To the Ends of the Earth

by Paul Theroux

  The Terra-cotta Warriors

  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 disinterment 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.

  Endangered Species Banquet

  “IN CHINA, WE HAVE A SAYING,” JIANG LE SONG SAID. “Chule feiji zhi wai, yangyang duo chi.” Looking very pleased with himself, he added, “It rhymes!”

  “We call that a half-rhyme,” I said. “What does it mean? Something about eating planes?”

  “ ‘We eat everything except planes and trains.’ In China.”

  “I get it. You eat everything on four legs except tables and chairs.”

  “You are a funny man!” Mr. Jiang said. “Yes. We eat trees, grass, leaves, animals, seaweed, flowers. And in Guilin even more things. Birds, snakes, turtles, cranes, frogs, and some other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “I don’t even know their names.”

  “Dogs? Cats?” I looked at him closely. I had overheard a tourist objecting to the Chinese appetite for kittens. “You eat kittens?”

  “Not dogs and kittens. Everybody eats those.”

  “Raccoons?” I had read in a guidebook that raccoons were also popular in Guilin.

  “What is that?”

  Raccoon was not in his pocket English-Chinese dictionary.

  He became very confidential, glancing around and drawing me close to him. “Maybe not lackeys. I have never heard of eating lackeys. But many other things. We eat”—and he drew a meaningful breath—“forbidden things.”

  That had rather a thrilling sound. We eat forbidden things.

  “What sort of forbidden things?”

  “I only know their Chinese names—sorry.”

  “What are we talking about?” I asked. “Snakes?”

  “Dried snakes. Snake soup. They are not forbidden. I mean an animal that eats ants with its nose.”

  “Scaly anteater. Pangolin. I don’t want to eat that. Too many people are eating them,” I said. “It’s an endangered species.”

  “Would you like to eat forbidden things?”

  “I would like to eat interesting things,” I said, equivocating. “How about sparrows? Pigeons? Snakes? What about turtles?”

  “Those are easy. I can arrange it.”

  Mr. Jiang was young. He was new to the job. He was a little too breezy. He had the joky and insincere manner of someone who has been dealing with elderly foreigners who enjoy being joshed as they are being deferred to. I felt this obsequiousness was a deliberate ploy to undermine me.

  That night Mr. Jiang emerged from behind a potted palm at my hotel to introduce me to a small monkey-like man.

  “Our driver,” Mr. Jiang said.

  “Qi,” the man said, and smiled. But it was not a smile. He was only saying his name.

  “I have fixed everything you requested,” Mr. Jiang said. “The driver will take us to Taohua—‘Peace Flower Restaurant.’ ”

  The driver slipped on a pair of gloves and whipped the door open for me. Mr. Jiang got into the front seat, beside the driver. The driver adjusted his mirror, stuck his head out of the window to signal—although we were in a parking lot and there were no other cars in sight—and drove into the empty road. After perhaps fifty yards he stopped the car.

  “Is there anything wrong?” I said.

  Mr. Jiang imitated a fat man laughing: “Ho! Ho! Ho!” And then a bored voice added, “We have arrived.”

  “There wasn’t much point in taking a car, was there?”

  “You are an honored guest! You must not walk!”

  I had learned that guff like this was a giveaway in China. When anyone spoke to me in this formal and facetious way, I knew I was being taken for a ride.

  Before we entered the restaurant, Mr. Jiang took me aside and said, “We will have snake soup. We will have pigeon.”

  “Very nice.”

  He shook his head. “They are not unusual. They are regular.”

  “What else are we having?”

  “I will tell you inside.”

  Bu inside there was a fuss over the table, a great deal of talk I did not understand, and finally Mr. Jiang said, “This is your table. A special table. Now I will leave you. The driver and I will eat in the humble dining room next door. Please, sit! Take no notice of us. Enjoy yourself!”

  This was also an unmistakable cue.

  “Why don’t you join me?” I said.

  “Oh no!” Mr. Jiang said. “We will be very comfortable at our little table in the humble dining room reserved for Chinese workers.”

  This was laying it on a bit thick, I thought, but I was feeling guilty about this meal, and eating food alone made me feel selfish.

  I said, “There’s room at my table. Please sit here.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Jiang said, in a perfunctory way, and indicated that the driver sh
ould follow his example.

  It was quite usual for the driver to be included—in fact, it is one of the pleasures of Chinese life that on a long trip the driver is one of the bunch. If there is a banquet he is invited, if there is an outing he goes along, and he is present at every meal along the road. It is a civilized practice, and thinking it should be encouraged I made no objection, even though the driver had taken me only fifty yards.

  “Special meal,” Mr. Jiang said. “We have crane. Maybe a kind of quail. We call it anchun. We have many things. Even forbidden things.”

  That phrase had lost its thrill for me. It was a hot night, this young man seemed unreliable to me, and I was not particularly hungry.

  “Have some wine,” Mr. Jiang said, pouring out three glasses. “It is osmanthus wine. Guilin means ‘City of Osmanthus Trees.’ ”

  We gulped our wine. It tasted syrupy and medicinal.

  The food was brought in successive waves—many dishes, but the portions were small. Perhaps sensing that it would go quickly, the driver began tonging food onto his plate.

  “That is turtle,” Mr. Jiang said. “From the Li river.”

  “And that is forbidden,” he said, lowering his voice. “Wawa fish—baby fish. Very rare. Very tasty. Very hard to catch. Against the law.”

  The fish was excellent. It was a stew of small white lumps in fragrant sauce. The driver’s chopsticks were busily dredging it for the plumpest fillets.

  Mr. Jiang crept closer and mumbled a word in Chinese. “This is muntjac. From the mountains. With onions. Forbidden.”

  “What is a muntjac?” I asked.

  “It is a kind of rabbit that eats fruit.”

  As all the world knows, a muntjac is a small deer. They are regarded as pests. You see them on golf courses outside London. Marco Polo found them in the Kingdom of Ergunul and wrote, “The flesh of this animal is very good to eat.” He brought the head and feet of a muntjac back to Venice.

  I sampled the pigeon, the snake soup, the muntjac, the crane, the fish, the turtle. There was something dreadful and depressing about this food, partly because it tasted good and partly because China had so few wild animals. These creatures were all facing extinction in this country. And I had always hated the Chinese appetite for rare animals—for bear’s paws and fish lips and caribou’s nose. That article I had read about the Chinese killing their diminishing numbers of tigers to use—superstitiously—as remedies for impotence and rheumatism had disgusted me. I was disgusted now with myself. This sort of eating was the recreation of people who were rich and spoiled.

  “What do you think of this?” I asked Mr. Jiang.

  “I like the turtle with bamboo,” he said. “The muntjac is a bit salty.”

  “You’ve had this before?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What does the driver think?” I said. I was trying to describe to myself the taste of the snake and the crane and the pigeon. I laughed, thinking that whenever someone ate something exotic they always said “chicken.”

  The silent driver, endlessly stuffing himself, made a dive for the turtle, tonged some into his bowl, and gobbled it. He did the same to the wawa fish.

  “He likes the fish,” Mr. Jiang said.

  The driver did not glance up. He ate like a predator in the wild—he paused, very alert, his eyes flicking, and then he darted for the food and ate it in one swift movement of his claw-like chopsticks.

  Afterward, slightly nauseated from the forbidden food, I felt like a Hindu who had just eaten hamburger. I said I would walk home. Mr. Jiang tried to drag me into the car, but I resisted. Then, hiding his sheepishness in hearty guffaws, he handed me the bill: 200 yuan.

  That was four months’ salary for these young men. It was a huge amount of money. It was the foreigner’s airfare from Guilin to Peking. It was the price of two of the best bicycles in China, the Flying Pigeon Deluxe. It was more than a night at the Great Wall Sheraton. It represented a good radio. It was two years’ rent of a studio apartment in Shanghai. It was the cost of an antique silver bowl in the bazaar at Turfan.

  I paid Mr. Jiang. I wanted a reaction from him. There was none. That was for form’s sake. The Chinese make a practice of not reacting to any sort of hospitality. But I persisted.

  “Is the driver impressed with this meal?”

  “Not at all,” Mr. Jiang said. “He has eaten this many times before. Ha! Ha!”

  It rang in my ears—one of the few genuine laughs I heard in China.

  It meant, We can always fool a foreigner.

  I was the hairy, big-nosed devil from the back of beyond, one of those foreigners (wei-guo ren), whom the Chinese regard as the yokels of the world. We lived in crappy little countries that were squeezed at the edge of the Middle Kingdom. The places we inhabited were insignificant but bizarre. Once the Chinese believed that we tied ourselves into bunches so that we would not be snatched away by eagles. Some of our strange societies were composed entirely of women, who became pregnant by staring at their shadows. We had noses like anteaters. We were hairier than monkeys. We smelled like corpses. One odd fenestrated race had holes in their chests, through which poles were thrust when they carried one another around. Most of these notions were no longer current, but they had given rise to self-deceiving proverbs, which sometimes seemed true. And then the laughter was real.

  Shaoshan: “Where the Sun Rises”

  “UNTIL NOW VISITORS DID NOT COME HERE TO LOOK AT the scenery,” Mr. Li had said. How true. They had come as pilgrims, first to walk the seventy-five miles west to Shaoshan, and then—after the railway line was built in the late sixties—to take the strangest train in China. They had come believing the Cultural Revolution slogan THE SUN RISES IN SHAOSHAN (TAIYANG CONG SHAOSHAN SHENGQI), which was a metaphor for Mao Zedong’s having been born there. The Chinese had once named themselves “Shaoshan” in Mao’s honor, and I ran into at least one Li Shaoshan.

  In the sixties there were several trains every hour. Now there is one train a day. It leaves at six in the morning from Changsha and arrives three hours later at Shaoshan. It returns from Shaoshan in the evening, just an old puffer on a forgotten branch line, which had outlived its purpose.

  The road had always been popular, even after the train was running regularly. It was not only the best way for Red Guards and revolutionaries to prove their ardor, but long walks were part of Mao’s political program—the “Forge Good Iron Footsoles” scheme. The idea was that all Chinese citizens were to have sturdy feet during the Cultural Revolution, because when the Nameless Enemy tried to invade China the evacuation of cities might be necessary. Mao filled the people with a war paranoia—that was the reason they were required to make bricks, dig trenches and bunkers and bomb shelters. They were also ordered to have hard feet and to take twenty-mile hikes on their days off in order to give themselves “iron footsoles” (“All I got were blisters,” my informant Wang told me). It was to this end that they trekked for four days on the road from Changsha to Shaoshan, sleeping in peasants’ huts and singing “The East Is Red,” “The Sun Rises in Shaoshan.” They also sang ditties that had been set to music from the Selected Thoughts, such numbers as “People of the World, Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All Their Running Dogs!” with its stirring last line, “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.” My favorite song from the Selected Thoughts, one I was assured had enlivened the marches along the Shaoshan road with its syncopation, went as follows:

  A revolution is not a dinner party,

  Or writing an essay, or painting a picture,

  or doing embroidery;

  It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle,

  So temperate, kind, courteous, restrained

  and magnanimous.”*

  A revolution is an insurrection,

  An act of violence by which one class

  overthrows another.

  They sang them on the trains, too. They flew flags. They wore Mao buttons and badges, and the red armband. It was not a trivial mat
ter. It compared in size and fervor to Muslims making the Hadj to Mecca. On one day in 1966, a procession of 120,000 Chinese thronged the village of Shaoshan to screech songs and perform the qing an with the Little Red Book.

  Twenty years later I arrived at the station in an empty train. The station was empty. The unusually long platform was empty, and so were the sidings. There was not a soul in sight. The station was tidy, but that only made its emptiness seem much odder. It was very clean, freshly painted in a limpid shade of blue, and entirely abandoned. No cars in the parking lot, no one at the ticket windows. A large portrait of Mao hung over the station and on a billboard was the epitaph in Chinese: MAO ZEDONG WAS A GREAT MARXIST, A GREAT PROLETARIAN REVOLUTIONARY, A GREAT TACTICIAN AND THEORIST.

  That was delicate: nothing about his being a great leader. Mao’s dying wish (obviously ignored) was to be remembered as a teacher.

  I walked through the village, reflecting on the fact that nothing looks emptier than an empty parking lot. There were many here, designed for buses; they were very large and nothing was parked in them. I went to the hotel that was built for dignitaries and I sat in the almost-empty dining room, under a Mao portrait, eating and listening to people spitting.

  The tide was out in Shaoshan; it was the town that time forgot—ghostly and echoing. And so it fascinated me. It was actually a pretty place, a rural retreat, with lovely trees and green fields, and a stream running through it that topped up the lotus ponds. In any other place an atmosphere of such emptiness would seem depressing, but this was a healthy neglect—what is healthier than refusing to worship a politician?—and the few people there had come as picnickers, not as pilgrims.