Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  Rebuilt and restored buildings in Tibet have the Disneylandish simplicity of fresh paint and characterless frippery—and it is true all over China: the style is pervasive. Only the Potala was spared the philistine fury of the Cultural Revolution, and that was because Zhou Enlai intervened. But it was in the Potala that a monk showed me a series of monasteries depicted on an old mural.

  He pointed to one monastery.

  "China destroy," he said.

  He pointed to another.

  "China destroy."

  He indicated six more and said the same thing. For this information I rewarded him with a portrait of the Dalai Lama. He clasped his hands and hissed at me.

  "Dalai Lama come! China go!"

  The Chinese have invited the Dalai Lama back, but he has so far refused to return until his conditions are met. It is unlikely that the Chinese will agree to the conditions, the central one of which is independence. Feeling is so strong in Tibet, and his devotees are so passionate and numerous, that he would not have any difficulty leading a rebellion. He is a peaceful soul, so that is unlikely. But even if any Tibetans attempted an uprising it would fail. The Chinese would crush it without mercy—and not out of revenge, but (as they would explain) for the good of Tibet. Party officials are happy to admit their mistakes in Tibet, but the thing they find hardest to understand is why the Tibetans are not more grateful for roads and buses and schools that were brought at great expense to this plateau. They say: "It's modern! It's progress! It's civilization!"

  It seems like proof to the Chinese that they are dealing with sentimental savages when Tibetans say the roads and schools are just another Chinese outrage. But that does not weaken the Chinese resolve—quite the opposite. It just means there is much more work to do in this benighted place, they say, echoing missionaries and colonizers and imperialists and encyclopedia salesmen the world over.

  The Chinese have a fatal tendency to take themselves and their projects too seriously. In this they resemble some other evangelizing races, spreading the word and traveling the world to build churches, factories, or fast-food outlets—the intention may be different in each case but they are all impositions. What the evangelizer in his naive seriousness does not understand is that there are some people on earth who do not wish to be saved.

  The Tibetans were too isolated to understand what a very great favor it was for them to be admitted to the Chinese world: that is the Chinese view. But it is plain that the Chinese are themselves isolated and do not understand how deeply their version of progress and modernity is hated by many sensible people. Partly this is due to their insensitivity and the clumsiness brought about by their isolation. But their seriousness doesn't help—nor does it mean they are particularly watchful or wise, since seriousness can often indicate that someone is vacant and stupid.

  Not much opprobrium was ever attached to the Chinese invasion of Tibet. In one respect the rest of the world did not care greatly. The prevailing view was that the Chinese were possessed of a kind of wisdom. How could such people fail the Tibetans? But that view accepts the Chinese as inscrutable, and working out their solutions in mysterious ways.

  I do not accept Chinese inscrutability. I think, like many people on earth, they are knowable, and they are a great deal more scrutable and obvious than most. Now the Tibetans know them much better and would probably agree (as I do) with Doctor Johnson who wrote 200 years ago, "The boundless panegyricks which have been lavished upon the Chinese learning, policy, and the arts, show with what power novelty attracts regard, and how naturally esteem swells into admiration. I am far from desiring to be numbered among the ex-aggerators of Chinese excellence."

  Tibet is so underpopulated that the Chinese have relaxed their one-child policy for Tibetans—it is also practically unenforceable in such a wild place. And the emptiness of the country means that any crowd of people is a novelty. That is why the Lhasa market is so busy: many of the people are merely spectators who have come to Lhasa on a New Year's pilgrimage and can't get over the sight of fresh oranges and bananas or the hundreds of highly ornamented Kham men swapping beads and necklaces.

  The Lhasa market was the most interesting one I saw in China, because the Chinese have found it impossible to regulate. As a consequence, the traders sell everything they can lay their hands on, at whatever price they can get. There is a lively trade in antiques—silver, pewter, semiprecious stones, knives, swords, saddles, horse brasses and harnesses, whips, rugs, carpets, and more Buddhist paraphernalia than you can shake a stick at. Some of the objects are copies. Many are fakes. Some are genuine. I was offered a silver charm box—a sort of sporran studded with jewels. Tibetan jewelry is heavy and often handsome. Enough tourists have come to Tibet for even these country folk to demand hundreds of dollars for their strings of coral and turquoise. After I bought a silver bowl from a young man he saw me as a serious customer and lifted up his robe, giving me a glimpse of an antique gold statue of Tara. Everyone had rare antiques stuffed up their cloaks and sleeves.

  I walked from one end of Lhasa to the other. The distance was not great—just a few miles—but the altitude made it slow going. I went to the carpet factory, the tannery, the boot and shoe factory. The bazaar atmosphere of the free market made it seem much busier than any of these industries. The factories operated at half speed, with abundant tea breaks and giggling employees and work-in-stoppage—a far cry from the sweatshops of Canton and Shanghai.

  There are no suburbs to Lhasa. Walk for fifteen minutes and you come either to the mountains or the river. A yak skin boat, a sort of unstable coracle, takes people across the river. On the other side there is a sandbank, a gravelly plain and more mountains.

  An early European explorer to Tibet burst into tears when he saw one lovely mountain covered with snow. When I saw the landscape of Tibet that did not seem to me an odd reaction. The setting is more than touching—it is a bewitchment: the light, the air, the emptiness, the plains and peaks. Dusty crags and steep slopes surround Lhasa, and on some of the mornings I was there they were covered with snow from flurries in the night. Tibet has none of the winding roads and black cliffs of the Alps, nor the impenetrable and dangerous look of the Rockies. It is a safe and reassuring remoteness, with the prettiest meadows and moors buttressed by mountains. It was, somehow, a mountain landscape with few valleys—a blue and white plateau of tinkling yak bells and bright glaciers and tiny wildflowers. Who wouldn't burst into tears?

  I got used to the smell of yak butter. It did not bother me that the Tibetans didn't wash.

  "The water is too cold," Ralpa said.

  "Of course," I said.

  It was much harder for me to understand the fresh-air fiends in Harbin who chopped holes in the ice on the Sungari River and jumped in.

  "They will get sick if they take baths," Ralpa said.

  "Of course."

  They were very dirty, but the cold pinched the smell, and it was so windy the stinks were academic. And Tibetans wore such gorgeous jewelry and furs and coiffures that they did not look dirty. In the end, the only thing I objected to were the fierce and rabid dogs, and in particular those mastiffs they called dhoki, guard dogs. I kept imagining myself riding a bike down these lovely roads on a long peregrination of Tibet, and the vision was interrupted by a mastiff lunging from behind a rock and messily dismembering me.

  While I was in Tibet I read in a two-week-old China Daily that the politburo had met in Peking and decided that Lei Feng was still relevant as an example to Chinese youth. The politburo issued a statement saying that Lei Feng ought to be emulated. This made strange reading in Tibet.

  Lei Feng was "the rustless screw." He was a model soldier and fervent Maoist who died after being crushed by a truck in 1962. No one had really known him; but after his death his diary was found and it showed him to be exemplary. He wrote how he reread and adored Mao's writings. He worked night and day, so he said. One night he went without sleep in order to wash a ton of cabbages. He did not stop there, but spent the early
morning mopping floors.

  In the diary (which some sceptical Chinese have called a forgery), Lei Feng wrote, "A man's usefulness to the revolutionary cause is like a screw in a machine. Though a screw is small, its use is beyond measure. I am willing to be a screw."

  Twenty-five years later, Yu Qiuli, an important politburo member, said that what was needed in China today was more of "the Screw Spirit."

  It was very hard to imagine a laughing Tibetan in his homemade fleece-lined coat with four-foot sleeves, his fantastic hat and boots, and red silk plaited into his hair, and his silver charm box and dagger, with jeweled earrings and ivory buttons, hollering at his dogs and gnawing bones and tying ribbons to his yaks—this freebooting man of the mountains—saying piously, "I am willing to be a screw."

  It was even less likely that a Tibetan woman would be so submissive. No women in Asia were tougher or freer. Polyandry was still practiced in Tibet—some women had three or four husbands (the men were nearly always brothers). I could not imagine such a woman in blue coveralls, washing cabbages and losing sleep for the revolutionary cause.

  It was not in the Tibetan's nature to be a robot. As nomads and the descendants of nomads; as hut dwellers in the emptiest region of the world, they were independent, and they were a great deal more self-reliant than the Lei Fengs. They were nearly always smiling, probably because they were either heading somewhere to pray or had just returned—prayers seemed to put Tibetans in a good mood. They seldom looked tired. They were brisk but they never hurried. They never ran. Unlike the Chinese they never nagged. They had made Lhasa a town of jolly pedestrians. They walked in the clean air through spindly winter-bare willows. They often stopped to admire the mountains. The mountains around Lhasa in new snow looked to me as though they had been made out of starched and crushed bedsheets, a mountain range of frozen laundry. Farther off the mountains were higher, bluer, and softened by the deeper snow. The snow represents holiness and purity to the Tibetans, whose glissading spirits need this symbol of innocence to prove they are still free: such snowy mountains are proof of God's existence.

  You have to see Tibet to understand China. And anyone apologetic or sentimental about Chinese reform has to reckon with Tibet as a reminder of how harsh, how tenacious and materialistic, how insensitive the Chinese can be. They actually believe this is progress.

  And yet, even with the policy of going too far, and the turbulence and damage in Tibet's recent history—the bombings, massacres, executions "for economic sabotage," oppressive nagging, crucifixions, tortures, desecrations, idiotic slogans, political songs, humiliations, edicts, insults, racism, baggy pants, army uniforms, brass bands, bad food, forced labor, compulsory blood donation, struggle sessions and pink socks—the scars hardly showed. Tibet had a way of looking inviolate. The mountains helped, but the people's attitude mattered most. They had found a way of distancing themselves from the Chinese, and they had done so in the most effective way, by laughing at them.

  The most serious development in recent years is the Chinese discovery that Tibet is a tourist attraction. Tourists want monasteries. Tourists want temples and ringing gongs. Tourists adore monks. So the Chinese allowed Tibet to return, at least superficially, to its spiritual slumber. The Chinese doubled all the prices in Tibet. They welcomed Holiday Inn to run their best hotel, and they promised to rebuild the dynamited Ganden Monastery. There is a trickle of tourists; China has said it would like to have 100,000 a year. In that event, the destruction of Lhasa might be assured.

  But it is a hard place to get to—six days overland from Xian, or else a long and frightening flight from Chengdu to Lhasa's small and dangerous airfield, which is so far from Lhasa that people must go there the night before if they have to catch a morning flight. These difficult journeys are part of the reason that Tibet has remained untouched. And the altitude can make even a strong person feel unwell—your head is two or three miles in the air most of the time. But the main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese—and so thoroughly old-fangled and pleasant—is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached. The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa. That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.

  Quite by chance I saw Mr. Fu before I left Lhasa. He was anxious to show me that he had overcome his horror of snow and his altitude sickness. He was being an exemplary Lei Feng for a change.

  Was there anything I wanted to see?

  "Let's go for a drive," I said.

  He slipped on his driving gloves. We set off alone. Miss Sun was in her room, playing cassettes, wagging her head to "I am a disco dancer."

  "It is a lovely day," I said. It was clear and cold.

  But I had a destination in mind—a gateway that was said to have been destroyed by Red Guards. I had read a clear description of it but it was not on any of the maps. Mr. Fu drove. We went past the carpet factory, and easterly past a ruined monastery; past barracks, past ugly Chinese houses, past barbed-wire fences. Dead dogs were flattened against the road—the wheels of Chinese army trucks had reduced the corpses to hairy stains. The red flags that flew were not prayer flags, which repeated mantras as the wind made them flap; they were army pennants.

  Mr. Fu lost his way. In his confusion he became reckless. He drove too fast. There were more recently ruined cloisters with slogans on them. Mr. Fu began to gasp in impatience.

  "Women chi le tai yuen," he said. I think we have gone too far.

  "You sure have," I said.

  Surprised by hearing English, he gave me a wild look, as if I had made an unpleasant noise. He had already forgotten what he had said. He saw me frowning, and in fear he started to laugh.

  This Chinese trip was so long and it had claimed so much of me that it stopped being a trip. It was another part of my life; and ending the travel was not a return but a kind of departure, which I regretted.

  When I left Tibet some days later I lifted up my eyes to the mountains and clasped my hands and invented a clumsy prayer that went: Please let me come back.

  * * *

  *"Ah Q typifies all those who compensate themselves for their failures and setbacks in real life by regarding them as moral or spiritual victories." (Scltcttd Works of Mao Zedong, vol. I, p. 282).

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  *Mao was often accused of being like the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. His reply (in 1969) was: "Well, and what was so remarkable about Qin Shi Huangdi? He executed 460 scholars. We, we executed 46,000 of them!...You think you insult us by saying we are like Qin Shi Huangdi, but you make a mistake, we have passed him a hundred times!" (Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows)

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  *Even so, in June 1987 some Chinese looters were caught trying to sell a warrior's head to a foreign dealer for $81,000, in Xian, the death penalty was a certainty.

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  "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.

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  Was a vindictive Chinese god listening to this? Perhaps. Exactly a year later, on June 20, 1987, a man from Texas was murdered on this very train by two Chinese men. The victim's name was Ewald Cheer. The motive was robbery ($i86). He was the first American to be murdered in China for forty years. His killers were quickly found guilty and executed.

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  She had the reason wrong Mao was the mover of a resolution to forbid the naming of provinces, cities, towns or squares for himself or other living leaders Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. IV, p 380).

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  During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) one of the chants went:

  Surely government bannermen are many;

  Certainly foreign soldiers a horde;

&
nbsp; But if each of our people spits once.

  They will drown bannermen and invaders together. Poems of Revotl. Peking, 1962

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  Confucius said, "The asking of questions is in itself the correct rite."

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Front

  1. The Train to Mongolia

  2. The Inner Mongolian Express to Datong: Train Number 24

  3. Night Train Number 90 to Peking

  4. The Shanghai Express

  5. The Fast Train to Canton

  6. Train Number 324 to Hohhot and Lanzhou

  7. The Iron Rooster

  8. Train Number 104 to Xian

  9. The Express to Chengdu

  10: The Halt at Emei Shan: Train Number 209 to Kunming

  11: The Fast Train to Guilin: Number 80

  12: The Slow Train to Changsha and Shaoshan "Where the Sun Rises"

  13: The Peking Express: Train Number 16

  14: The International Express to Harbin: Train Number 17

  15: The Slow Train to Langxiang: Number 295

  16: The Boat Train to Dalian: Number 92

  17: On the Lake of Heaven to Yantai

  18: The Slow Train to Qingdao: Number 508

  19: The Shandong Express to Shanghai: Train Number 234

  20: The Night Train to Xiamen: Number 375