Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation

by J. Maarten Troost

  Much of the wall we see today, however, was built in the sixteenth century during the Ming Dynasty. Scholars still speculate as to why, exactly, the Ming emperors went to such great lengths to build a wall that Mongol invaders could, very simply, go around. Some have posited that the Great Wall was reflective of imperial paralysis—Should I attack the Mongols? Should I trade with them? I dunno. Maybe I’ll just build a really big wall.

  And, of course, the Chinese are very fond of walls. All the farms we passed had walled compounds. In restaurants, patrons prefer to be seated among the walls within the private dining rooms. Karaoke is conducted not out in the open, but behind walls. It is a nation of walls. Walls are celebrated; they are insisted upon. There must always be walls. And so it’s unsurprising that the greatest wall ever built is in China.

  But this wall, unlike most in China, was not ultimately effective. Subsequently, over the centuries that followed its construction, it was allowed to fall into ruin, becoming nothing more than a brick repository for nearby villages. Why buy new bricks when there’s a really big wall nearby, just sitting there doing nothing? It was simply a huge, pointless wall that went on and on and on. So they took the bricks, built homes, shops, and wells until some enterprising official discovered that there was good money to be made with the Great Wall, that tourists would flock there wanting camel rides and bird whistles, and they could combine a trip to the Wall with a visit to the Traditional Medicine Center. And a jade factory too. Build it and they will come, he thought, and so he took pen to paper.

  The Great Wall which be created by the human being will be your nice mind forever!

  And so it is.

  6

  I had, during my time in Beijing, already managed to find myself yearning for a place far, far away from the pounding of jackhammers and the wailing of buzz saws and the unrelenting honkyness of urban life in China. This, I recognized, was not a good sign when confronted by a journey through coastal China, a region proudly called home by hundreds of millions of people. But really, you could say that about any region of China. Beyond the deserts of Xinjiang and the cold steppes of Inner Mongolia and the lofty summits of Tibet, every region in China calls itself home to hundreds of millions of people. It is indeed a very crowded country. And so, for what I hoped might be a brief respite from the urban whirl, I’d decided to climb mighty Tai Shan, the most revered mountain in China. It is said that those who climb Tai Shan live to be a hundred. I wasn’t at all certain I wanted to live to be a hundred, but I did know that I’d like to have the option.

  I had often been cautioned that in China I should put my regular glasses aside and replace them with special lenses that allow me to see things in the Chinese context. It was always the same words: Chinese context. And so that is what I did. Somehow, I had managed to navigate the tumult of the Beijing train station and boarded the train to Tai’an, 250 miles to the south. And so, rolling out of Beijing and into Shandong Province, I took my glasses off and put my magic spectacles on and looked out the window and viewed the world within the Chinese context. There, I observed. The hundreds of people scavenging in the dump. It’s fine. Fifty years ago, they would have been dead from hunger. Look. A bird’s nest, the first evidence I had yet encountered that there are, in fact, birds in China. True, I hadn’t actually seen the bird, but a nest suggested bird life. And, of course, forty years ago during Mao’s great bird purge, that wasn’t the case. That village of crumbling red bricks nestled against a pond of luminous colors. A kaleidoscope of colors because the water was profoundly toxic. But it’s okay, it was evidence of progress. Opportunities. There was pollution thirty years ago, but no opportunities. Now anyone can make money in China. And what’s a little pollution? It’s a sign of development. The dry, barren riverbeds…No worries. Chinese engineering will always triumph over nature.

  And then I put my reading glasses back on and read the newspaper. I was sitting on a small foldout chair in the hallway of a sleeping car. I had no need for a sleeping berth as it was a midday train, a six-hour journey through green farmland under a gray, soot-stained sky. But since I was traveling the rails of China during Golden Week along with 150 million other people, every seat had been sold out except for the higher-priced sleepers. Train tickets are divided into four classes—hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper. The Chinese, of course, are among the most frugal people on the planet. Few people spend their hard-earned kuai on a daytime soft-sleeper.

  I shared my cabin with two cheerful kids, along with their mother and grandmother, who were happily sprawled on the two lower births contentedly munching on fish heads. In the next cabin, a quartet of Party officials was busy spewing a fog of blue smoke that hung in the train car like a carcinogenic mist. There were, I was surprised to note, prominent No Smoking signs throughout the train. As I sat reading, a young train attendant approached the cabin of smokers and bowing, deeply and often, kindly reminded them that smoking was forbidden on the train. Moments later, she returned with ashtrays.

  I returned to my reading, an engrossing article in the government-run English language newspaper China Daily about all the shoddy Western goods that had to be recalled in China. It’s terrible, the article suggested. You just can’t trust what comes out of the West these days. I took a sip from my bottle of water, idly recalling that 50 percent of all bottled water in China is contaminated. The label said Nestlé, but it could just as well be Beijing tap. I put my magic spectacles back on and tried to view the bottle of water in the Chinese context. But they made my head spin and I took them off again.

  Outside, beyond the gritty sprawl of Jinan, in a landscape of stony hills and farm fields in spring bloom, we rumbled past power plant after power plant. What are those, I’d wondered, a few miles back, those perfect conical mountains pointing to the sky? They were dusty slag heaps, it turned out, the enormous stacks of coal that power China. And they were everywhere, stack after stack. One, two, three, the power plants stretched on to the horizon. It’s an astonishing sight, rolling past farms in the shadows of chimneys with billowing plumes of smoke. I had, of course, lost hope that I’d know what, precisely, I was eating in China, and it was enlightening to see that my vegetables came braised in the unfiltered emissions of hundreds of coal-fired plants.

  And there are so very many of them. In 2005 alone, China built enough power plants to power the United Kingdom. In 2006, China built enough power plants to power France. It is, frankly, nearly impossible to comprehend the scale of China’s energy demands. The United Kingdom is no Togo. France is no Fiji. These are two of the most industrialized nations in the world. And yet every year, China added another France or United Kingdom in energy production.

  Most of the power plants are relatively small. And nearly all of them burn coal. This is because China has an awful lot of coal, mountains of it really, and to obtain it thousands of miners die each year, as many as six thousand a year by some estimates. In a single twelve-month period, China burns more coal than the United States, Japan, and Europe combined.

  I’d had no intention of dwelling upon air pollution when I boarded the train. My brain was on a stirring hike in the cragged mountains of Shandong Province, far removed, I’d hoped, from the cough-inducing, eye-watering haze of the capital. Only one percent of urban residents in China—and there are 400 million of them—breathe air that might, kindly, be regarded as safe by Western standards. What block did they live on? I had wondered in Beijing, pleased at the prospect of departing the city for some fresh mountain air. But, as the train chugged through the countryside, I began to wonder. Where’s the blue sky? It’s got to be around here somewhere. The weather map in China Daily had promised sun.

  And then, as we passed the umpteenth power plant, came the slow-to-dawn realization that there would be no blue sky. There would be no crisp-yet-warm, winter-has-been-conquered, let’s-celebrate-the-spring air. Instead, there would be smog. There would always be smog. Enough to drift across the vastness of the Pacific and settle like
snow upon the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and even the waters of the Great Lakes.

  How could people live in this? I wondered. How could they put it up with it? The air was so rank and dense with pollutants that even a Republican would be hollering for clean air. Really, it’s that bad. And then, as I perused my newspaper, it occurred to me that it’s very possible that the Chinese are not aware, exactly, of how appalling their air truly is.

  The World Bank estimates that 700,000 people die each year in China simply from breathing air. The city of San Francisco has roughly 700,000 people. So, too, Indianapolis. And Austin. Lose these cities and people are bound to notice. One would think that the Chinese would be upset by this appalling state of affairs. And the Chinese government does, too, which is why it refuses to publish information confirming just how devastatingly foul China’s air is. And thus we hear Los Angeles is polluted too.

  Meanwhile, as I finished an article on the government’s efforts to teach migrant workers good manners, the train pulled into Tai’an, the small industrial city near the base of lofty Tai Shan. I hopped off, walked briskly through a train station that smelled like piss, and found the taxi stand, where I soon understood what it is like to be regarded as prey. The taxi drivers couldn’t believe their good fortune. A laowai! Foreigner! I felt a sudden bond with sheep. I settled on a taxi, and as the other drivers congratulated him on his good fortune, we sped past an enormous bust of Lei Feng, Hero of the Revolution. I took note of what I could understand—Supermarket for Beverages, Tai’an Power Supply Business Hall, Silicon Valley Grand Hotel—and tried hard to ignore the heart-thumping fact that we were racing, horn blasting, up the wrong side of the road. Microseconds before crashing into a truck, we veered away and I emerged, heart palpitating, at a garish hotel on the edge of town. This had been the only hotel I could find that still had rooms available, and now standing before it, I could see why. It was inconveniently located, and gaudy as a hotel in Reno, but one that didn’t have to comply with anything so burdensome as building codes.

  “Passport, please,” said the young woman at the front desk. She showed it to her colleague and they spent a moment giggling. “Where you from? I have not heard of this country Netherlands. I think it is maybe in Europe.”

  “Excellent guess.”

  I made my way to my room, opened the flimsy door, and noted that among the grooming products lined up along the bathroom shelf were packets of his and her Erotic Sex Lotion and packages of his and her polyester shorts provocatively labeled “Sexywear.” A moment later, the telephone rang.

  “Nihao,” I said, and then followed a moment later with “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Chinese.”

  There was a momentary pause. “Massagee?” said the woman on the line.

  “Er…” What is this, messagee? “Thank you, but no.”

  I hung up, puzzled, and opened the curtains to a vista dominated by the sputtering power plant next door. Well, I thought. At least I had a view.

  The next morning, I found myself in a misty drizzle pondering the cragged head of Pan Gu, the Taoist deity who, very thoughtfully, took it upon himself to separate the earth from the sky. This was no snap-of-the fingers event. Indeed, in comparison to Pan Gu’s travails, creating the world in a mere seven days seems slothful in the extreme. It took Pan Gu 18,000 years to sufficiently separate the earth from the sky so that life could commence, and since he was awfully tired when at last he finished—you can hardly blame him—he settled down for a rest. His eyes became the sun and the moon, and his limbs became four of China’s most sacred mountains—Hua Shan in Shanxi, Song Shan in Henan, Heng Shan in Hunan, and because this is China and everything is just a little more complicated than it needs to be, another mountain called Heng Shan in Shanxi. Tai Shan, as the head of Pan Gu, is the most revered mountain of them all.

  The Buddhists, too, have a soft spot for Tai Shan, and ever since the second century B.C., people have bedecked the mountain with temples and calligraphy. There is even a staircase that winds up to the very summit of Tai Shan, nearly 6,000 feet up in the clouds. Altogether, there are 6,660 steps of stone leading up the old Imperial route. Confucius, who lived in nearby Qufu, had climbed Tai Shan and famously declared The world is small. Mao, too, had somehow managed to waddle up to the peak, and after viewing the first rays of dawn, he proclaimed, The East is red. So deep!

  Over the centuries, seventy-two emperors had stood upon Tai Shan. Indeed, the mountain was so important in Chinese cosmology that a new emperor was expected to hightail it pronto to Tai Shan to receive a special heavenly blessing. Intriguingly, only five of them went on to climb to the summit. A failed attempt was regarded as a divine rebuke. So why risk it?

  And, as I was very pleased to learn, Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for the Canadian rock band Rush, had also apparently climbed Tai Shan. In the early 1980s, Rush was the pride of the Canadian rock world. Admittedly, this was a very small world, composed, really, of Rush and the twiddly-winks from Vancouver, the band Loverboy. Nevertheless, for a certain thirteen-year-old boy in Toronto, Rush was the be-all-and-end-all of his rock world, leading, in time, to his joining the Official Rush Fan Club, which sent him buttons that he proudly wore on his parka, while he tried to conceal the intense jealousy he felt for the boy in his class who claimed to have singer Geddy Lee’s mother on his paper route. Oh yes, this thirteen-year-old was a serious fan. He had all their records and he played them every day on his record player, a record player that was never sullied by the likes of Journey, the fakers.

  And then, in 1983, Rush released the atrocity of an album that was Signals. What is this? cried the thirteen-year-old boy, who had stood in line for hours at the record store with money he had earned delivering newspapers by sled so that he could be among the very first in the whole of Canada to have the new, oh-so-eagerly awaited Rush record. He listened to this album on his record player. And he felt betrayed. He could not believe his ears. But it was true. It was unmistakable. Undeniable. There were synthesizers. Et tu, Rush, the boy said, swelling with bitterness. Have you, too, gone to the dark side? And he felt so lost that he drifted, aimlessly and alone, for two whole months, eight bleak and cruel weeks, until, from somewhere in the darkness, he was found by Bono, who raised him up and made him whole.

  But eventually, this thirteen-year-old boy grew up to be a man, a man who one day found himself in a chintzy hotel in Tai’an, sitting in a smoky Business Center, idly wondering what a censored Google search would reveal about the mountain known as Tai Shan, when he discovered that in 1987—and by 1987, the year of Big Audio Dynamite, he was so over Rush—Rush had recorded a song called Tai Shan, and suddenly the memories flooded back and he was lost in a bittersweet reverie.

  I stood at the top of the mountain

  And China sang to me

  In the peaceful haze of harvest time

  A song of eternity

  You’re smoking crack, Neil, if you think the haze that permeates China is the peaceful haze of harvesttime. I mean, come on. Clearly, the bitterness had never lifted. Nevertheless, as I stood in line at the base of the mountain to pay the entrance fee, I hoped that China would sing to me too. Actually, as I watched a nearby vendor do a brisk business selling bird whistles, I wished that China would just quiet down for a while.

  At the gate, a sign informed us that old people (sixty to seventy years old), students, and maimed persons would have to pay only 50 yuan to climb Tai Shan. Not too many mountains offer a discount to the maimed, but Tai Shan does. The sign went on to inform us that teachers, provincial model workers, and combat model heroes also received a discount. Should one be tempted to proclaim oneself a Combat Model Hero—and I certainly was—you will be asked to provide a certificate confirming your status.

  I passed the First Gate of Heaven, a square arch emblazoned with calligraphy, and started to clamber up the stairs, which wound ever upward through a forest of pine and cypress trees. Huge boulders and rock formations were emblazoned with ancient calligraphy
, but since for this hiker they were about as inscrutable as, well, Chinese calligraphy, I turned my attention to the signs I could read. Please fling the rubbish into the dustbin. And I started to look for rubbish to fling.

  I continued upward through a damp, muggy drizzle and it wasn’t long before I began to sweat. Tai Shan, I was discovering, was no stroll through the park. True, I was climbing stairs, but these were narrow stairs, suitable perhaps for tiny little bound feet but treacherous for others, particularly when they were as rain-slicked as they were that day. And, while I do want to commend the hard work that must have gone into building a stone staircase up a mountain, I did begin to wish that perhaps a little more effort could have been expended so that each step was similar to the others. But, of course, each step was different—a stutter step here, a two-foot chasm there—making it impossible to establish a rhythm.

  I paused to take a breather. Keep distance from the precipitous cliff, a sign read. What cliff? I wondered. I couldn’t see more than ten feet through the drizzly haze. Instead, all I could see were people. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands of people. I had, of course, known that Tai Shan was the most climbed mountain on Earth. I had envisioned a Matterhorn-type crowd, a few streams of hikers, but in no way was I prepared for the seething masses scampering up Tai Shan. Good call, I muttered to myself. Wanted to get away from it all for a couple of days, did you? A little nature. Serenity. And so you choose to climb the most climbed mountain in the world in a country of one and a half billion people, give or take a hundred million.

  While I stood there ruminating, I noticed people pointing at me. Laowai, I heard. Very often, it’s not meant kindly, either. And then “Picture,” said a man waving a camera. A moment later, I was surrounded by the Zhang family from Hunan, or whoever the heck they were, smiling for the camera. Xie xie. Thank you. Well, good, I thought, at least my presence here as an odd curiosity to be gawked at and photographed was bringing joy and mirth to many.