We were now through the Wei Gorges, and after Baoji the land opened up and became flatter. It was spread with wheat fields in which people were scything and bundling and carting away the stalks. It had grown very hot and hazy, and though it was humid, too, this midafternoon the fields were full of people, because of the harvest. They stood chest-high in the wheat, and they disappeared when they bent over with their sickles.
The villages here were tumbledown, but even the poorest houses had tall TV antennas. In some countrified places there was that other Chinese conundrum, of ugly tenements and barracklike buildings in a pastoral setting. We stopped at Xianyang, where China's first emperor had 460 of his critics buried alive, and then we crossed the Wei again—two shallow here for even the smallest boat—and through more wheat fields to the city of Xian.*
The first sign of the city proper is the high wall around it, like a medieval fortification, built in the Ming Dynasty, fourteenth century, and recently restored. It has crenellations and sentry posts and towers with windows designed (like those on the Great Wall) for the width of crossbows. And like the Great Wall, it was built as much to keep some people in as to keep others out. The Xian city wall was high and bulky, and the train passed the North Gate, which looked like a temple, with red beams and a large arched roof. Near it was a big banner with two-foot characters, saying, Be Disciplined and Obey the Law.
Xian Station was new, the streets were broad, the city was well organized; it was as though it had been designed to be visited. As the capital of the brilliant but brief Qin empire and the starting point of the Silk Road, Xian had always been regarded as a visitable city. Even 8000 years ago, people lived here in reasonable comfort—the proof was at the excavated neolithic site at Banpo, nearby. Xian's most glorious associations are with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the man who unified China, burned the books; built the Great Wall; standardized the laws, currency, roads, weights, measures, axle lengths and written language; and ordered the now famous terra-cotta warriors to be made. That was well over 2000 yeats ago, and the warriors weren't uncovered again until twelve years ago.
"When I was young, no tourists came to Xian," Mr. Xia told me, as we walked around town. He was thirty-two years old, a local guide, one of the many I hired en route. "There were some visitors and foreign experts from East European countries. But we never saw Americans."
"When did they start coming?"
"Obviously, after the terra-cotta army was found. Then, people were very interested. More and more things were unearthed. In 1980 some diggers found the bronze horse and chariot. People wanted to see these things."
That was wonderful for the Chinese. They probably realized that the value of a tourist lies in his attention span. Sight-seeing is perfect for a dictatorship—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The nonsightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency and has to be deported. Also, typically, the nonsightseer is not a big spender and, in his or her unregulated way, is quite a dangerous person to have around.
I hated sight-seeing in China. I felt the Chinese hid behind their rebuilt ruins so that no one could look closely at their lives. And the rebuilding was poor—usually botched and too sloppily painted. The places were always impossibly crowded and noisy. The Chinese were so desperate in their courtships that they went on tourist outings in order to hide and canoodle. Every holy mountain and famous pagoda had more than its share of motionless couples hugging and (sometimes) smooching. It was no good saying a particular place was hideous or pointless. It was the ritual of visiting—the outing—that mattered.
Xian was one of the few exceptions I found. It was genuinely interesting and pretty, and rather a stately and dignified place—different in that respect from most other Chinese cities, which were sooty and badly made and industrial. But Xian knows it is important. Hotels were being put up quickly to accommodate tourists, and in what had been for hundreds of years a very provincial city, off the beaten track, people seemed aware of the city's new celebrity as a tourist attraction.
The stall holders of Xian's market are relentless in their hectoring. They plead, they beg, they bargain. They hawk cast figures of the warriors, and mats, and puppets cut out of cowhide, and horrible little coasters, and they push them in your face and shriek, "Ming Dynasty!"
Tourists and the free market economy arrived at about the same time, which meant that the first tourists found rapacious individuals waving handicrafts and haggling.
A small proportion of the merchandise is not junk. It is stuff from attics and old chests—the family jewels, knickknacks that have been around for years, filthy little incense burners, cracked jade seals, tobacco boxes made out of hammered silver, rags of silk, very old and beautiful clothes made of silk and embroidery, and bonnets, jade wine cups, old brass padlocks, wooden images of gods and goddesses, silver fingernails, elaborate hairpins, perfume jars, snuff containers, pewter jars, pretty teapots, chipped dishes and plates, ivory chopsticks and mortally wounded vases.
Entirely off their own bat the Chinese turned the free market into a flea market. The trinkets and treasures have come out of the woodwork, and the stall holders or improvisational market people have become pestering hagglers for the first time in the People's Republic.
A thought that occurred to me back in Xinjiang was that the Uighurs were reverting to what they had always been—travelers, nomads, bargainers, inflexible Muslims and "shansh marnie" people. So it was elsewhere, too. Scholars who had had to pretend to be political parrots for the sake of Mao were re-forming themselves into that old distinguished class of scholar gentry; gamblers and drinkers were reemerging, and so were family farmers, and tinkers and pot wallopers, and small businessmen; and these folks living at the margins of the big cities—the market traders. Especially them.
What choice had they? Politics was closed to them. They couldn't emigrate. They couldn't criticize the government. The Communist Party was like a Masonic order, just as mysterious a brotherhood, possibly sinister, and just about unjoinable—you had to be chosen, and the most supine and robotlike yes-men were the likeliest candidates.
In such circumstances, who wouldn't dig out the family silver and flog it to tourists?
"This is old—very old!" they squawked. "Early Qing Dynasty! Ming Dynasty! Fifty kuai! How much you pay? Make me an offer!"
That fascinated me. No fixed prices, no fixed location, no overheads. Just a wild-eyed person clutching my arm and pushing a string of old beads at me.
What made the whole enterprise even more interesting was that the stuff ranged from certifiable treasures to outright fakes. I went to Mount Li to look at the man-made hill which is probably the tomb of the first emperor—and it is probably just as likely that the tomb was looted in 206 B.C., the year his dynasty ended.
A man lurking in the market near that hill hissed at me and pointed to a bulge in his shirt, indicating that he had something wonderful inside.
"You want to sell me something?" I said.
He shushed me, making a worried face. And with great caution he showed me what he had. It was a brass jar, with a lid, about five inches high, with markings on it.
"Two hundred yuan," he said.
I laughed at him, but he persisted. "Look," he said. "The sides. The top. Look closely."
There were erotic carvings on it, five sexual positions, tiny inscriptions, and bits of flummery and decoration. Also, I could see that it was old—not ancient, but old. Qing. Nineteenth century. Maybe a little earlier than 1850. Dao Guang period, according to my book.