The Modern China: An American City - Xian, China

By: Phillip Donnelly

The Modern China: An American City
Xian, China

I hadn’t expected much from Xian. My students had warned me that it was so polluted that when it rained, the rain was black. One of them had joked that I could return my graying hair to its original colour by merely spending a weekend there. I expected a black, decaying industrial behemoth, like Manchester in the eighties.

In reality, Xian is a much more pleasant metropolis of seven million people. From its central square, the Drum and Bell Tower Square, the cities four main arteries (East, West, North and South Street), spread out into infinity, dividing the city in a logical and coherent way. The square itself, where our hotel was situated, is a pleasant enough grassy place, where kite flying aficionados ride the wind, or rather their kites ‘ride the wind’. They themselves stay on the ground and try to flog your kites. It contains two typical Ming Dynasty towers; one containing a museum of bells, and another a museum of drums. We went to one of them, but I can’t remember which one, which shows what a great impression it left on me.

The rest of the city centre is all new. This is surprising when you consider that Xian was China’s capital for far longer than any other city, and much longer than the recent upstart, Beijing. Most of the dynasties rose and fell here in Xian, but judging by the downtown area, they left no trace. Once again, war, progress and indifference have destroyed Chinese history. The centre of modern Xian could be any American city; malls, banks, McDonald’s and traffic jams.

Xian’s citizens looked prosperous and purposeful. This was a world of business and careers, of mobile phones and factories, and the rough and ready Tibetans of yesterday were world’s away, much to the delight of both parties, I suspect.

Even the weather surprised me. I had expected more of the damp, drizzle and grey mist so characteristic of Southern China, but Xian was dry and dusty. Posters everywhere encouraged people to conserve water - ‘each drop means life’ - they proclaimed.

Instead of mist, one finds a slight haze. The sky here is cloudless, but not really blue - it’s a kind of grey/blue I haven’t seen before. That’s partly due to pollution, no doubt, but mainly due to the dusty yellow loess soil from northwest China being blown east by howling winds from Mongolia. The soil up there is yellow and like powder, and winter winds lift it from the ground and carry it all the way to Xian and Beijing.

There’s nothing new in this, but the scale and intensity of soil erosion has increased massively in this century. Recent rapid economic progress is bringing things to a crisis point. Drought, over farming and de-forestation, combined with ever increasing demands for water from industry and the cities, are pushing northeast China toward the abyss, and some speculate if the whole region, from Xian to Beijing, may soon become a desert.

The Party, not one to let even Mother Nature stand in its way, has a plan. It has begun a massive canal building project to transfer water from the wet south of China (which receives 80-90 per cent of China’s rainfall) to the dry north. Yet again, I am struck by the power of the Party and the Chinese to control, to organize and to build. It contrasts sharply with say, Spain, where the Sahara desert is already moving into the parched Andalusian south. Does Spain, occupying an area smaller than a Chinese province, and in per capita terms massively richer and more economically developed than China, build its own canals from its wet north to irrigate its parched south? No, it does nothing. It merely talks about the possibility of doing something at some indeterminate time in the future.

However, we had not come to Xian to see the grey/blue sky and congratulate the Party on its public works projects. We had come, like everyone else, I suppose, to see those silly Terra Cotta warrior statues. You know, those life-size replicas built by Emperor Qin to protect him in the afterlife, in place of burying real soldiers alive, standard practice at the time. The soldiers were lucky - his many concubines, servants and all but one of his 22 children did receive the honour of being buried with him, whether they wanted to or not. Emperor Qin was the first emperor to rule a united China, but also a bit of a paranoid megalomaniac tyrant, apparently. It seems to me that paranoid megalomaniacs always do well, historically speaking. Just look at the Bush Dynasty in America.

After uniting China, he set about making sure the whole continent of a country was kept busy glorifying his magnificence, and built the greatest mausoleum the world has ever seen. The terra-cotta warriors were only one small part of the 25 kilometer complex that was to ensure his greatness was never forgotten. The workmen involved in building the most sensitive part of the complex, the emperor’s tomb, were buried alive in it immediately after it was finished. Talk about a bum rap! You spend 25 years - your whole life - slaving away underground on some loony’s tomb, and then as soon as you finish, they bury you alive in it. I guess these guys had pretty weak unions.

The irony is that only a year after his death, peasant uprisings destroyed the emperor’s vast monument to himself, looting what they could, demolishing what they couldn’t and burning the rest. Even the Terra Cotta warriors had their metal weapons stolen and were smashed to pieces. The warriors you see today have been put back together again by teams of archaeologists, who are so patient and skilled, they could probably reconstruct Humpty Dumpty.

The Chinese can be a very destructive lot when they set their mind to it. They can build on a massive scale, unthinkable by other cultures, but they can also tear it all down again at frightening speed. I know it’s a crass generalization, and not my first, but so little of China’s long history is still standing I can’t help but make the assertion. Often when it is standing, you find it’s just a replica of something that was destroyed earlier, often several times, and always for no apparent reason. The Cultural Revolution and the vandalism of the Red Guards is just a recent, and comparatively mild, example of the China’s periodic lapses into a destructive insanity.

This is not the same the world over. When the Goths sacked Rome, they left most of it standing; the Egyptians may have stolen anything valuable from the pharos’ tombs, given half a chance, but they left the Pyramids standing; the Burmese, Thai’s and Cambodians never flattened the temples of Angkor Wat; the Spanish conquistadores would do anything for gold, but they saw no need to flatten Aztec and Maya cities, for the most part; Tsar Peter the Great may have hated Moscow, but he didn’t flatten it and start again, he went off to build a new city and left Moscow alone.

However, I’ll stop here, as I really am talking through my nether regions, so to speak, but it seems that way to me. Let’s get back to the great Qin.

Fortunately, for the emperor, the peasants couldn’t find the entrance shaft to his tomb, hidden in a mountain, so they never laid their hands on his most valuable loot. We went to a replica of the tomb, which modern archaeologists have seen, and it makes Lenin’s Mausoleum look like a pauper’s grave, but I suppose Lenin would be glad to hear it. His coffin is in the centre of the enormous circular vault-like tomb, and the coffins of his favourite concubines are buried into walls around him. These lucky beauties were allowed to swallow poison rather than being buried alive. Bloody favouritism, eh? There are jewels everywhere and more gold than you could shake a stick at. There are also rivers of toxic lead and mercury, which is why tour groups can’t see the original, or that’s what they told us.

I’ve always felt cheated by replicas, but the Chinese in the group didn’t seem to mind at all. I’ve noticed this before about Chinese - they seem to see no difference between a replica and the real thing. China is littered by parks where you can see replicas of everything. Near where I used to live in Zhuhai, there’s a park with replicas of famous structures in China (the Great Wall, the Summer Palace etc.), and nearby there’s another park with replicas of famous foreign buildings (the Louvre, Buckingham Palace etc). My students told me once, without a trace of irony or sarcasm, that it’s more convenient this way, as you can see all the places at once without having to travel around a lot, and you only have to pay one entrance fee. As if to prove their point, near the tomb of Emperor Qin, there’s even a replica of a pyramid and a sphinx, so you don’t have to bother going to Egypt!

The nearest you can get to the real tomb is to stand on the hill which it was dug into. From the top of the hill, upon the mausoleum’s completion, you could once see all 25 kilometers of the great emperor’s magnificent mausoleum complex; an eternal necropolis, walled in and an eternal reminder of his greatness. Today, you can see absolutely nothing, because nothing survived - just a small dirty factory or two and some pig-farming peasants.

It reminded me of a poem by Shelley, one of the few poems I’ve ever really liked. I think Shelley was traveling around Libya, and he came across the stump of a once-great statue with only half a leg left over it. Inscribed on the statue, he read the following:

“‘I am Ozymandius
King of Kings
Look on my Works
Ye Mighty
And Despair’
Nothing else remained
On the lone and level
The sand stretched far away”

I suppose I could have spent more time in Xian. There were tombs aplenty left to visit, and temples galore, or perhaps they were just replicas, but I was anxious to get to Beijing. We visited other places in Xian, but as I write this two week’s later, back home in Bangkok, I can’t even remember what they were. I suppose this shows how little impression they made on me.

I do remember my cold was getting worse, and rivers of phlegm were turning my sinuses into volcanoes. The dry and dusty air, and the truly awful Chinese cigarettes and fake western cigarettes (one Marlboro packet’s health warning read ‘Smiking dimages your hill’) were making me cough like a moose. I wanted to move on, believing for no sane reason, that I’d feel better in Beijing. I felt like a shark, which like all fish, must keep moving to breath.

“If you don’t keep moving, you die,” I said to Sandra out of the blue on the way to the train station, trying to sound enigmatic.
“Don’t forget your bag again,” she replied.