She lies naked in a Lucite coffin filled with formaldehyde, her face is hideous from decay and dissection, her flesh is pruney white and her mouth gapes open. She died in the Han Dynasty after eating a watermelon. The seeds taken from her stomach are on view. Indeed, her stomach is on view—all her internal organs are in jars. The Chinese throng this museum for much the same reason that, as a schoolboy, I used to go to the Agassir Museum at Harvard. I was fascinated by the pickled head of a gorilla in a big jar and the way one of his jellylike eyes had come loose and floated to the top of the jar. Horror-interest.
One of the pitfalls of long journeys is the tendency of the traveler to miniaturize a big city—not out of malice or frivolity, but for his own peace of mind. Confronted with a stony-faced and charmless Chinese city I tried to simplify it and make it interesting to me. Changsha was a good example of that. I knew it had several universities, a number of technical institutes, hospitals and medical schools—most Chinese cities were equally well equipped. They are a tribute to China's determination to be self-sufficient, healthy and literate. And such projects and institutions are seen as so necessary that the Chinese cannot understand why African and other Third World countries indulge themselves in meretricious enterprises like luxury airports or super highways. The Chinese are contemptuous of showy projects and regard aid recipients who spend money this way as pathetic and backward. On the whole, the Chinese are baffled by people who are unwilling to make sacrifices. That is admirable. But it is very tiring constantly to be subjected to Chinese sacrifice. After the twentieth hospital and fortieth university campus, I began to give them a miss.
So Changsha was rather more than Maoist memories and the two-thousand-year-old pickled woman; but the rest was not compelling. I found it hard to distinguish the hotels from the colleges and the hospitals from the prisons. Chinese architecture, which is all-purpose and excruciating, makes it almost impossible to tell these places apart. One of the most common experiences a foreigner has in China (outside of the three or four major cities) is of waking in a dreary room, seeing the water-stained ceiling, torn curtains, dented thermos bottle and rotting carpet and not knowing whether he is a student, a guest, a patient or a prisoner.
That is changing. I met four men from the Hunan Provincial Tourism Bureau in Changsha, and when one of them—Mr. Sun Bing—said, "We are the Selling and Marketing Department of this outfit," I was convinced it was changing fast.
"We want foreign friends to know what a wonderful province this is," Mr. Li said.
"Because of Chairman Mao?"
"Not only that," Mr. Zhang said. "Our great secret is Wuling Yang."
"Another politician?"
"A region. More beautiful than anything in Guilin."
"Limestone hills?"
"Of course, but better shapes," Mr. Sun said. "More interesting. Bigger. Plus woods and birds."
"And minority people," Mr. Chen said.
"Very colorful minority people," Mr. Sun added. "Altogether a most attractive package."
Rap on, I thought. I loved this. Four new Chinese, selling their province's scenic wonders. And again I thought, The Chinese wake up quickly.
"People know nothing about this now," Mr. Zhang said. "It is a secret. No one goes there."
"Why not?"
"Because there is no hotel. But one is being built. And when it is, this region will be famous all over the world."
Mr. Li said, "Hunan is a lovely province. People must know it better. We compete with other provinces, but we have everything: Until now visitors did not come here to look at the scenery, but they are starting to."
And saying this he led me to a table, where we had a long meal of Hunanese dishes—the best food in China, in my opinion. This banquet consisted of frogs' legs, turtle, duck, tripe, sea cucumbers (which are actually sea slugs), soup and vegetables—no rice, no noodles: that sort of stodge was for people with cruder palates. I knew that it was a blatant attempt to win my approval, and I was touched by their innocent belief in the dynamics of feasting the foreign devil. The Chinese can be deeply unsubtle, stage-managing a bowel-shattering banquet before asking a favor. Or is that subtle? Anyway, they have found that it works. But I would gladly have praised the hills of Hunan without a third helping of frogs' legs.
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 120 kilometers 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 shenggi), 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 to Changsha in the evening, just an old puffer on a forgotten branch line that 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 Foot Soles 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 foot soles ("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 the songs on the trains, too. They flew flags. They wore Mao buttons and badges, and the red armband. It was not a trivial matter. It compared in size and fervor to Muslims making the hajj 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 their Little Red Book.
Twenty years later I arrived at Shaoshan 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 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 the epitaph in Chinese, Mao Zedong was a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, a great tactician and theorist.