Riding the Iron Rooster (9 page)

Then we left the dead center of Mongolia and headed south. The train climbed the brown hills outside the city, and after folding itself double on a series of hairpin bends, it rolled into the grasslands—the grass, and the whole landscape had the look of a fine sheepskin of carefully clipped fleece, the same color, a yellow that was whitish and then golden. It was the texture of the grass, it was the wind and sun. This seemingly barren
gobi
was full of live creatures—I saw gray cranes, herds of wild camels, eagles, hawks, buzzards, and brown, long-bodied, gopherlike animals that were probably marmots. But no yaks. Every time I looked out of the window I saw something living, and when there was not a wild animal there was a Mongol—one of those middle-of-nowhere horsemen, heading into the wind.

It was clear and sunny. Every day is clear and sunny in the
gobi,
every sunset is spectacular, the sun softening and sliding down in a red mass and soaking into the ground; and every night is cold.

That night, at dinner, we were served Chinese food.

"Tomorrow we'll be in China," Miss Wilkie said.

"And there I'll have to leave you, I'm afraid," I said.

"Whoever you are," Ashley said. 'Those French dicks call you 'lom mistair.'"

'That's me."

I looked around the dining car at sedate tables. After three weeks of steady travel the mood in this group had changed: it was slightly more irritable but less rambunctious. People knew exactly who to avoid, and which subjects were unwelcome in conversation, and who was crazy and who was safe. Gut also they kept pretty much to themselves: French, American, Australian, English, and the ones left out—Wilma because of her baldness, Blind Bob because he couldn't see, Morthole because of his obsession with rocks, Miss Wilkie because of her sharp tongue—made up a foursome.

I listened to my shortwave radio and learned that many of the earlier scare stories about Chernobyl had been wrong. But it was very bad and still dangerous; the fire had not yet been extinguished.

I slept fitfully, because of the cold, and just as I dropped into a slumber, there was a knock at the door and the Mongolian attendant demanded my bedding. When I hesitated, she employed the grip-and-snatch technique, removing everything from the bed except me, in one pull.

We were just outside the Mongolian border post at Dzamïn Üüd. It was the perfect distant frontier: sandy desert, blowing dust, nothing growing, a desolate wreck of a town looking absolutely on the edge. The railway station looked like the plaster version of a German town hall. But there were no formalities. I waited, watched birds, and four hours passed; the sun climbed to noon. So much of travel is waiting or delay.

The small blue thing in the desert was a Chinese engine. It chugged up the line and rammed us and was coupled, and then it took us across the border, in bright sunshine, from Mongolia into China.

Whenever I heard the Chinese word for railway I thought my name was being mentioned.
Tielu
(literally "iron road") sounds something like a Chinese person attempting the French pronunciation of Theroux. The word never failed to turn my head. What were they saying about me?

The word for train is
huoche
("fire wagon"). This one took us across the border to Erlian. I was aiming to go through the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. Xanadu is in Inner Mongolia, but Kublai Khan's stately pleasure dome exists only as a few acres of broken mud walls. Inner Mongolia is an immensity of grass, and is such a quiet place that the arrival of the train makes Mongolians stare.

Erlian is only a few miles from the border town of Dzamïn Uüd in Outer Mongolia, but the places were very different. Dzam¨n Üüd was a wreck of a town set on glaring sand and was so lacking in events that when a camel went by everyone watched it. But Erlian was a tidy town of brick buildings and flower beds. New saplings lined the streets. The post office was open, the telegraph office worked, the shirt factory was in operation, and the hotel welcomed us. It was not an elegant place, but it was orderly. A work gang was painting an iron fence green.

"Look, Rick. They're smiling. They're waving!"

"Hi there!"

"It's been ages since anyone smiled. The Russians never smiled. I'm going to get a picture of that."

The travelers on the train were completely won over by the smiles. But were they smiling? It seemed to me that this work gang of Mongolian painters was simply dazzled by the sun, though they might well have been smiling in recognition at our exact match of the Chinese slang for foreigners:
dabidze
("big noses").

It was a very hot day in May, and the whole town shimmered in the heat. Christmas decorations (holly, tinsel and strings of tiny lights) had been put up in the station and in the hotel. The train was shunted into the shed to have its wheels changed. But it was not just the wheels—the whole undercarriage was unbolted and replaced, Chinese-style, by hoisting the train, looping it with cables and pulling it apart until ninety tons of cast iron were swinging back and forth.

The arrival of a train was something of an occasion. There were only two trains a day, but they tended to carry some foreigners—people with money to spend or hard currency to exchange. These passengers were either leaving China or just arriving—in any case, a little unsteady and anxious. The Chinese, seeing an opportunity, offered them food and souvenirs. No Chinese destination is complete without a restaurant, and the Chinese do not consider that they have visited a place until they have eaten there. So Erlian had a hotel with a big dining room, and eight-dish meals were served to the train passengers, who ate gratefully and with a sense of relief: China was tidier than they had imagined, and if the rest of it was no worse than this they might even end up liking it.

Bud Wittrick said, "Aw, it's great. They're friendly, they're warm..."

He meant that the Chinese knew how to scuttle around and pour tea. They knew how to be polite, but that did not keep them from staring at our big noses and our huge flapping feet. This fascination—or perhaps horror—was mistaken for affection; and every grimace was interpreted as a Chinese smile.

The Westbetters waved at three passing Chinese. The Chinese fluttered their fingers in imitation.

'They're waving back at us!"

Which was worse—hearing right-wing tourists curse the Russians, or hearing them gush about the Chinese? No one cared about the rotten political systems, but only whether the people smiled at them or not. In a simple and clumsy way the Chinese knew how to manipulate these visitors, but it was so obvious it was like children making friends with other children.

I walked around for three and a half hours, waiting for the train to return with new wheels.

A plane went overhead, flying west in the clear sky. With glasses of Krug champagne in their hands, the First Class passengers were studying the menu: parfait of pheasant and goose liver, smoked salmon mousse and fresh squid salad, and a frisée salad with smoked duck julienne, followed by turbot with prawns and apples, roast rack of Iamb, or crab leg and prawn ragout, and someone was saying, "How is the quail breast today?"

Down here in Inner Mongolia, an old man squatted holding a bowl against his nose and flicking rice grains into his mouth with chopsticks.

If any of the passengers in the plane looked down, they saw nothing more than a light brown land, yellower where the grass was. It was practically all empty space, but I did not know then that empty space is the rarest landscape in China.

We set off again, to cross the plains. It was a long hot afternoon, with only the merest glimpse of people or animals. I saw camels grazing, and herds of horses, and sparrow hawks. At the railway stations with Mongolian names—Qagan Teg and Gurban Obo—the buildings were frugally built but freshly painted, with tiled roofs and flared eaves. Chinese travelers were lined up in an orderly way on prearranged spots as the train pulled in, but when the train stopped the people broke ranks and began fighting for the doors. They were dressed differently from the way I had remembered: fewer blue suits, more color and sun hats, sunglasses and bright sweaters, some women in skirts. All of this was new to me, and I wanted to see more; I was glad that I had come. Towards dusk there were hills in the distance, the limit of the province of Inner Mongolia and the beginning of Shanxi.

That provincial border is marked by a section of the Great Wall. We clattered along the Wall for a while and then, in darkness, passed through it. The Wall is broken and sloping and piled up here—a muddy-looking heap of brown bricks and rubble. We had arrived at the big brown city of Datong.

The Chinese guide said, "We were going to put you up at the Datong guest house, but it is not very clean these days. Now, only Chinese people stay there."

We were taken to the locomotive works, which was one of those Chinese factories that is so self-contained it is like a city. It was formerly a commune; it had schools and a hospital and stores, and a wall around it. It had a hotel, The Datong Locomotive Works Hotel, and that was where we stayed.

After all those weeks of getting there, China seemed shabby and busy and orderly, with great crowds of people, and glaring lights and the sharp smell of burning coal. It seemed odd for a place seemingly so battered and depleted to have such a buzz.

And it was dark and dusty, so that being in Datong was like being in an old movie, in black and white. Chinese clothes were part of the same effect—low hemlines and white blouses and sensible shoes, and men in pin-striped suits, and most of them wearing hats. Chinese-made cars were like the black limousines in old gangster movies. And the streetlights were high, on fluted iron lampposts, and they weren't very bright. The skyline was all factory chimneys—no sign of the Great Wall. The smoky air and flickering lights made it seem like an old movie, too. But that was Datong.

I fell asleep reading and woke late. When I went downstairs breakfast was over, and waiters and waitresses were clearing the table—about ten of them picking up plates. One was eating the leftovers. He was wolfing the bread and hard-boiled eggs that no one had touched. He stopped chewing while I looked around, and then I pretended to be busy and he resumed, stuffing himself and carrying plates and cups. He moved in a rapid, scavenging way.

A morning walk which I took intending to see the famous Nine Dragon Screen involved me in detours, and then I was fooled and lost. I was deceived by the simple city map into thinking the distances were not so great. But I was much more content looking at half-obliterated slogans that had once said
Long Live the Thoughts of Mao Zedong!
Large and small, they were everywhere, and there were too many to rub out. But it was clear from the way they had been vandalized—because the Chinese don't vandalize anything ("Love Public Property" is one of The Five Loves)—that people frankly hated these painted mottos from the Cultural Revolution.

There were people working by the roadside—tinsmiths, carpenters, people drying beans and washing clothes and processing rags and sorting spinach. And repairing vehicles: it is the commonest sight on a Chinese road, people pumping tires, or fiddling with engines, or welding an axle; the bus jacked up and the mechanic's legs sticking out from under it.

The yellow smog in Datong was a combination of desert dust and fog and industrial smoke. It is a coal-burning city, and one of the largest open-pit mines in China is just outside the city limits. The fog was thick and sulphurous in the early morning, and it made the buildings look ghostly and ancient and the people wraithlike. But the buildings weren't old and the people were well fed and fairly friendly.

The biggest difference between this first Chinese city and all the other cities I had seen since West Berlin was that the shops were full of food and goods, and the market was piled high with fruit and vegetables. I kept thinking of the empty shelves and the dented cans in Warsaw, Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator; the women in black shawls carrying string bags and pleading to buy a peck of wrinkled potatoes or six inches of withered sausage. In Moscow I had seen long lines of people—thirty or more to a line—trying to buy tomatoes from hawkers on the street. The tomatoes had just arrived, overripe and soft, from the Caucasus; and they were scarce. After all that, China seemed a land of plenty.

The Chinese are the last people in the world still manufacturing spittoons, chamber pots, treadle sewing machines, bed warmers, "quill" pens (steel nibs, dunk-and-write), wooden yokes for oxen, iron plows, sit-up-and-beg bicycles, steam engines, and the 1948 Packard car (they call it "The Red Flag").

They still make grandfather clocks—the chain-driven mechanical kind that go
tick-tock
and
bong!
Is this interesting? I think it is, because the Chinese invented the world's first mechanical clock in the late Tang Dynasty. Like many other Chinese inventions, they forgot about it, lost the idea, and the clock was reintroduced to China from Europe. The Chinese were the first to make cast iron, and soon after invented the iron plow. Chinese metallurgists were the first to make steel ("great iron"). The Chinese invented the crossbow in the fourth century B.C. and were still using it in 1895. They were the first to notice that all snowflakes have six sides. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding calipers, porcelain, the magic lantern (or zoetrope) and the stink bomb (one recipe called for fifteen pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane and cantharides beetles). They invented the chain pump in the first century A.D. and are still using it. They made the first kite, 2000 years before one was flown in Europe. They invented movable type and devised the first printed book—the Buddhist text, the
Diamond Sutra
in the year 868. They had printing presses in the eleventh century, and there is clear evidence that Gutenberg got his technology from the Portuguese who in turn had learned it from the Chinese. They constructed the first suspension bridge and the first bridge with a segmented arch (this first one, built in 610 is still in use). They invented playing cards, fishing reels and whiskey.