1979
In the late 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution in China ends, I’m attracted to China as clearly things are going to change in a big way.
I’m in Nairobi, having coffee at the Thorn Tree Restaurant, when I read in the East African Standard about a pro-Communist group in Ethiopia offering Ethiopian citizens the chance to visit China. I run across the street to my office and book a flight to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and stand before the tourist board a couple of weeks later. “I want to join your tour to China,” I tell them.
Their response, naturally, is, “But you’re not Ethiopian.”
I’m prepared. “But I am, in a way,” I tell them. “My sister was born here, in Addis.” From an envelope I pull out her birth certificate and let them pass it down the table.
The chief of the tourism board glances at the certificate and asks me to excuse myself for a few minutes. When they ask me to reenter, he tells me, “We’ve decided to give you an Ethiopian visa to travel to China.” On the spot I write them a check for the visa and then book our flights—Jorie’s and mine—to Hong Kong. Because I know that no other travel executive has spent more than two weeks scouting China, I plan a sixty-seven-day reconnaissance, with the final week in Tibet—also a place explored by no more than a couple thousand travellers. The goal is to immerse ourselves in what still stands of the cities, the villages, the history, the food, and the culture of the Middle Kingdom in the wake of the Cultural Revolution—a truly historic journey.
Already from on the plane, Hong Kong is unlike anywhere else I’ve been. The city is a forest of buildings, and we’re flying at a height well below the level of the highest floors of the skyscrapers. As we make our descent to land, my fellow passengers and I catch up-close-and-personal glances into the conference rooms of office buildings—then suddenly our wheels hit the tarmac.
In my head, I rehearse the simple note I’ll make in my travel report to the company: Hong Kong needs a new airport.
I spend a week in meetings with new contacts like Burton Levin, the US State Department deputy principal officer, and Patrick Macleod, an old friend from the Seychelles. Rain pours from a gloomy sky as we tour the hotels and restaurants of Hong Kong, but I’m pleased that the city is civilized and thoughtfully designed to attract travellers.
The shopping is impressive as well. An antiques lover could get lost in the shops on Hollywood Road, and one afternoon I duck into King’s tailors on the first floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel for a suit and shirt made from the highest-quality English cloth available anywhere. After a week in Hong Kong, I prepare to leave to see Macao, but it’s pure disappointment: a monsoon is about to sweep in, and the rain rages. Our trip to Macao is cancelled.
Apart from the weather, the next few weeks are brilliant. As we descend into the morning light of Guilin, a prefecture-level city that sits on the west bank of the Li River, I catch a glimpse of the magnificent karst scenery, where water has weathered the mountains into a landscape of sharp, rocky hills. That afternoon I board a boat for a cruise down the Li River, and my guide seats me at the front table at the very prow of the boat. “This is one of the finest excursions anyone can do in China,” he says. The river is set amid jagged vertical limestone mountains that the Tang dynasty poet Han Yu immortalized with these words:
The river forms a green gauze belt,
the mountains are like blue jade hairpins.
As I lunch on chicken, rice, fish with sweet-and-sour pineapple and peppers, mushrooms, and fresh mandarin oranges, I take in the landscape—and it is exquisite. The mountains and rivers of traditional Chinese painting come to life before my eyes, and Ming Dynasty pagodas appear all along the route. There are fishermen wearing pointed wicker coolie hats and floating on bamboo rafts, people clearing river weed and collecting fodder for their pigs, and water buffalo cooling off in the lakes that lie beside the river. I gaze in front of us, to the south, at the jagged peaks of limestone rock, a summit obscured by ethereal mists.
It makes me all the more eager to reach the city of Xi’an for one of the highlights of this reconnaissance: the tomb of the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang Di. The Emperor began building his tomb as soon as he came to the throne in 246 BC, and hundreds of thousands of laborers toiled to finish it before his death. My guide tells me that the Qianling Mausoleum is also worth a visit to see the tomb of Li Zhi, the third Tang Emperor and his notorious wife, the Empress Wu Ze Tian, who reigned from 649 to 683 AD. The route to the tomb, known as the Royal Way, is flanked by towers, obelisks, statues of winged horses and ostriches, ten pairs of standing statues of men with their heads lobbed off, a pair of steles, a pair of towers, and groups of statues representing those who attended the emperor’s funeral. “As yet they haven’t uncovered the actual tomb,” says my guide. “But one wonders what treasures they’ll find when they do complete the excavation.”
{Erin Long}
It’s always been my dream to see China from the 5,500-mile-long Great Wall.
After a day touring the tombs in Xi’an, I’m raring for the modern life of Shanghai and its eleven million people. The afternoon that we land, we head straight for a tour of the Shanghai Hotel, which is currently the tallest building in Shanghai at twenty-six stories high. The foyer is as basic as that found in any metropolitan hotel, featuring a marble downstairs and a café and bar area. When the manager shows me up to one of the six hundred guest suites, we’re met with a surprise: a pretty Chinese girl carrying her maid’s uniform emerges from one of the hotel rooms for a night out on the town. She slides by us in a rush as the manager looks her over, then he shows me to the rooftop, where the view is magnificent and the setting would be perfect for a cocktail party for my clients. Then he takes me for dinner in one of the private banquet rooms, and as we eye the menu, he reveals, “In Shanghai, you have to try the Peking duck.”
“Why’s that?”
“Everyone here knows that Shanghai Peking duck is much better than Peking Peking duck.”
He’s right. In addition to the Peking duck, we order boned chicken drumsticks lightly fried, accompanied with a poached quail egg on a wheat toast round and medium-sized freshwater crabs. This is the best I’ve eaten in the few weeks I’ve been in China, and the next evening when I eat cream cakes and cream puffs and chocolate éclairs at the Peace Hotel, it’s clear why Shanghai is known for its fantastic cuisine.
From Shanghai it’s a short drive to Suzhou, a two-thousand-year-old city known for its artisans’ wares. Our first stop is at the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute, established in 1957 with over 300 people working in design, embroidery, and silk tapestry. As I tour the institute with the director, Madame Qian, I take note that the students are almost all university-aged women who will train for nearly a decade before they take jobs in factories or stay on as designers at the institute. They show me the projects they’ve worked on for the last six months: silk pieces with reverse embroidery and double-sided embroidery, delicate details, and bright color. There’s a particular work of roses so well defined that I’d almost like to pick a bouquet of them right out of the fabric.
My next port of call is one of the only four sandalwood factories in all of China, at Suzhou’s Northwest Street 58. Here they make the traditional sandalwood fans that many Chinese women carry to cool themselves.
{A&K staff}
Sailing through the Three Gorges on the Yangzi River—Qutang, Wu, and Xiling—the most celebrated natural wonder in all of China.
In the shop, I observe as the workers cut out the intricate fans on their handmade fretwork saws, and in the next room, as they use a hot electric stencil to engrave the fans with images. At the end I make my way into the sculpture room, where they complete the fans and carve the handles. The whole process takes twenty days for a sandalwood fan and up to two months for an elegant ivory fan.
After my tour of Suzhou I board a boat on the Yangzi River for a cruise through the Three Gorges. I take two weeks to make my way to Beijing, a
llowing for plenty of time along the route to tour agricultural areas—the State Market and Free Market in Wuxi are unique representations of how the government has assigned land to farmers, for example. After a hair-raising ride over narrow roads and small humpbacked bridges, I reach the gorgeous West Lake in Hangzou. I’d read in one of my guidebooks:
One of the most beautiful sights you will see in China is the sun rising over West Lake. Make an effort to rise early to see the first rays touch the lake. You will not be disappointed. The sun will disappear from time to time as the slowly receding mist lifts and is carried skyward.
But when I wake at six thirty the next morning and look out of my hotel window across the lake, I see gray clouds diffusing themselves under a milky white sky. The branches of the willow trees sweep unwillingly toward the lake; the gentle leaves of the lily pads tousle in the wind. After a morning tour of the man-made islands on the West Lake, I beg off for Beijing, where I’m eager to visit the Forbidden City. On the flight there, however, I find myself in debilitating pain. Just as the flight crew announces we’ll be making our descent, our hostess walks down the aisle serving each of us a candy. Curious to sample a Chinese-style sweet, I untwist the wrapper and tuck the small cube inside my cheek, discovering a flavor exquisitely similar to a buttery English toffee. Unable to reserve my fondness for the treat, I bite in with gusto and suddenly clench down in pain. Now I remain calm as I remove the toffee from my mouth, embedded with a gold filling that my dentist promised would never need replacing.
I wrap the gold filling in a napkin, and, upon landing and checking into my hotel, I phone the China International Travel Service to help me locate a dentist. A young man named Jimmy calls for me at the hotel and drives me to a hospital—an entirely Chinese place where the receptionist asks me to pay a deposit of one American dollar before she escorts me down a long corridor into the dentist’s surgery space.
Slowly, I glance around: the curtains hang halfway off the rods, the medicine bottles—most with the caps off—are scattered on the counters, their liquid contents spilling onto the floor. The drill looks like something designed by Heath Robinson, the English cartoonist and engineering illustrator. I lean toward my guide. “Could you tell these two nurses, please, that I do not want the dentist putting any injection inside my mouth?”
“These two women are the dentists,” he says.
“Excuse me, ladies?” I say. “I’d like to make it clear that I do not want either of you, or anyone, putting an injection of any kind inside my mouth.” I pause for a moment. “Please.”
Their eyes go blank over their face masks and they look toward my guide. In Cantonese, he puts forth a somewhat hesitant explanation of what I’ve just said, and there’s a sudden explosion of argument. I observe as there are shouts, dental instruments pointed in the air like threatening pistols, arms wielding, and, at one point, I think, almost tears. “Doctors!” I shout, pulling the napkin from my back pocket. “It’s only a filling!”
At once, everyone calms down. One of the dentists turns to the counter and silently begins mixing up a paste. The other points me into the chair, as if to say, What meltdown? Please, sit. She glides onto the wheeled stool and says something in Cantonese. I flinch as one of them clicks on the lamp over my head. Before I can crane my jaw the entire way, there’s a hand rammed inside my mouth and another one jamming my new filling home. In my peripheral view, I note as a foot pedals like crazy to run the drill. “Finished,” says Jimmy. “Well done, Mr. Kent.”
At reception, I pay my bill: two dollars and fifty cents, American.
When I finally reach the Forbidden City, I’m enthralled by its beautiful courts and its atmosphere of mysterious history. The sheer scale of the place with its nine courtyards is astounding, as well as the fact that in the time of the last emperor, regular people were not allowed to enter it. The China International Travel Service has arranged for us to take an incredible tour into places few people had ever been before.
The Great Wall, though, is staggering. The whole thing is built wide enough for ten horses to stand side by side on top of it. How could humans build this, with its scale and massiveness, walling off China from the nomad hordes? The whole visit is a wildly cultural experience—not my typical type of adventure, but incredibly unique nonetheless.
We spend our last morning in China touring Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province known for its industry, its reserves for giant pandas, and the fact that in the thirteenth century, Marco Polo noted it as a place where a young man could get very lucky with the ladies. Apart from the prospect of bringing special clients to see the pandas, we find the city rather disappointing: with its own Imperial Palace, Chengdu was once thought beautiful enough to rival Beijing, but it turns out that most of the lovely sites were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. In the afternoon, we take to shopping, and Jorie loads up on oranges and tins of fruit, a loaf of bread, smoked oysters, pâté, and steak fillets in soy oil with chilies and a small bottle of Chinese red wine.
We rise at four in the morning for our six thirty flight to Tibet and take off, as is typical of Chinese airlines, at ten thirty a.m. After an hour in flight, we start to cross the Hengduan Mountains—nearly five miles high in one spot, and with magnificent glaciers and snow-covered peaks. Rolling clouds hover beneath the mountains in an azure sky. We snap photos and make a note to instruct clients to do the same, as this view is especially unique thanks to Tibet’s position as the highest region in the world.
The sun shines marvelously, assuring us that we’ve made the right choice to come here, and another hour after soaring over the mountains, we spot the landscape of Tibet—desolate, as I might have predicted—crossed by the crystal-blue Yarlung Zangbo Jiang River, which is one of the sources of the great Brahmaputra River.
When we land at one thirty in the afternoon on a hard-topped strip in the town of Gongkar, the deputy director of the China International Travel Service meets us and escorts us to the Chinese Army jeep that awaits. “And our luggage?” Jorie asks.
“It will arrive in Lhasa in separate transportation,” the director tells her.
Jorie shrugs and climbs into the vehicle. “Let’s hope so,” she says. “All my warm clothes are packed away.”
Our driver, Keping, leaves the airport and moves at a steady pace until we’re stopped by a roadblock. “The Chinese army is dynamiting the road,” our driver says. “Trying to make it bigger for more tourists to come through.”
Keping rolls down his window and yells an exchange with one of the road workers. He sighs, rolls the window back up. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Kent,” he says. “He’s saying that we have to wait until eight o’clock tonight to get through.”
Jorie and I look at each other and start laughing. “What else!” I cry.
“Ah,” she sighs, leaning against her headrest. “At least there’s fresh air,” she says. “No pollution, no cigarette smoke like in China—”
“And no bus full of people that use yak butter for deodorant!” says Keping. He rolls down the window again, waves the road worker to the vehicle. They exchange more words, escalating into what sounds like a rather involved argument. Finally our driver starts the vehicle back up. “I’m going to try and get through anyway.” He drives slowly as workers shove great boulders aside. “I told them I’m driving the man who’s going to bring Tibet the tourists they’re making these roads for!” he says.
A gang of probably fifty workers stands at the top of a hill and greets us, and we return the wave. Drive, I will Keping. Keep driving. If any of the workers above makes a wrong move, the rocks they’re guarding could tumble down and crush us in a second.
The driver negotiates one more dynamite explosion and then sails on toward Lhasa, stopping at a fourteenth-century monastery for us to capture some photos of the structure, with its bright red and cobalt-blue beams, murals depicting Buddha’s disciples, and a stupa containing the ashes of the monastery’s founder with a gold leaf–covered statue of Buddh
a.
“Keping,” Jorie whispers as we enter the east altar room, “what is that scent? I’ve been smelling it since we landed at Gongkar.”
“The smell like bad cheese and animal fur?”
“Well . . .” she says, “yes.”
“That’s yak butter! People in Tibet use it in everything—tea, deodorant, everything. What you smell now is this.” He points into a pot of oil holding a wick. “They even use it for candles.”
“I don’t think I could ever get used to that,” Jorie says.
“Don’t worry,” Keping says. “Some of us don’t either!”
The shadows and light are magnificent as we cross the landscape and spot red and white gleaming on the far horizon: it’s the Potala Palace, indicating that we’ve reached Lhasa. Keping crosses his way through the city streets and parks outside a rather official-looking building. “This was the provincial administrative headquarters before Tibet opened back up to tourists,” he says. “But now, this is your guest cottage.”
When we enter, he brings us coffee, tea, and hot buttered toast. “I can’t wait for a bath,” Jorie says, entering the bathroom. A minute later, she shouts. “Geoff? Is Keping still there?”
“I’m here, Mrs. Kent!”
“There’s a problem,” she says, ducking her neck around the doorframe to face Keping. “I think the boiler needs turning on.”
“Oh no, Mrs. Kent,” he says with great concern in his voice. “We never give clients a hot bath on the first night.”
Jorie closes the bathroom door and opens it again, exiting in a white robe. “Pardon?” she says. Her arms are crossed tight against her.
“We would never let you have a hot bath on the first night, Mrs. Kent.”
“Now just a minute,” I pipe in. “Why’s that?”
“We are very worried about your wife’s welfare, Mr. Kent.”
“And?”
“And if she takes a hot bath, she could catch cold!”
“Keping!” she says. “We are twelve thousand feet above sea level in early November. The sun will go down within the hour, and our luggage is stuck somewhere on a road that’s being blown up with dynamite between Gongkar and Lhasa!” She approaches him slowly with her hands on her hips. “When an American woman tells you she wants a hot bath, she really means that she wants a hot bath.”
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