by Mark Colvin
So my two companions took their jobs very seriously, and they warned me that, although things were now far less intense than at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, this was still a potentially dangerous journey. They were not, perhaps, imaginative men, but they were both immensely experienced: they’d carried bags to every country in the world where there was a British diplomatic mission, and despite my self-described membership of the ‘counterculture’, I took these greying short-back-and-sides veterans with proper seriousness.
I remember the train journey from the border to Canton as a series of vistas of paddy fields, dotted with bent figures in conical hats: all that landscape is now pretty much one vast city of concrete, steel and glass. We arrived in Canton itself by late afternoon and checked into our hotel. The Queen’s Messengers advised me very strongly not to leave the building, not only because I spoke no Cantonese, but because I would be the immediate object of large and possibly hostile crowds. There was no air-conditioning, and it was both swelteringly hot and extremely humid, so confinement to a hotel room was irksome, but was at least relieved by the view from my window.
From about five floors up, I sat and watched the activity on the Pearl River as the sun went down. An extraordinary menagerie of shipping crowded the waterway, from pole-driven sampans to elderly steam-driven tugs, newer motorboats, and junks—large and small—under their lateen sails. They moved in such profusion that it was hard to understand how they never seemed to collide. Dusk fell, and the power failed at about 9 p.m., so even the single small fan that had been struggling to cool my room was now out of action, and I spent a sweat-soaked night sleeping intermittently before rising early to get the plane to Peking (now called Beijing).
Chinese airlines in the 1970s were still part of the Chinese Air Force, and the service was accordingly basic. We boarded a British-built Trident jet in CAAC livery at about 11 a.m., with the temperature and humidity both still extremely high. Unfortunately, China still had only rudimentary abilities in airline engineering—most of their planes had to be serviced outside the country—and this aircraft was malfunctioning; in what way, neither the flight crew nor the cabin crew seemed able to tell us. The Queen’s Messengers, each with a diplomatic bag occupying a full seat beside him, were phlegmatic: not only were they probably the world’s most frequent flyers, they’d had plenty of prior experience on CAAC. It wasn’t too hard to try to imitate their air of calm, but what did become more difficult was not to expire from the sheer heat. The plane’s auxiliary motors appeared to be out of commission, so the crew simply opened every available door in the hope that a draught would blow through. It did, but it was a hot draught carrying more hot moisture. After some hours on the tarmac, the effect was something like sitting in a toothpaste tube over a Bunsen burner turned to high.
For the first few hours, this being a totalitarian state, there was hardly a murmur from the other passengers. Eventually we could hear some grumbling, to which the neatly dressed women of the cabin crew reacted by handing out consolatory packets of Chinese cigarettes. Even I, by then a regular smoker, found these particularly disgusting, especially when the breeze through the aircraft proved insufficient to dispel the heavy fug that then ensued. By the end of the afternoon, the crew were doling out unlimited glasses of Moutai, a Chinese liquor, and a number of our fellow passengers decided to anaesthetise themselves against the whole experience. It was early evening before the jets coughed into action, and the air-conditioning finally started to suck out some of the choking smog we’d managed to build up inside our metal prison. I’d also spent some of the afternoon trying very hard not to think too much about the BOAC Trident—the same model as this plane—which had crashed only a couple of weeks before, near Heathrow, in Britain’s worst ever air disaster. But finally we made it into the air and headed north, arriving at Peking Airport at about 9 p.m.
An hour passed before we were loaded into the British embassy’s van for the trip into the Chinese capital. As we drove through the dark, we saw the city’s inhabitants everywhere by the roadside, making use of the streetlights to read, play chess, or talk. Power to ordinary homes was restricted in 1972, in what was still an extremely backward economy despite all Mao Zedong’s attempts to persuade the world of the virtues of his disastrous Five-Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward. The Beijing I see on TV screens now is almost completely unrecognisable from the low-rise, bicycle-teeming city I remember: only the vastness of Tiananmen Square seems unchanged, in an urban horizon which otherwise seems to consist of massive skyscrapers.
As a guest in the home of the British deputy head of mission in Peking, I had three days to fill before the Queen’s Messengers and I would board the train to Ulan Bator. With the Cultural Revolution still in full swing, there was simply no tourism industry in China then: the Gang of Four were near the height of their power, and Chinese rhetoric about foreign, decadent, imperialist lackeys was still rife. The upside was that the privileged few, and they were very few, had the run of the tourist sites.
On the first day, an embassy driver took me to the Forbidden City, and I walked the steps up to the inner sanctum almost alone, hearing how only the emperor himself had been allowed to use the middle of the staircase. The vast compound seemed inhabited only by sweepers and janitors and a few other diplomatic visitors. There I also saw for the first time the treasure that had been dug up in Gansu only three years before, and was now on display for the first time: an extraordinary collection of bronze horsemen, and nobles in horse-drawn chariots, carrying parasols of the most delicately worked bronze.
But nothing could compare with the centrepiece of the exhibition, the ‘Gansu Flying Horse’, which I still regard as one of the greatest works of sculpture in Eastern or Western art. Poised with one hoof on a bird in flight, the horse is pure liquid motion turned to metal, and it struck me with the force of revelation. Because of my father’s interest in Chinese ceramics, I had seen a great deal of blue-and-white and Celadon pottery, and I had learned to associate ancient Chinese art with a degree of stillness, simplicity, purity. Here instead was a creature whose coiled energy would have inspired or even intimidated Michelangelo, but which had been cast over a thousand years before he was born.
At that point, despite US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China early in the year, there was no way of knowing that the Cultural Revolution still had four years to run, no way of knowing for how long China would seal itself off against the world. I had a sense of extreme good fortune, of knowing that I was seeing things totally closed to the rest of the world, for the moment and perhaps for much longer.
I had the same sense, but tinged with shock and disgust, at Beijing’s Summer Palace the next morning. The palace is more than a building or even a series of buildings. It was built as an aristocrats’ resort, a place of beautifully landscaped hills, lakes and high, tiered pagodas, where the Imperial Court would pass the time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Buildings were linked by long covered walkways, open at the sides, or ‘breezeways’, their ceilings gorgeously decorated with painted scenes of pastoral or court life. But when I was there, it was the scene of some of the most extensive official vandalism I have ever seen. In every case where the paintings depicted a person, which was most of them, that person’s face had been systematically painted over, or worse, scratched out, seemingly by chisels hacking into the plaster. This had been done by the Red Guards at the height of the Cultural Revolution, and even though it involved no torture, public humiliation or bloodshed, seeing it in person somehow brought home, more starkly than any TV news clip, the brutal fanaticism of the time.
It reminded me of a school trip to Ely Cathedral in East Anglia, when I was fifteen, where we had seen the results of another bout of fanaticism, 400 years before, during the orgy of iconoclasm after the dissolution of the monasteries. We were led into the elegant, airy, Gothic Lady-Chapel, whose hundreds of alcoves had once each held a statue. After Henry VIII’s campaign wrought its destruction, many of the statues
were completely reduced to dust, but even those whose bodies had been spared had one thing in common: they were headless.
Something about the human face—its individuality, the implication it contains of others’ humanity, the possibility of compassion—has the ability to enrage fundamentalists, whether Protestant, Islamist or, in the case of the Summer Palace, Maoist. We know now that Mao’s rule caused the deaths of up to 70 million people. I discount none of them in noting this act of vandalism, but observe that the two things are linked. Before you commit mass murder, you first have to turn the people into a mass, and you can only do that by taking away their humanity, their individuality, their face.
But the Summer Palace also contained a reminder that human folly was hardly confined to the Red Guard or its mad leaders. A huge boat made of marble—shimmeringly beautiful but forever unable to float—seems like the perfect metaphor for Imperial extravagance, and indeed, the Empress Dowager Cixi, in the mid-nineteenth century, had diverted much of the tax money raised to fund the Chinese Navy into having this extraordinarily paradoxical symbol of her dynasty’s power enlarged and restored.
So far, I had seen few Chinese crowds: the Summer Palace and Forbidden City were largely off-limits to most of Mao’s proletariat. But that afternoon, there was shopping: first at the big State Department Store, which, as was usual in communist societies, had very little to sell. I bought alarm clocks in which a Red Guard waving Mao’s Little Red Book ticked off the seconds: my sister Zoë still has hers. Then I was taken to ‘Antique Street’, the street where a few state-licensed shops were allowed to sell trinkets of dubious provenance, mostly to foreigners. On a student budget, I had little money, but enough to buy some gifts and souvenirs. I was let out of the van and told I could walk down this street, going into shops, but on no account to stray off it. Immediately, I was surrounded by a large and growing crowd.
Everyone in Beijing then dressed almost identically, either in blue or khaki Mao suits. The figures milling around me, some reaching out to touch my Western clothes, seemed identical from the neck down, mostly very thin, wiry, scrawny. Only their faces distinguished them: some hollow-eyed from the long-lasting effect of the famine years in the first Great Leap Forward, others, younger, with more-unlined faces. Some looked more like city people; others had the bewildered look of peasants just up from the country for the first time. I walked slowly and carefully up the street, smiling and trying to speak very quietly and reassuringly while quite aware that no-one around me spoke English, and ducked into the first shop I reached. It was all so intimidating that I only managed perhaps four shops before going back to the van and safety. I had bought a couple of scroll paintings, a little piece of jade for my sister, and some small thing for my father and stepmother in Ulan Bator.
It had felt like being ejected by a time machine into the Middle Ages. This was a society which had deliberately exiled, imprisoned, ‘re-educated’ or killed a huge percentage of its most cultured and educated population. Mao’s revolution, aimed at lifting the country out of peasantry, had instead made a cult out of peasant ignorance. It was impossible, at the beginning of the 1970s, to imagine China as the emerging superpower of the twenty-first century.
That night, we went out to eat at the Little Duck, a place off Tiananmen Square, where we ate in a booth upstairs and I experienced Peking Duck for the first time.
If all this sounds like the standard tourist itinerary you were taken through on your visit to Beijing in recent years, I can only reiterate that at the time it was utterly exotic and, for me, completely new. And if you’ve walked among the vast throngs along the Great Wall, or jostled among the crowds around the Ming Tombs, just imagine doing it alone: having all that history to yourself. I had that good fortune: few others have, and probably few ever will.
On the appointed morning, I rejoined my comrades, the Queen’s Messengers, at the train station, and, farewelling my kind diplomatic hosts, boarded the branch-line of the Trans-Siberian Railway which took passengers from the Chinese capital to Ulan Bator. For someone accustomed at the time to the grime and discomfort of British Railways, the first-class carriages we travelled in seemed magnificent. I have seldom taken a journey of such comfort and splendour since.
My carriage appeared to have been built before World War I but had been immaculately maintained. Each compartment was outfitted with an armchair, complete with antimacassar (presumably in case you had pomaded your hair); a small writing table; and a massive and yielding velvet sofa, convertible at night into a comfortable bed. Between compartments was an ancient but workable flushing lavatory, bearing the imprint of Thomas Crapper and Company, of London: I believe the model was called The Venerable.
Both the train and the track were elderly. The result was that the speed never exceeded a sedate 50 to 60 kilometres an hour, and in areas of track subsidence was sometimes as low as 20 or 30. Far from being a problem, this was a luxury. It meant that from your magnificently large picture window, you could watch the Chinese countryside roll by as you approached the Great Wall. Then, as you moved regally out towards Inner Mongolia (the northern region of China that borders what is now the Mongolian republic), you could see that what you had thought was the Great Wall was instead the last of a series of Great Walls, the innermost engineering triumph of a civilisation which had earlier tried to protect itself with walls further out from the mountains—walls which were not strong or high enough, so that as the first signs of desert showed themselves, you could see the remains of the very earliest earth-work walls, almost entirely worn away by time and erosion. And after that, before dusk shaded into night and took away all views, the endless monotony of the dunes of the Gobi Desert.
Conductors came around with constant supplies of tea and Tsingtao beer, there was beef and black-bean sauce with green peppers and rice for dinner, and as night fell, I fell asleep over my copy of Middlemarch, thinking about seeing my father the next day for the first time in eighteen months.
Chapter 17
Dear God, the Ear
I HAD FORGOTTEN, AS I drifted off, about Er-Lian. Someone had told me, I’m sure, but the reality of being ousted from my well-sprung, gently rocking bed at a chilly frontier post at 1 a.m. was still a shock. Er-Lian, the border station between China and Outer Mongolia, was also the place where the railway gauge changed. We would be continuing in the same comfortable carriage, but not until it had been lifted off its Chinese-gauge bogies and onto ones built for the Russian system. That meant sitting in a station waiting room, drinking gunpowder tea from a samovar, for a couple of hours.
It was there that a member of the People’s Liberation Army sat down next to me and asked if he could practise his English. Sure, I said, and we talked—about how he was here in this remote border post but his wife was in Shanghai, and how I was going to visit my father who I hadn’t seen for such a long time. And then he started talking to me about someone called Lin Biao.
The name didn’t really mean much to me. I was naive and largely apolitical at the time, with no journalistic ambitions and little recent Chinese current affairs knowledge. So the man explained to me that Lin Biao had been a marshal in the PLA, very close to Mao, and that in September the previous year, 1971, he had tried to mount a coup, which failed, then boarded a plane and took off to defect to Moscow. I believe, but this may be a false memory—at this distance I can’t be absolutely sure—that he also told me that the Chinese Air Force had shot down Lin Biao’s plane and thereby prevented a potential Russian coup. (This claim has certainly been made since, but mystery still surrounds exactly how Lin, Mao’s deputy and designated successor, really did die.)
I thought the story was interesting, but I didn’t know enough to ask any penetrating questions: I had little idea of Lin Biao’s significance. And besides, I thought, if a junior soldier is telling some travelling student this story, it must be common knowledge. He must have read it in the party propaganda sheets.
The transfer of the carriage to the Mongolian gauge co
mpleted, I shook hands with my new friend, boarded and went back to sleep. I woke to fields of rolling grassland, my first real sight of one of the strangest, wildest, emptiest countries I’ve ever seen. Here I was to spend the next six weeks.
Dad met us at the station with the embassy Range Rover, then a novelty issued to diplomats in some far-flung places as an advertisement for British technology, while his deputy, Phillip Shaw, had brought the thoroughly utilitarian Land Rover. The Queen’s Messengers loaded the diplomatic bags in the Land Rover, their task now almost complete. I lugged my cases to Dad’s car and we proceeded to the embassy. This was a large 1930s building on Peace Street with a neoclassical front portico which was seldom used. Instead, you entered the compound through the less-imposing rear gate, which revealed a tennis court, a cottage where my toddler half-sister and brother, Joanna and David, lived with their nanny, the redoubtable Mrs Taylor, and the back of the embassy and residence itself.
Home was upstairs, to the right at the top of the landing. Dad’s office was to the left, behind a heavily locked door through which, it became gradually clear, I would never be allowed to go. My father told me at the time that this was because there was code machinery in there, which I was not allowed to see, but in retrospect that was a serious understatement.
In his memoir, Twice around the World, my father claimed that ‘The value of a British presence in Mongolia’ lay ‘in the visible witness we afford of a different civilization’. But his book was a sanitised version of the truth, vetted by the SIS and scrubbed of anything that would hint at the reality of the embassy’s role—principally that of a spying station. The espionage expert Professor Richard Aldrich wrote to me during research for this book that electronic eavesdropping was at the centre of the operation, that the ‘main role’ of the British embassy in Outer Mongolia ‘was protecting the GCHQ listening site there’.