventually he died on a journey to east China, and to disguise his death, his ministers covered his stinking corpse with rotten fish and carted him back to be buried here. The second emperor was murdered, and so was his successor, in what the Chinese call 'The first peasant insurrection in Chinese history."

The odd thing is not how much this ancient ruler accomplished, but that he managed it in so short a time. And in an even shorter time, the achievements of his dynasty were eclipsed by chaos. Two thousand years later China's rulers had remarkably similar aims—conquest, unity and uniformity.

The rare quality of the terra-cotta warriors is that, unlike anything else on the tourist route in China, they are exactly as they were made. They were vandalized by the rebellious peasants in the year 206 b.C., when these people invaded the tomb to steal the weapons—crossbows, spears, arrows and pikestaffs (they were all real)—that the clay warriors were holding. After that the figures lay buried until, in 1974, a man digging a well hit his shovel against a warrior's head and unearthed it and the disinterrment was begun. The warriors are the one masterpiece in China that has not been repainted, faked and further vandalized. If they had been found before the Cultural Revolution instead of after it, they would undoubtedly have been pulverized by Red Guards, along with all the other masterpieces they smashed, burned or melted down.

Chinese tourists also flock to Xian to see the hot springs, the Hua Qing Pool, a sort of Tang Dynasty resort that is associated with the two-week arrest in 1936 of Chiang Kai-Shek, the so-called Xian Incident. They crowd around the sign saying
This Is the Window that Chiang Kai-Shek Jumped Out Of
and say, "Where are the bullet holes?"

They go to the Big Goose Pagoda, the Drum Tower, the Temple of the Recumbent Dragon, and the Banpo neolithic site, where a sign reads
People in this primitive society with low productivity couldn't understand the structure of the human body, living and dying and many phenomena of nature, so they began to have an initial religious idea.

They go to the Great Mosque, Qinzhen Si, where many people still do have religious ideas. This mosque was founded 1200 years ago, and enlarged, vandalized, demolished and rebuilt many times since. It was in the process of being restored when I visited. I asked an old man how many believers there were in Xian. He said there were hundreds and that a few dozen had been to Mecca. He also said that during the Cultural Revolution the mosque had housed animals—pigs, mainly—which seemed the most popular way of insulting Muslims. When I left him he said, "We are Sunni. Not Shi'ites. No Khomeini. Ha-ha!"

That was a
ha-ha
I hadn't heard before, and seemed to mean
Death to the infidels.

Walking among the gates and pillars with their Arabic inscriptions, I saw an old man.

"
Salaam aleikum,
" I said. "Peace and blessing be upon you."

"
Wa-aleikum salaam,
" he replied, returning the greeting. "Are you from Pakistan?"

"No. America."

"Are there Muslims in America?" he asked, using the word
Mussulmen
in his Chinese.

"Yes. Quite a few," I said. "Why did you think I was from Pakistan? Did you think I looked like a Pakistani?"

"Maybe," he said, and shrugged. "I don't know. "I've never seen one."

I became sad, looking at Mr. Fang's lopsided expression of longing, one eye screwed up and one spiky patch of his hair sticking up. He could be so silent. He merely followed me, perhaps hoping that I would do something wrong. He looked so grateful when I asked for his help. Now we were in the Soft Class Waiting Room at Xian Station, killing time with magazines, and I became sadder when I saw him trying to work out with a dictionary a page in
China Products Monthly.
I had the same magazine, and that page was an ad for "Jiangsu Ceramics"—small, ugly statues of angels, Santa Clauses, snow-covered churches, Mickey Mouses, choirboys with lyres; and what Mr. Fang was trying to read, described the ceramics as "Ingeniously conceived! Vividly modeled! Freshly colored! Boundlessly interesting!"

He looked up and smiled at me, which depressed me even more, because I suspected that he was sad. Then I decided that he was not sad at all. He was like so many other Chinese—reserved and fatalistic and steeling themselves against disappointment. Yes, the Great Wall was a masterpiece and the Tang Dynasty had been glorious and they had managed to thrash the Japanese, and they invented poison gas, toilet paper and the decimal point; but they also had a long history of convulsions and reverses. Never mind that they forgot they invented the mechanical clock. Look at the upheavals that had taken place in just the past hundred years or so: the Taiping revolt, the humiliating colonialism of Europe and Japan, the Boxer Rebellion, the fall of the empire in 1911, the republic of Sun Yat-sen, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the battling between Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang and Mao's communists, The Great Leap Forward and all the other witch-hunts and hysterical purges that followed the emergence of the People's Republic, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Who wouldn't be uneasy? And these sudden agonies were undoubtedly the reason that few people ever showed confidence in the future. It was better not to think about it. And it was a loss of face to seem disappointed, which was another reason the Chinese never opened presents in front of the giver (nor commented on the gift, no matter how large or small), and why their impulse when startled was always to laugh.

Mr. Fang, who was a Russian specialist, who had lectured on Pushkin and acted as interpreter in Moscow and Leningrad at a time when the Russians and the Chinese had been comrades, had been howled at in the 1960s for teaching a bourgeois foreign language and forced to carry boulders in a sort of chain gang. And now he was shadowing an ungrateful American through central Sichuan. Instead of screaming
What next!
he looked up and shyly smiled.

He pretended not to see me board the train, but I called out to him, "I'll see you in Chengdu."

The train pulled out at about five-thirty in the bright early evening, and passed the wheat fields and the harvesters. It also passed a great number of mounds and tombs and tumuli, probably all of them looted (though no one took treasures to the Government Antique Exchange anymore, where they were paid a pittance for the object which was then sold for a high price at a state shop). I had heard at my hotel that another pit near Xian had just been excavated and was full of yet more terra-cotta figures. I asked for information on this, but either no one knew about it or else they had decided to keep it a secret.