by Jim Rogers
I noticed here in Lanzhou how the Chinese had polluted the air. No Third World country has pollution controls on its chimneys or smokestacks. However, the Chinese have done a better job on their rivers than most, probably because they need the fish, whereas the Russians, with fewer people to feed, have carelessly killed lots of their internal waterways.
The Chinese drink only boiled water. When we checked into Chinese hotels they gave us big, elaborate, wonderful thermoses filled with water that stayed hot for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, to use for tea or washing. Typically Chinese. Why waste all that fuel heating water and piping it around when a few thermoses will do the trick?
The drive from Lanzhou to Pingliang was spectacular. We climbed up to a seven-thousand-foot-high ridge and drove along the top. The Chinese had planted thousands of trees on top of this ridge to keep the winds from blowing everything away. All the way down on both sides were contoured terraces with saplings.
Without warning a dozen beekeepers and their hives appeared along both sides of the road—then hundreds of hives and scores of beekeepers. Worried about getting stung, we lowered our visors and pulled on our gloves, covering ourselves thoroughly.
These were nomadic, migrant beekeepers, we learned, with five to fifty hives each. Naturally, the worker bees went with the beekeepers to wherever they moved the queen bees. From spring to fall, the beekeepers followed the budding of flowers, spending a few days in a location till the bees had drunk all the area’s nectar, then moved on.
Thousands, millions, billions of bees filled the air and buzzed everywhere! This extraordinary sight went on for fifteen miles, with hundreds of the beekeepers camped in tents along the side of the road, often with their families. The beekeepers for the most part wore no protection, living in perfect harmony with their bees.
This was yet another example of superb Chinese productivity. They took the bees to the blooming flowers, rather than allow the bees access only to what spring chanced to bud around them. Of course, like the Chinese themselves, the bees had to work six to seven times harder than their foreign counterparts, as their masters had extended their honey-gathering season from a few weeks to half a year.
We saw amazing sights in China, but little to match those miles of bees and migrant beekeepers. It’s that kind of productivity, that kind of planning and industry, that convinces me the Chinese will do better than any other people in the next century.
Xi’an was called the glorious capital of the world two thousand or three thousand years ago. It flourished before Rome and was very likely even richer.
Long since fallen into decline, today Xi’an is a provincial capital—a common pattern. The success of a country, a culture, an enterprise, a people—particularly a very great success—also contains the seeds of its decline, possibly its destruction. It’s one of the things the real world rubs your nose in as you move through it. The once-glorious civilizations of the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Chinese, the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, to name only a few—all are ruins now.
In a way Xi’an was lucky. It had found a new lease on life through its past. For years Beijing, site of the beginning of the Great Wall, had been the country’s tourist center, but now Xi’an was suddenly its major attraction.
Several thousand years ago, whenever an emperor of China died he had been buried in an elaborate ritual with his entire court, his surviving wives, his children, courtiers, guards, cooks, everybody. Some prime minister had come along, knowing his fate, and had come up with an idea: Why not make statues of everybody, lifesize terra-cotta statues, bury them and not us? Somehow he’d sold the emperor on this, and so every single person in the court had been individually modeled and sculpted in terra-cotta. So far in Xi’an eight thousand of these buried life-sized statues—foot soldiers, chariots, horses, generals, weapons—had been found, entire armies facing every direction of the compass to ward off attacks on the dead emperor.
I’d seen pictures of the statues, but the first time you actually lay eyes on them is like first seeing the Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon—it just knocks you out. It takes a few minutes to adjust to the fact that the army and court stretching in every direction are real, not a dream, that people actually molded so many statues, and did it so long ago, and then every few minutes it hits you again and you’re amazed once more.
A few of these terra-cotta statues have been shown in museums around the world, but to really see them, to really feel their impact, you must go to Xi’an to the underground museum. All this was discovered only in 1974, and they’re still digging. God knows what they’re going to find before it’s all over. So far, they’ve dug up one emperor’s court. Who knows how many more there are?
As usual, we stayed at the best hotel in town—which in many towns was a five-flea instead of a five-star—the Golden Flower. We met the manager, a single Englishman named John Brown, a forty-two-year-old career hotel manager whose Midlands accent seemed wildly out of place. He supervised the five hundred Chinese employees, mainly teenage girls, who staffed the hotel and catered to all the foreigners flying in to see the terra-cotta statues. The hotel had its own beauty school, which taught the girls how to dress, make themselves up, and serve, taught them everything from the ground up. To them it was a glamorous job, like being an airline stewardess thirty-five years ago. It was here that we learned that the Chinese are taught it’s dangerous to kiss a foreigner because the Chinese will get sick. Despite this, I must say I wondered about John’s private life.
Tourism here was booming so much that even professors were giving up their positions to work in hotels as room clerks. They didn’t see it as a step down, but as a move up to money and glamour. The lure of a more prosperous life has changed people’s direction throughout history.
Here we saw a few beggars, but not as many in a week as you’d see in an hour in India. Some hung around restaurants waiting to move in on table scraps. They didn’t seem to bother foreigners.
I’d always heard there was a fabulous bird market in Xi’an. Frequently going through a town we’d see fifteen to twenty old guys sitting in the park, each with a birdcage. In the U.S. we take our dogs to the park. In China you take your bird. A bird is the quintessential Chinese pet: It doesn’t take up much room, nor does it eat much. In the same way, Ping-Pong and shooting pool are the quintessential Chinese sports. Cricket and baseball and football won’t ever be as popular; they take up too much space.
Anyway, I wanted to see the bird market, but when I asked about it, I kept being told there was none. On two prior trips I had failed to find it. After making a nuisance of myself at the Golden Flower and with a dozen cab drivers, I finally found a driver who would take us.
He drove us to a tiny market about the size of an American living room, with a dozen cats and a few dogs. These aren’t popular as pets in China; they, too, take up too much room, and the Communists discouraged them as capitalist-bourgeois. Knowing that governments rarely reveal their real reasons, I understood that they didn’t want to have to feed millions of pets. So, Tabitha and I did our sign-language bit, going “tweet, tweet” and flapping our wings. After a couple more false stops, he finally let us out and pointed, indicating that we had to walk the rest of the way, that vehicles couldn’t get any closer.
He was right. The road was too crowded, a sea of humanity. But when we turned the corner, there it was, a quarter of a mile of birds! Thousands of cages on both sides of the street, spilling beyond the road’s edge, on the ground, dangling from bicycles, hung in trees, and along ropes stretched between poles. Every kind of bird was displayed—doves, parakeets, and ducks; parrots big and little; larks, canaries, swallows, thrushes, and titmice; exotic birds with brilliant headdresses, which we couldn’t identify; hundreds of different kinds of birds, not to speak of the odd chicken destined for the pot, as well as snakes and goldfish meant for pets.
The area was packed with customers haggling with the sellers. As we were talking to a seller, a bird streaked ove
r our heads, free of his cage, and headed for the hills, but the bird seller reached up and snatched it from the air with the nonchalance I would use to pick an apple. I couldn’t decide who was more stunned—the bird or me.
Twice more we saw bird keepers pluck flying birds from the air. We didn’t know whether to move forward or backward, afraid we’d miss something. We gathered that a bird was an inexpensive purchase, on a par with a cat back home. The Xi’an bird market was like so much in China—intense, packed, crowded. Between the crush and our curiosity, it took us forever to walk through it.
Since I’ve been back to the U.S. I’ve told friends, “If you go to Xi’an, yes, see the terra-cotta warriors, but also be sure to see the bird market.” Every one has come back and said, “There is no bird market.” I don’t know why nobody will take them there. Usually there’s a reason why natives don’t want travelers to see places like the bird market or the teahouses. Maybe the Chinese think Westerners will say rude things if they think some Chinese are layabouts and others eat parakeets. Well, it’s true, the Chinese will eat any bird, so maybe that’s what it is; perhaps they think the bird market is somehow not politically correct.
We drove over the mountains to Luoyang, a day’s drive of five hundred miles.
I had a flat on my rear tire, the second of what would be twenty or so between us over the entire trip. We both changed it, with me acting as Tabitha’s assistant. With more than another thousand miles to Shanghai, we were now down to two spares, as with tubeless tires it’s wise to discard them once they go flat, as per the manufacturer’s instructions.
Mostly we drove on two-lane blacktop. In a few places the road was a mess, worse than on my last trip, although this time it wasn’t washed away. Of course, there had been no signs saying, BEWARE, ROAD WASHED OUT, DETOUR. Imagine in the United States if a main road was out from New York to Boston; it would be all over the news. But the Chinese don’t announce disasters.
We were about to leave Luoyang for Shanghai, where we had reservations on the monthly ferry to Japan, when some damn bureaucrat attached to the travel office panicked and threatened to call out the army if we drove there. We pleaded and showed Mr. Zhu our papers, but he was a local fellow who refused to understand that we already had permission.
I even tried to bribe him with my standard line, “I know this is out of the ordinary. There must be an extra fee that can be paid.” Mr. Zhu wouldn’t bite, and it was clear we couldn’t go to Shanghai. As this was only a year after Tiananmen Square, he probably decided foreigners could be better controlled in Beijing.
This one functionary was screwing up our timing for the entire trip. By now, late May, we were on a tight schedule dictated by climate and ferry departures to and from Japan. We were desperate to avoid winter. Not just in Siberia, where winter began in September, only three months away, but also in South Africa and Australia and Argentina. We had only a thirteen-day window in Japan to catch the boat from Yokohama to Siberia. If we missed it, we’d have to wait an entire month for the next one.
So we were forced to alter our plans and drive north to Beijing. This didn’t mean traveling more miles, but we didn’t know what we would do after we arrived, how we would get to Japan. Of course this was often how we arrived in countries. A trip like this had so many variables, so many imponderables, such a changeable timetable, and was extended over so many months that it was impossible to obtain visas and book ourselves on every ferry and airline in advance. By necessity we had to make it up as we went along, discover our passage in the process of making our way.
Hurried inquiries told us the Beijing ferry to Japan was in dry dock for the summer. My next hope was to fly to Tokyo on the Chinese state airline, but airlines were often stuffy about bikes, disliking the idea of gas and batteries in their cargo holds. After all, they reasoned, even empty gas tanks held explosive vapor, and battery acids might wreak God-knew-what havoc on an airplane. Unless bikes were factory-new, Singapore Air refused to take them at all, no matter how well crated or prepped.
I was sure we’d have problems with the Chinese airline, but I didn’t know whether they would be severe or mild.
Because the mania of Mao’s Red Guards was long over and wall posters were rare, the fresh black-and-white posters caught my attention. Their bold ideograms on stark white paper made them look official and important.
Almost everywhere we stopped in China, within a few minutes a schoolteacher would appear to practice his English. As I collect political posters, and we were right under one of these fresh ones we’d seen so many of, I asked the thin schoolteacher with the nicotine-stained fingers about it. Mr. Li looked around furtively and edged closer to speak in a low tone.
This poster announced the pending execution of two criminals. What had they done? I asked.
Brandishing long pig knives, said Mr. Li, these men in their late twenties had broken into a widow’s house and robbed and injured her. They had been caught, had been found guilty, and were sentenced to die.
Why the posters? I asked. Would there be a public execution?
No.
How would it be done?
With a pistol shot. Unless the robbers wanted a more brutal form of death, they or their families would buy the two bullets with which the police would execute them. The police assigned the task would drive them around until a suitable burial site was found, at which point the criminals would be given the task of digging their own graves. There would be no coffins. Once their graves were dug, the bullets they had purchased would make a swift end of them.
In contrast to the bold black ideograms on the white paper was a red check in the poster’s bottom right-hand corner.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“It means the execution was carried out,” whispered my informant.
Filled with unease, we pushed on.
From Lanzhou on we had begun to notice more people. Once we’d left Xi’an, once we’d crossed the mountains, we were right in it, smack in the fertile, populated part of China. From here to Beijing were constant masses of people. Everywhere, in the countryside, the cities, the towns, the villages, we were never out of sight of people. The roads were incredibly crowded, because everybody and everything was out using them—pigs, goats, people, bicycles, carts, trucks. The expression “teeming Asian masses” took on real meaning.
Slow traffic stayed to the side, and the few vehicles drove right down the road’s middle. When we were lucky we made thirty to forty miles an hour.
Once along the road to Luoyang we came on a huge traffic tie-up. I rode up to see what the problem was. A wagon was sitting in the middle of the road, blocking everybody. The driver had disconnected it and left it there and had driven off with whatever was pulling that wagon to fetch a spare part. Whenever a vehicle broke down, the driver just went off and left it to get help. Nobody worried about his property being stolen. In this case, nobody got out of his car to move the damn wagon, either. I mean, eight guys could have pushed it to the side of the road if they had thought about it.
When I went back for Tabitha, I clocked it. The queue was three miles long.
From time to time we drove over a heap of grain in the road, put there to be threshed by traffic. We also rode across piles of nuts, placed in the road to be cracked.
We never saw any public displays of affection between the sexes. It must happen; people have been necking for thousands of years. We saw girls walking down the street holding hands with girls, boys with boys—not homosexual, which is against the law—just as friends, the way you see it in France or the Middle East.
On my last trip I had attended an outdoor dance, an afternoon disco. I noticed that the guys danced only with guys, the girls with other girls. Finally this guy came over and asked me to dance, taking me aback. I had never been asked to dance by a guy before. I protested, but when in China … still, I didn’t particularly like it and I wasn’t very good at it.
On the way to Shijiazhuang, a large industrial city that
has sprung up over the past few decades, we stopped off at a big Buddhist temple with a martial arts school.
In China today there are many cities of 3 million and 4 million people, close to the size of Los Angeles, that forty years ago were no more than villages. If such growth happened in Kansas, it would be a much-remarked event; here in China the story has been lost to the outside world.
I noticed more gas stations than on previous trips, all state run, of course, except for the black marketeers’. Shijiazhuang, too, had one of the eighties’ boom-time hotels, but as usual it was almost empty.
Approaching Beijing was very exciting to both of us. A sign said, BEIJING, 49 KILOMETERS—in Western letters, no less! Just seeing road signs was a shock. This was part of the new internationalism. We were moving back into the other world, the one we’d left behind in Istanbul, seven thousand miles ago.
Tabitha and I grinned at each other: We’d crossed the Eurasian mass on bikes. Ninety-four hundred miles of driving, Ireland to Beijing, mostly over two-lane blacktop pocked with treacherous potholes, often no better than a bad Southern dirt road, full of farm animals, ramshackle vehicles, and pedestrians careless about traffic. We’d done it in March, April, and May, and thankfully the weather hadn’t been bad, only a few rainy days. We’d slept in five-flea and five-star hotels, we’d eaten off the best china in luxury hotels and fly-specked tin plates in outdoor bazaars, but we’d done it. At that moment I knew if we could do this, we could do anything together.
We hit the four-lane blacktop into Beijing, quite a luxury. We could now roar along at sixty or seventy miles an hour, unfettered.
We passed through Tiananmen Square, the heart of Beijing, a vast sea of cobblestones. In the old days, this had been the location of government offices, but Mao had changed its character. Wearing his Red Guard armband, he had reviewed parades of a million people here. In 1976 this had been the place where another million people had paid him their last respects.