INNOCENTS ABROAD: AN AMERICAN CLASSICIST IN CHINA

[essay: 17,834 words]

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

--from S. T. Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Barry B. Powell

Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics

University of Wisconsin-Madison

1210 Sweetbriar Road

Madison, WI 53705

phone: 608-233-5991

fax: 608-233-0415

email: bbpowell@facstaff.wisc.edu

1. THE GLORY OF THE HAN

At first it’s hard to get drunk in China. The beer, served with every meal in large brown bottles, is 3.7 percent, near-beer really, and you never have time to find a proper bar, if they even exist, where you might find the legendary 157% proof maotai. Meals are served on round tables in Louis Quatorze spacious dining rooms that withdraw into broad coffered ceilings, often pink. The walls are rose and Corinthian columns stand on either side while gorgeous, lovely women, dressed in silk with a long slit up the side, stand along the wall, waiting to serve you. The women have no body fat--they are thin, dark-eyed, raven-haired, fine-boned. Their features are delicate and evenly proportioned and harmonious and their deep red and blue silk dresses are radiant and spotlessly clean. That was the first thing you noticed--the beauty of the women, and their translucent skin. Where was the communist revolution?

The beautiful women saunter back and forth, serving the first course onto a broad lazy Susan, usually four dishes of something dread and shining. You’re never sure what it is, but around the two tables, which seat the eighteen American diners and two Swiss in your group, you speculate. This must be seaweed--or a kind of noodle? Either way the taste is foul, repulsive. A gourmet at our table considers the taste carefully--the background is uncooked sesame oil, he is sure, drowning everything in its dark smell. After the first few days no one touches the first course, except for the occasional small dish of unsalted peanuts, which you pick out one by one with chopsticks that are never clean and sometimes soggy. The fussy Midwestern divorce lawyer with gray hair in a bun has brought along alcohol wipes and swabs each stick fastidiously, eats eight Pepto-Bismo tablets a day for prophylaxis. She has been complaining about the toilets, for the men cannot imagine what it’s like. It’s easy for them to urinate in any old trench, but the women must crouch over a hole, feet precarious on the knobs which protrude from stinking depressions caked with moist excreta. It’s enough to make you sick, and it’s the same everywhere, even in the “washroom” just off the Louis Quatorze dining room.

Fourteen million people live in Beijing, China’s second largest city after Shanghai. In 1949 two million people lived here, and in 1971, seven million. It has been the capital of China more or less continuously for seven hundred years. Still, the streets from the International Hotel to the University of Beijing seem like a small town, lined with Oriental Plane trees, which look like maples except the bark comes off in long vertical gray-brown strips. White painted mudbrick low houses, one against another, then an alley. Sidewalks and open shops overarched by the trees. The streets are crowded, but nothing like Cairo or even New York, and everywhere people sweep the sidewalks. You expected the lavatories, but you didn’t expect this.

“Oh this is excellent,” someone murmurs when the second course comes around. The second course consists of ten or twelve dishes, which the beautiful women stack one on top of another around the lazy susan. The dishes are almost always the same, with slight variation, twice a day, day after day, but you wonder what they are. Quickly you learn which ones are edible, and ignore the rest--the french fried potatoes can always be eaten, and the deep fried bits of fish, and the stuff called stateside sweet and sour pork, but too chewy and hard to be pork. You don’t want to know what it really is. Sometimes the women bring carp boiled in a loose water and lemon sauce, the milky eyes and brain drooling around the edges. It is bony and flat but really not bad. In California where I grew up, when we caught carp like that in the Sacramento or American rivers, we would throw it on the bank to rot in the sun, disgusted by its appearance, whiskers and heavy scales. But now we were glad to see it amidst the piles of noodly and wilted things, and sometimes maybe an onion, or slices of beef, maybe, in a dark brown acrid sauce, and certainly pieces of chicken which have been hacked to mince meat by a cleaver, bones and all. You have to pick out the gristle with your chopsticks. Spitting it out on your plate is bad form. You can always eat the egg-drop soup, which comes last, and mix in some rice, which comes late in the meal too, and this works to keep the hunger down.

In Lanzhou, an industrial town on the Yellow River, my wife left early at lunch. I heard her vomiting in the halls, while a slinky woman shut the door demurely. Only I seemed to have noticed what happened. Sometimes travelers praise the food in China, but unless they were traveling with Queen Elizabeth they are politely lying , or incapable of seeing the real world.

The Chinese, really the Han, are the most successful race in human history and they are proud of their success. In the Paleolithic their ancestors drove the American Indian across the Bering land bridge. For the last three and a half thousand years they have been more clever than other humans in Asia and outnumber them manyfold. They know that they are beautiful and view with envy and amusement the overweight lumbering pasty Caucasians who visit them now in ever increasing numbers, bringing what the Chinese badly need: hard cold cash. They pity the Caucasians, but are not afraid to hate the Japanese, who come in many tours too, themselves often fat, because all Chinese remember the horrors of the Japanese occupation, and they despise an upstart Asian people who took from them the arts of civilization and turned these arts against their natural master. Everyone in China agrees that now things are going to be different, and in our lifetime.

One of every four human beings is Han Chinese, making up 93% of the 1.2 billion people who live in China. The other 7% are the 55 “minorities,” who have special rights in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including the right to have more than one child. But the real Chinese are the Han, descended, they say, directly from the Han dynasty, when China was first unified. You quickly learn that everything in China is explained in terms of dynasties, and you need to get a handle on them to understand what is being said. Roughly, the Han extended from 200 years before to 200 years after Christ, and thus was contemporaneous with the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. The two empires stood at opposite ends of the transcontinental Silk Road, and over this road, through middlemen, conducted trade relations. The present form of Chinese writing comes from the Han and is called Hanzi.

The contributions of the Han weigh enormously into the accomplishment of civilization, though are almost unknown, even to the Chinese themselves, who think of their great contributions as merely “The Four Inventions:” gunpowder, the compass, paper, and printing. But Joseph Needham of Cambridge University, who died in 1995, the greatest sinologist of his generation, spent his long life assembling evidence for the other extraordinary Chinese achievements in science and technology, published in his monumental Science and Civilization in China, of which nine volumes and several supplements have appeared. According to Needham’s work, the Han also invented the row cultivation of crops, the iron plow, and the horse collar, which transformed European agriculture when it came West in 700 A.D., 1,000 years after its invention in China. They invented the seed-drill, cast iron, and discovered how to make steel from cast iron. They invented the double-acting piston bellows, the crank handle, deep drilling for natural gas, the belt drive, water power, the suspension bridge, the essentials of the steam engine, the segmental arch bridge, lacquer, strong beer, petroleum and natural gas as fuel, the wheelbarrow, sliding calipers, and the fishing reel. The Chinese invention of the stirrup revolutionized warfare when it reached Europe in the 5th century A.D. and made possible the heavily armed knight, the crusades, and medieval romance. Of course the Chinese invented porcelain, a high-fired special clay--sometimes translucent--which rings when struck, always the most valued ceramic in the world. The Chinese invented the umbrella, biological pest control, matches, and chess, though most think the game came from India. They invented brandy and whiskey (which we could never seem to find), the mechanical clock, and systems of movable type seven hundred years before Gutenberg. They invented playing-cards and paper money, the spinning-wheel, the decimal system, the kite, and first experimented with manned flight with kites, made the first relief maps and invented the rudder. The Chinese first found a place for zero, invented negative numbers, and learned how to extract higher roots. They first worked with decimal fractions, used algebra in geometry, refined the value of pi, and defined “Pascal’s” triangle of binomial coefficients. The paddle-wheel boat is a Chinese invention too, as is land sailing, the canal pound-lock, batten sails and staggered masts, multiple masts, leeboards, and watertight compartments in ships. Already in the Shang dynasty (1800-1200 B.C.) the Chinese had invented the large tuned bell and tuned drums. Daoist priests discovered hermetically sealed research laboratories and first understood musical timbre and equal temperament in music (how to make the circle of fifths correspond with the octave, so that music can be modulated from key to key). In warfare the Chinese remained for long transcendent, inventing poison gas, smoke bombs, tear gas, the crossbow, flame-throwers, flares, grenades, metal cased bombs, land and sea-mines, and the rocket, both single and multistage. They invented the fire stick and the first true gun. The Chinese first understood how to diagnose diabetes through urine analysis and described the circulation of the blood 1,800 years before it was understood in the West. The Chinese discovered the solar wind, made the first Mercator map-projection, and recognized sunspots as solar phenomena. They understood circadian rhythms in the human body in the 2nd century B.C., invented the helicopter rotor and propeller, and the seismograph, and described the first law of motion 2,000 years before Newton. Only a European could discover and explain to Chinese their own past, because in China the past is not made by men striving for perfection, but is a moral pageant illustrating the universal state’s approach to and decline from heavenly favor. In China there has never been, and can never be, a scientific historiography.

It used to be exotic to go to China, but the CITS (China International Travel Service) has worked hard to change that in their design to bring in foreign currency. They have built a remarkable infrastructure of hotels, train cars, air service, and guides to allow the Japanese or Westerner to come into the country, spend a lot of money, and leave without ever noticing exactly what has happened, or even caring, because the expense is never high. A young, perhaps frightened, Swedish woman boarded the train at Hangzhou in south China, but in general nobody travels alone in China because of the exaggerated complexities of finding information and communicating with the Chinese about basic necessities. But the CITS makes travel easy and comfortable for organized groups. Each party is assigned a National Guide, who accompanies you for the whole trip. In every city you are also assigned a local guide, all employees of CITS, who provide transportation to the airport, to restaurants, hotels and sites, and to local factories, where you are given a chance to spend some money on often exquisite local crafts. The tour guides, young people on the make with a college education (they must speak English), often have interesting stories to tell about China’s recent past and about its hopes for the future. Right now you can become fabulously wealthy by being a local or a national guide. It took us a good while to figure out why.

Our national guide is named Pu Hu, a handsome 28-year old bachelor whose English name for some reason is Drin. He is tall for a Chinese and has light, almost grayish skin. His eyes are more gray than black, and his hair is neatly trimmed. He wears shorts and a sports shirt and athletic shoes, as do most of the young men we see in Beijing. Drin speaks with authority and is articulate, friendly, intelligent, and a pleasure to be with. It is impossible not to like him. Our local guide in Beijing is Peter, a flamboyant 21-year old with longish hair whose real name is a word in Chinese that means cotton. Because Peter doesn’t like soft things, he decided to name himself Rocky in English, but that seemed phony. Someone must have told him that Peter is “rock” in Greek, so that’s how he got the name. Peter’s favorite movie is “The Sound of Music,” which he’s seen seven times, now that it is possible to see American films in China. Though his English is not good, he knows by heart “A Do, a deer, a Ra, a drop of golden sun.”

Peter takes us to Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world. At its northern end stands the Forbidden Palace, made famous from the film “The Last Emperor.” A great portrait of Chairman Mao smiles down from the outer gate of the Forbidden City over Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese slogan behind him reads, on one side of the portrait, LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA, and on the other LONG LIVE THE GREAT UNITY OF THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD. Thousands mill in the square and the sky is filled with kites in amazing shapes--dragonflies, butterflies, hawks--the colored kites soar and flutter. We wonder just where the massacre took place, exactly, but are afraid to ask. No one in the square pays us much attention, except to hawk rubber sandals or ice-cream bars. Tourists are becoming a familiar sight.

On the eastern side of the square is the historical museum, filled with reproductions of ancient artifacts whose labels are written only in Chinese. On the southern side is the mausoleum of Chairman Mao and on the western the Great Hall of the People. We follow a steady stream of people up high steps past enormous granite carvings of the people rising up with Chairman Mao at their head. We enter an anteroom, high, Roman in feeling, with bouquets of flowers, then file into an inner chamber. The body lies in state in a glass box, but you can’t take pictures. Mao looks plastic from a distance, and someone wonders if it is real.

Of course it’s real. The chairman's personal doctor tells a frightening story of the clumsy embalming in Zhisui Li's amazing The Private Life of Chairman Mao : The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician (1994).

Coming out of the other side of the mausoleum we find souvenir stands selling carved jadeite and kites. In eight cities, in over 4,300 miles of travel, only once again did we see a portrait of Chairman Mao, a magazine picture taped to a peasant’s mudbrick wall. This great monster of history is a puzzling presence to the Chinese. He claimed to make them what they are, but brought so much horror and death that no one wants to think about it any more. The communist revolution is becoming a myth, something that might have happened, but no one is sure why.

2. THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES

“Where were you during the Cultural Revolution?” someone asks Drin, as we are busing to the Temple of Heaven in the southern part of the city, where emperors of the Ming dynasty (14-17th centuries) and the Qing (“ching”) dynasty (17th century through 1911) prayed to heaven for good crops and general prosperity. I liked to think of the Ming Dynasty as coextensive with the Italian Renaissance and the Qing as coextensive with the modern period.

“I was too young, “Drin says.

“You are 28? But the Cultural Revolution ran from 1966 to 1976, so you would have been around nine when it ended.”

“I can remember it, but I was never a part,” Drin insisted.

Our national guide Drin is well educated but we’re not sure why. His father was a colonel in the Chinese army, and he grew up on military bases. Drin claims to know eight thousand Chinese characters and, even as we bus through town, he is preparing to take his written exam in French, which will entitle him to promotion in CITS. Drin is extremely nervous about the exam because of all the bizarre tense forms he must master; in Chinese there are no tenses, no gender, no singular or plural numbers, no inflection of any kind. Such features make the Chinese language easy to learn, but Chinese writing is another matter. A further impediment to learning Chinese is the limited range of sounds: one dictionary lists 28 words which are pronounced “chang.” Two Chinese Americans, whose parents were from Taiwan and Canton, both of whom grew up speaking Chinese, traveled with us. Neither had any idea what I was talking about and neither could understand more than a few words of the Chinese spoken in Beijing, and evidently Chinese dialects are a great barrier to understanding.

“Well what do people think about Mao now, then?” I pressed.

“Mao was a great man,“ Drin said earnestly. “He created the PRC--the People’s Republic of China. He only made one mistake, the Cultural Revolution.”

“One mistake! Good God! Ten million people died, many horribly!”

“Yes, but China is very old, you must remember. What is that? China is 3,000 years old. Ten years is not a long time.”

Drin was right. Ten million people is nothing in Chinese time. When the Taiping rebellion broke out in southern China in 1851, led by a Protestant convert named Hong Xiuquan who claimed to be the son of God and brother to Jesus Christ, the population of China was 400 million. In 1864, when the rebellion was suppressed, and all of southern China destroyed, the population had dropped to 300 million. Between 1958 and 1963, 30 million Chinese starved to death solely because of the fatuous policies of Chairman Mao in the Great Leap Forward, which the Chinese carried out with enthusiasm. Such overwhelming catastrophes are common in Chinese history and staggering, incomprehensible, in the West.

The day was sultry and threatening rain as we got out of the bus and entered through a gate the walled compound of the Temple of Heaven. We ascended an open-air circular sequence of three superimposed mounds, each composed of circles of stones the numbers of which are divisible by 9, a magic number. At the center, on the altar stone, silk and jade and animals were burned in the days of the emperors. As the smoke rose to heaven, the emperor would pray for abundant crops. His right to rule, and his influence over nature, was underwritten by the Dao, “the way,” the infinite harmony of man and nature expressed in the symbol of Yin-Yang, the balanced union of positive and negative, male and female. Teachings about the Dao are traced to Lao zi (“Old Master”), who lived during the confused period of the Zhou dynasties (13th-3rd centuries B.C.) about 600 B.C., a contemporary of Thales in the Mediterranean, second Isaiah in Palestine, Zoroaster in Persia, and Sakyamuni in northern India, who became the Buddha. The emperor was heaven, symbolized by the dragon, and the empress was the earth, symbolized by the phoenix; everywhere in the Forbidden City, and in the gorgeously painted buildings with symbolic pillars and domes in the grounds of the Temple of Heaven, dragons crawl and phoenixes adorn. The union of dragon and phoenix brought perfect happiness to the land. When a dynasty became corrupt, and the emperor no longer served the people, but disturbed the Dao, the harmony of yin and yang, then his power waned, often to the accompaniment of great natural catastrophes, floods, storms, and famines. The founder of the next dynasty would again receive the mandate from heaven, and longevity, good health, and fecundity would return to China. The cycle of power wedded to moral uprightness, followed by weakness wedded to immorality, followed by disaster and then new life again was only natural in the Chinese understanding of their past, and elaborately commented upon. Such was the way, the Dao. Mao Zedong was just one more messenger from heaven in a long rhythmical sequence, a new emperor for a new age. All ancient societies before Greece, above all Egypt, understood the past in similar ways, but in the West, where Thucydides’ description of the Peloponnesian War has carried the day, history is the struggle of men against men, moved by mortal aims toward mortal ends. It is fairly said that there is no God in China, and has never been, only the rhythms of the Dao, which the emperor embodies; hence there never was a struggle between church and state, resolved in modern Europe, and above all in America, in the political theory of the loyal opposition: just because you serve God doesn’t mean you cannot serve the state, although each makes separate claims to moral authority, often conflicting. In China the emperor serves through the mandate of heaven, and to disagree with his views is to disturb the harmony of nature. Hence political opposition in China always functions underground, in secret societies, and discovery brings swift reprisal. We were horrified by the slaughter in Tiananmen Square, because we think there is room for political disagreement. In Drin’s eyes they only got what they asked for.

Peter is trying to catch the attention of the 18-year old daughter of a second woman traveling with us--the mother’s bright blond hair stands out in the sea of dark-haired Chinese, as does her cheerful manner in the group--and at the same time Peter is explaining that anyone who prays from the center of the stone altar in the Temple of Heaven will not be disappointed. The Chinese tourists, who swarm everywhere over the monument, well-dressed with one child per couple, push and joke to get on the center of the stone and, well, make their own prayer.

It won’t hurt to try. Eyeing the gathering clouds in the overwarm July day, I stand there and pray for good weather, for when we go tomorrow visit the Great Wall.

Down below, near the souvenir shops at the base of the mound, someone is flying a mechanical bird. The man winds it up with a little crank at the back, lets go, and the bird flaps its plastic wings and flies around in a high circle over the man’s head. None of us has ever seen anything like it.

3. MONEY FOR THE DEAD

Beijing huddles at the north of a great plain that rises above the Yellow River and backs into mountains over which the Great Wall stretches, far to the west, sometimes in double course, into the Gobi Desert, through which passed the Silk Road. The Great Wall is the most massive construction project ever undertaken on earth, beggaring the Egyptian pyramids: if all the different bits were added together, it could run as long as 30,000 miles. Its purpose was to protect the north China plain from the marauding tribes that lived in Manchuria, in the North, and in Mongolia, in the East. From these two quarters came the only foreign dynasties ever to rule China, that of the mongol Genghis Khan’s grandson Kubilai in the 13th century (the Yuan dynasty), when Marco Polo traveled to fair Cathay-- Cathay is the north China plain--and that of the Manchus, who conquered China in the 17th century. The earlier capital of China was Xian (shee-an), 600 miles southwest of Beijing on the middle reaches of the Yellow River, end of the line for the Silk Road. There the unifier of China, called Qin (chin, hence “China”), precursor to the glorious Han, buried 7,500 lifesize clay warriors discovered in 1974 near his tomb, one of the sensational archaeological discoveries of all time.

Beijing is ideally sited according to geomantic theory, a specialty of the Daoist religion, which is not the same as Daoist philosophy, though theoretically arising from it. A principal object of Daoist religious research was to discover the elixir of eternal life, and Daoist alchemy led to the finding of many remarkable devices, including gunpowder. Daoist geomancy is the placing of a city, or a tomb, or a house in such a way, oriented to the four directions and to water, as to bring abundant good luck. There can be no theory in Chinese thought, ancient or modern, that the world is random, or magic ineffective, because the universe is always in harmony with all its parts which are in perfect corresponsion one with another. Such is the Way, the Dao.

A two-lane macadam road leads from Beijing into the mountains. The clouds are dark and ominous and hunker down on the road, or roll in waves through the steep canyon that soon borders the road. It reminds me of Greece in the winter, but the mountains are much steeper and obviously easy to hide in and hard to patrol and impossible to tame. Perhaps the houses off the road look alpine, but their roofs are of curved Spanish tiles.

After 30 miles we are dropped at a walled enclosure, which protects stairs up the Great Wall, at a place called Badaling. Within the enclosure is a forest of tourists, mostly Chinese, and a festive spirit in spite of the heavy air. We take A HARD PATH to the left and soon are on top of the wall, a road really, between crenelated ramparts. The oldest parts of the wall were built in the Han dynasty (contemporary with the heyday of Rome), but they were made of packed earth. During the Ming (14-17th centuries) the original wall was faced with cut stone, like an endless castle. I had no idea the Great Wall was built in such rough terrain, up and down these wild precipitous hills. It is really an elevated road, through dangerous and wild terrain.

At the top of a nearly 45 degree section you can buy a T-shirt that says I CLIMBED GREAT WALL, but the rain, which began now, gave my wife and me too an excuse to. Beneath us, in a ribbon, stretched the weaving stone snake, wrapped in romantic mist, but soon drowned in torrents. We hurried down the steps and ran to a tourist shelter, but outside it rained still harder. I imagined that this sort of thing happened all the time.

“I guess they didn’t hear my prayer, “I said to Drin when he came into the shelter, thick rain dripping from his yellow poncho. “You should bring the bus up here, Drin. We will wait.”

“No, it is impossible to bring the bus up here!” he said. “The driver just got a ticket and will loose his license already! He never should have let us off where he did! We will have to walk to the bus!”

The ten of us dash into the rain, but it is hard even to see through the downpour. I am worried about the hawk-shaped kite I had just bought at the tourist stand, which I cling to me beneath my L. L Bean poncho, in which I have enormous confidence. But it is useless against the deluge and soon we are drenched.

We have left the circle of shops and are walking along the macadam road, but there is an actual river running down one side of it, and we must traverse an underpass cut beneath the Great Wall. There is no ledge on either side of the underpass and we must wade through the knee-high torrent. As tour escort, I am suddenly actually alarmed and look back for stragglers. The water is strong and anyone could be knocked down and many of the group are elderly and in poor physical condition--I’m unsure of my own footing and the water is moving with greater force.

A car pushed its way into the torrent from the other direction, throwing up high waves. We are not even near the bus--it is a quarter mile down the road still and when we emerge from the underpass it is raining even harder.

“I’ve never got this wet fishing,” says the giant in our crowd, 6’ 5”, and in China a constant sensation. He taught history in a college in Missouri.

I was very unhappy and determined to have a little chat with Drin, when we were next alone.

“I’ve never seen rain like this at the Great Wall,“ Drin said when we all arrived safely back in the bus. We all were steaming from the wet clothing and bodies. Worry drifted across Drin’s brow. “I want you all to know that Mr. Chang, our bus-driver, has lost his license because he stopped to leave us out up by the wall.”

Drin actually seemed badly shaken, both by the citation and by forcing us to trek to the bus through the torrential rains.

Modern China occupies the second-largest space of any nation on earth, after Canada, somewhat larger than the U.S.A. and shaped rather the same as the U.S.A. It comprises three river valleys, the Yellow River in the north, the Yangtze in the south, and the West River in the far south near the border with Vietnam. The three great rivers flow west to east. Most of the 1.2 billion Chinese huddle together in these valleys. The other two thirds of China consists of sparsely inhabited high mountains, blending in the southeast into the Himalayas and in the north slipping into the great and desolate Mongolian plateau. The mountain ranges run east-west in a great band that has effectively isolated China from the rest of Eurasia and the developments that took place there, and the rest of Eurasia from China’s own superior technologies. Only the great Gansu Corridor, more or less the headwaters of the Yellow River, which pierces this band of mountains at a rather northern latitude, enabled communication between China and the high civilizations of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The Silk Road began at Xian in the northern plain of China and ran across the Gobi and into central Asia to Samarkand, Bokhara, Merv, Hamadan, Palmyra, Antioch or Tyre on the Mediterranean, then to Rome. Already the Han dynasty, recognizing the importance of the Gansu Corridor, extended along it the westernmost parts of the Great Wall, where some of its oldest remnants are still found in the Gobi Desert. The Silk Road was not a single road, but a complexity of paths whose dangers the managers of local caravans understood. Marco Polo came to Cathay over this road. So great were the distances, and dangerous the transport, that profit could be realized only on items of extreme value, including silk, a miraculous cloth of unparalleled softness and feel, decorated exquisitely. The Chinese had perfected sericulture by the 14th century B.C. at the latest, the time of King Tutankhamen in Egypt, and the substance was highly coveted by Mediterranean grandees nearly from this date. The secret of breeding the cocoons and how to unravel them stayed inside China until the 6th century A.D., when the emperor Justinian arranged to smuggle silkworm eggs into Constantinople. Silk is made by unrolling the cocoons of a worm that eats only Mulberry leaves. An individual strand, so fine as to be hard to see in a poor light, can be several hundred yards long and has a tensile strength of 65,000 pounds per square inch, stronger than any other natural fiber.

The production of silk cloth is wildly labor intensive, and the spinning wheel was invented by the second century B.C. to facilitate production. Chinese crafts are exquisite and they are all labor intensive--jade carving, rug weaving, embroidery, porcelain, the carving of gourds and the making of kites. Sometimes the labor is put to ludicrous purposes, embroidering in the finest thread a portrait of Princess Di on a sheet of silk--this took two years, the guide informed us--or a laughable reproduction of the Mona Lisa, or little kittie-katties playing with a ball of yarn. Such errata are nothing in the great ocean of Chinese labor, which consumes the life of most Chinese, yet has little economic value; the Westerner cannot easily understand its worthlessness. It is a paradox--labor has little economic but great moral value. Too many people crowd China, but the Chinese prize and admire hard work, including the backbreaking massive labor that built the Great Wall and makes possible all year long, every year, the cultivation of rice, two crops a year in the Yangtze valley and three in the far south. The abundant grain supports ever more people to cultivate still more rice which can feed even more people.

The exorbitant Chinese population, always higher by far than any other people on earth, has for 3,000 years depended on their superior agricultural technology--planting in rows, removing weeds, use of the seed drill--but also on the use of human excrement for fertilizer. Called “night soil,” human excrement is gathered in every village in troughs, one for the women and one for the men, then carried in baskets to the fields. During the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals condemned to the countryside were routinely required to carry and distribute excrement so that they could know what it was really like to be Chinese. All Chinese vegetables are covered in human waste so that no Westerner in his right mind will eat a fresh salad in China, however much you lust for lettuce or something fresh. As the dish of tomatoes went round and round the lazy susan, untouched, the joke wore thin and stale.

Chinese population is based in agricultural technology, but depends too on the structure of family and its values of filial and wifely piety, celebrated and maintained by the ghost cult, China’s only real religion. The spirits of the ancestors live in a name written on a sheet of paper hung over a domestic altar, and they live in the graves where at least once a year the Chinese burn mounds of paper money to translate wealth into the other world; now the dead will be happy, just as the living are happy with their piles of money and mountains of chariots and legions of slaves. At the grave the Chinese also pour out bottles of Mao-Tai, the world’s strongest liquor and another Chinese first, which we had been looking for since the day we landed in Beijing. Mao-Tai, the guide told me, sells for $65 U.S., when you can find it, a very great deal of money. The burning of money and the pouring-out of liquor is old-fashioned sacrifice--give what you value, so that the dead will not take it anyway, or worse. The Chinese ancestors, pleased with the sacrifice, will shower blessings on their descendants, being effective spirits in the other world. Because family is traced through the male, the ghost cult is controlled by males and focussed on the male dead. You must have a son to maintain the domestic altar and to burn money and pour out liquor on your grave, or you will be poor in the land of the ghosts. You must nourish your male heir with all your love and power: thus is maintained the Dao, the harmony of the living and the dead. With the policy of one family, one child, in effect since the mid 1980s, the PRC may have dealt a fatal blow to the ghost cult because now nearly half of Chinese families have no male heirs. The communist revolution lives on in the roughly equal social status accorded to women, once the lowest in the world, and in the restructuring of the Chinese family so that for the first time a whole human generation, belonging to the world’s most numerous people, will be raised as only children, spoiled to death and inexperienced in the forms of radical social compromise that growing up with brothers and sisters requires.

Confucius, a contemporary of Lao zi in the 6th century B.C., taught the virtue of filial piety, with which the ghost-cult was intimately bound, and explained the need for hierarchical social relations in the family and in the state, the family writ large. One must know one’s station and one must respect age and authority, as a son reveres his father. In life you bow your head and in death you burn money on the grave. Our national guide Drin was from Confucius’ home town in Shandong Province, to the east of Peking, and very proud of it, though Confucius’ direct ancestors have fled to Taiwan. In the sixties many cast the I Ching oracle book in the Bollingen edition, asking questions about love and the future and never realizing that in the Commentaries to the hexagrams was encoded the very wisdom of Confucius in the governance of human affairs, which has upheld Chinese civilization through two and one half thousand years. In the Cultural Revolution Mao taught that children should defy their elders, their teachers, and mock and humiliate them, and that one should no longer burn money on graves (but he himself lies in glory in a crystal box in a mammoth mausoleum). Instead of ancestors and mumbo-jumbo he offered gangsterism and anarchy. If the ghost cult goes, what will follow?

In the westernmost city of our visit, Dunhuang, positioned well within the Gansu Corridor, 1300 miles west of Beijing and deep within the Gobi Desert, the local guide, a nervous young woman with acne, suggested that for a modest fee of 100 yuan each (about twelve dollars) we could see the Great Wall.

But we’d already seen the Great Wall, I objected, and our itinerary said we were to spend both morning and afternoon in the Buddhist caves outside the city.

“Yes, but we’ve already seen 20 of the caves, and this is not the Great Wall of Ming dynasty, you know, but Han. This wall is Han.”

The guide meant, Oh Ming--what is that! Only 500 years ago! This is Han, when life was real!

After facing some resistance, and complaint about changing the itinerary, the local guide arranged for us to hire the bus driver--though we had theoretically already retained his services all day. It didn’t seem like much money. He drove maybe 50 kilometers outside of Dunhuang, heading southwest. There were no other cars on the road. Around Dunhuang itself, the desert is high rolling sand dunes with ripples, and nothing growing, but here the desert is windswept dunes and sparse vegetation on a hard flat surface, like the deserts of Arizona; but the earth was golden, not red.

In an hour the bus pulled to the side of the road.

“There it is--Great Wall. Han Dynasty Wall,” the local guide said.

A quarter mile away, across the desert, stood dilapidated sections of something clumpy stuck across the flat desert. We got out and because we had paid our extra 100 yuan walked across the hard sand to see the thing. The wall, such as it was, was terre pisé, not at all like the cut stone of the Ming Wall near Beijing, and there were no ramparts or causeway. The 6’ 5” professor, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan I FISH THEREFORE I AM, got the group on his camcorder as they scrambled up a ledge on the wall.

Beyond the wall, through one of the many breaks, heaped odd mounds of stone. We walked over to them and saw, surmounted on top, odd-shaped frames of tied bamboo, crossed circles and stars. On the south of each mound, a small oven, and beside the oven a large empty earthenware jar, and all around the oven, scattered on the sand, bottles of an opaque glass with a square body.

“These must be tombs,” someone said.

The irreverent teenager who wanted to study pre-med, daughter of the blonde lawyer, suggested that we dig one up and maybe find a skull.

“Are you insane?”

“But I can’t understand these tombs,” I said, “because in Muslim burials they don’t leave bottles lying around, and the desert grave should have no markers. These are mostly Muslims out here, aren’t they?”

I picked up a high stone on top of one mound. Underneath, a stack of rice paper, folded accordion like, with a stamp on each sheet. Perhaps the paper was burned at one edge.

I examined carefully one of the square opaque bottles: MAO TAI, 157% PROOF, I could just make out.

“Sorry, it’s empty,” I apologized.

These were no Musulmen--these were Chinese. Money for the dead! A jar for the disinterred bones, washed in wine and removed to a new permanent location, with groovy vibrations.

Back in Beijing, on the day we were drenched at the Great Wall, Drin called me into his room. We were staying in the International Hotel, which exceeded most international standards for luxury and comfort; only the water pressure was poor and the carpets in the halls strangely stained.

“I’m concerned about the tipping situation,” Drin said to me, leaning back in his chair before the desk.

As tour escort it was my responsibility to collect the daily tips for the busdriver and for the local guides; and, of course, in the end, for Drin himself. I liked Drin for saying what was on his mind and explained my understanding that the driver received 50 cents a day per person, and the local guide 1.50 per person (and the national guide 2.00 a day per person, but I didn’t mention this).

“No, no, no, that is not right, that is completely wrong,” he said, knitting his brows, nearly offended. “That is nothing here in China, really. You should tip the driver $1.00 a day, at least, and the local guide 3.00 a day.”

“But my information is current, I’m sure!”

The communists had outlawed tipping, and you still don’t tip for meals, but the tourist industry was going nowhere because of the surly incompetent service and the CITS had approved a tipping scale to raise performance. You were also to tip the redcap $1.00 per load of luggage.

“Well, if you say so Drin--look: I’ll discuss this with the group.”

It was good to be working with someone who knew what he was doing. We liked the Chinese and didn’t want to give a bad impression, just because someone had given us a bum steer.

4. CONSULT COUNTER. ITEM OF SERVICE

*PROVIDE EXPLAIN FOR ALL STUDENTS

*PROVIDE WHEELCHAIR FOR DEFORMY PERSON

*PROVIDE CHINESE, ENGLISH, AND JAPANESE’S TOURIST EXPLAIN

*PROVIDE LECTURE ON A SPECIAL TOPIC

*PROVIDE THE TOURIST’S EXPLAIN TAPE

*PROVIDE ORAL CONSULT, WRITTEN CONSULT, AND RELATE MATERIAL

*PROVIDE LOUNGE

--sign at Xian, tomb of the terracotta soldiers

Before we got to Dunhuang we stopped in Lanzhou (lang-jo), an industrial city directly on the Yellow River. The guide explained that it was a small town: only three million people lived there!

The guide looked at us with friendly puzzlement. He had studied English at the University of Beijing, then had been assigned to this remote outpost. Mastery over English was surely the secret to success in post-Maoist China--with it, you could go anywhere. Our guide spoke well in a soft voice; everything about his manner was gentle. He smiled constantly.

“Here the Yellow River flows dangerously, yellow with sediment from the loess mountains beyond it, he said. In ancient times, the river could only be crossed in the winter on the ice, or in the summer on a bridge of boats, but now there is an iron bridge--” he pointed.

The smokey industrial city lay lowering on one bank of the broad swift river, and on the other a pagoda commissioned by Genghis Khan, and a Buddhist temple. Tourists didn’t come to Lanzhou because there wasn’t much to see. We were there because we wanted to see some of the ancient Silk Road, and we wanted to see the Yellow River, cradle of China.

At night we walked along the market street behind the hotel, thinking maybe we could find a bar. Pool tables were set in the open air, and young sharks, cigarettes dangling from their lips, made their shots. One tiny shop or restaurant followed another for block after block. These Chinese gawked at us as we threaded our way through the throngs and past the shops, but we saw no bars.

Because airline scheduling forced the delay of an extra day in Lanzhou, and there was nothing to do after the pagoda and the temple, Drin suggested that we rent a bus and travel to the countryside to visit the famous Bingling Buddhist caves up stream from the Liujiaxia Dam, the first ever built across the tumultuous Yellow River, one of the proudest achievements of the People’s Republic.

The roads were jammed with big trucks going both directions as the bus driver worked his way out of the city. The factories and warehouses thinned out. A man was pissing beside the road. There has been a head-on collision between two trucks under an underpass, and the bus has to go in the ditch to get around. Any victims have been removed, and a dozen men squat by the road. Later, the traffic thinned and the bus began to wind upwards through narrow yellow precipitous valleys, sparsely populated, but every snatch of soil near the bottom farmers had cultivated. No birds flew in the air, or perched on the few trees; there seemed to be no wildlife in China.

We stopped before a hotel much too large for its small village, the lobby of the hotel spacious and with marble floors and half-walls--perhaps for personnel attached to the dam. Parked outside stood a shiny new white Beijing Jeep, popular product of a Sino-American “joint venture.”

After lunch the bus drove a mile to beneath the high dam and we entered by a side door into an enormous broad cavernous hall. In the center five giant turbo generators hummed, making it hard to talk.

“These turbo-generators were built between 1969 and 1974,” the guide pointed out.

“The Russians built them?” asked a man in our group, who in his youth was a fan of Moby Grape and Country Joe and the Fish, but now taught Chinese history in a rural high school.

“No, no--entirely of Chinese design and craftsmanship.”

We were amazed that the Chinese could build anything like that, and skeptical as we followed the guide through a door, down green steel steps, through echoing tunnels all in concrete, green iron rails, until we came to a room deep underground, and down the center ran colossal glass insulators from which were suspended stupendous wires.

“This single dam produces more electricity than was produced in all of China before 1949,” the local guide said, “thanks to the leadership of Chairman Mao.”

“Oh, that was part of the Great Leap Backward?” I asked, actually unconscious of my mistake.

The guide smiled slyly.

“The Great Leap Forward, you mean. No, that was in 1959.”

“When all the trees in China were cut down to refine steel in peoples’ back yards? When Mao ordered the destruction of all the grass and flowers in China?”

“The grass and flowers--that was the Cultural Revolution,” the guide again smiled.

We traced our steps back to the generator room. For some reason I had not noticed when we came in that the entire far end of the vast high room was covered by a canvas 80 feet long and 30 feet high showing Chairman Mao, heroically posturing on a rocky crag, overlooking distant rocky mountains. The remarkable painting was not in the Chinese style at all, where pointed mountains surge to the top of the painting and draw the viewer within, but in the Soviet realist style, in an unforgiving scientific perspective. Mao smiled. He wore a gray suit and overcoat that blew around his legs and in his right hand he held a burning cigarette, the symbol of prosperity.

“Can’t you see it--CAMEL, just over his head,” cracked the blonde tax lawyer from Chicago with the exuberant teenage daughter.

“Oh no--we Chinese prefer Marlboro,” the guide corrected and sighed. In Beijing we had seen signs WELCOME TO MARLBORO COUNTRY--BE A MARLBORO MAN! and a shot of Montana.

Suddenly I wanted a cigarette, though I had quit ten years ago.

“Do you have any Marlboros, by chance?”

“I’m sorry I do not smoke. It is a very serious problem in China. Thirty percent of Chinese smoke, but it is very injurious to the health.”

“We cannot see the Buddhist caves,” the local guide apologized as we came back into the sunshine, “for I’ve just learned that the water in the reservoir behind the dam is too low for boats to travel on it. And there is no other way to get there. I am very sorry.”

“Then what are we doing here?” spoke for the first time the white-haired 65 year old man from Vermont, who carried far too much girth for one his age.

“Then we must see a real school with real children, here in the countryside!” exclaimed the elderly Calvinist emigre from L.A., who taught English as a Second Language at a regional city college. Her graybearded, genteel husband designed art books for museums in southern California and always stood at her side, slightly back.

A few miles from the dam the bus stopped outside a mud-enclosure, where Drin and the guide disappeared, then soon returned to lead us down a dirt path bordered by ditches and high mud-brick walls. We entered the school grounds beneath an iron gate. The children quickly gathered in the courtyard and stared in dumbfounded awe. The giant was a great hit. The elementary school boys and girls were neatly dressed in sports jackets and trousers but much mended and roughly clean, and some girls wore skirts. The principal emerged, his jacket in worse repair than the children’s, a collarless shirt and Chinese cap, profoundly embarrassed.

We filed into the back of the English class, the floor pounded earth. Forty children before wooden desks, the young teacher attractive in an odd green-yellow jump suit with zippers. Her English was probably not very good and twenty American maniacs were standing at the back of her class!

“Ox,” she cried out, and the children said something Chinese.

“Door,” but she said “dur,” and they cried out. something.

“Pu Hu, please answer!” she commanded. “Road! Then please sit down!”

We were snapping pictures left and right. The teacher blushed a crimson red, the only time we ever saw anyone blush in China.

The principal led us to his quarters, where he and his teachers lived. We piled into an outer room, too small for everyone, but some sat on opposing ragged couches, a wooden box between. The floor was packed earth and mud bricks were stacked in a corner beside a crude armoire.

Several people came in whom we did not recognize, then the principal, beaming, spreading out in his rough hand a half-dozen cigarettes. Everyone in our group laughed at the same time, and principal, crushed like a flower in ice, pulled back his hand and retired to an inner room. It didn’t seem likely we were going to explain the joke to him, and how moral indignation had wiped out respectable smoking in the USA, or that even bad breeding can have its thin excuse.

I followed the principal into the inner chamber. Against the narrow end, an iron bed, a wash-basin in the wall, a beat overstuffed chair where I sat. The principal spoke no English and couldn’t understand that now I did want a cigarette, while a second ago we had all laughed at him for offering. Probably I was feeling sorry for him.

Other Chinese came in, and the teenager who wanted to study medicine who sat on a chair beside the door. A low dirty window looked onto the courtyard where the children played. I lit the cigarette and the principal lit one too, and we both had a good laugh while the teenager took our picture.

In came light green tea in chipped mugs, but they had to go to all the teachers’ houses to find enough mugs and glass jars.

“Now we want to see a real village!” declared the Swiss woman from the back of the bus, who very positive in her views.

The bus stopped a mile up the road and we went through mud walls down a yellow lane. At the end, a dog barked furiously, chained behind a barred gate.

Down the lane, a small, delicious-looking piglet snarfed in the soil and a chicken ran ahead and soon both were picking in a garbage pit at the end of the lane. But there wasn’t much garbage, mostly mud and rinds.

Opposite the pit, a man smiled and shook our hands, his teeth ruined, in advanced decay, probably the grandfather. He wore the old-fashioned suit and cap. Inside the mud-walled court, we nodded to Chinese smoking cigarettes on the other side of the court, then entered the house, a single small rectangular room, one end occupied by a built-in bed, really a kang, a hollow ceramic structure constructed with a passage leading outside the house to a wood-fired oven, the only warmth during the bitter long winters. The whole family would live on it.

No possessions except a small refrigerator and, under what seemed a tea-cozy, a small TV set. No water or sink. Over the refrigerator, the picture of a handsome young communist warrior, cap with red star and brown suit, no doubt taken from a magazine.

“Who’s that?” I asked about the handsome man.

“That’s Chairman Mao!”, said Drin, amused that I did not recognize him.

“He looks so young.”

“This house is made of mud but it has electricity,” observed the high school history teacher, probably a leftist in his youth.

“Is this a rich village?” the high-school teacher asked.

“Not rich, not poor, but ordinary,” said the weak-handed local guide. “Eighty percent of Chinese live like this, twenty percent in cities.”

The owner was happy for us to take pictures, for he was proud of his wealth, and he led us across the courtyard to another house at right angles to his own. His son lived there, with his new wife.

The house was decorated with crepe streamers strung from the ceiling and attaching to the posters of the bed, which nearly filled the room. On one wall, a picture of, perhaps, an island in the Bahamas. Over the bed, in twisted crepe, the Chinese characters for Good Luck, Long Life, Fecundity. Clipped to the end of the iron bedstand, an ashtray filled with butts. It was a good way to keep a tidy house.

5. DESIRE FOR THE WORLD

My wife and I had the idea that there wouldn’t be much to buy in China, because we’d seen plenty of Chinese kitsch in windows in San Francisco’s Chinatown and places like that, and nothing depressed me more than the scrolls of mountains and fish and egrets that decorated the walls of Chinese restaurants everywhere. Dull, repetitive, unimaginative, overwrought, baroque--we hated Chinese art. But like all our previsions of China, everything turned out to be wrong. In fact there was no end of things to buy, and they were all going very cheap, and they were unique and gorgeous.

Fortunately my own interests were thoroughly in antiques, which narrowed the field. The guide books said you can buy antiques in China, but you need a clay seal to get through customs. This stipulation too turned out to be untrue--we had been misled.

The first antiques I saw were in a government shop in the International Hotel in Beijing. Truly lovely porcelain in blue and white large sold for 900 yuan, or 100 dollars, which seemed reasonable by any accounting, though I didn’t know the first thing about porcelain. Of course the problem was carrying the thing around, and the trip was only beginning. So I settled on a cast bronze arrow head, which the clerk said was from the Chin Dynasty, 221-206 B.C., when China was first unified, whose emperor buried the 7,500 terracotta soldiers at Xian (and buried alive 650 scholars for their traditional views, and burned all the books in China, anxious to replace rule by custom with rule by law; Mao burned all the books in China too, for similar reasons). The prices at the shop seemed firm--more fool I!--and of course everyone knows you don’t bargain with a credit card in your hand. I paid $85 for the Chin arrow head, and $70 dollars for an interesting opium pipe, whose bowl was embossed in incised silver, a short bamboo stem and a little wooden carrying box for the opium suspended from the stem. The romance of opium-smoking is very great and the pipe was obviously old and had been used a lot and the clerk said “Qing,” that is 100-400 years old, like even from the Opium War of 1840 when the British fought for the right to provide addictive drugs to the Chinese people.

There was an antique shop in the hotel in Lanzhou too, which also sold bottled water and the ubiquitous stone “chops,” cylindrical or columnar stone stamps with any number of clever decorative carvings at the top, the bottom to be carved to order. You could get your name in English and Chinese too. A sign read CARVING A SEAL IN TWO MITS was displayed on the counter. Such stamps are an important part of Chinese life, for every paper, however insignificant, must bear the seal, the chop, of its originator. This ancient practice has made it easier to date Chinese antiques because paper things and ceramics commonly bore the Emperor’s chop (though often faked in later times). The movie The Last Emperor begins with a man inking in red an enormous stone chop and affixing it to some official document, while the empress dowager lies dying.

In the glass case in the antique shop in Lanzhou, next to the chops, sat a pile of plates, including one with a capricious carp in red and blue, fitted into the curve of the plate. It didn’t look Chinese, which made it more attractive in my eyes, and I was sure I had seen the design in art books. The plate was 2400 yuan, or 28 dollars, but I didn’t really want to pack the plate with me for the rest of the trip.

“Then how about 1200 yuan?” the clerk suggested. She was so friendly--all the Chinese were friendly, sweet and comely and friendly.

“1200? How about 900?”

“Oh, let me go see.”

The clerk went away and came back to explain that her manager said I could have the plate for 1000 yuan, about 12 dollars.

“How old is it?”

“Qing dynasty--200 years old.”

Later, when I got to Dunhuang in the Gobi desert, I regretted not having bought the plate for 900 yuan, because I could probably have preserved it in a special box without breaking it and now I feared I would never see anything like it again. We had flown to Dunhuang not to see the Han portion of the Great Wall, but the Buddhist caves just outside town, about 600 of them carved in the limestone rock, from the 6th century A.D., the greatest concentration of Buddhist art in China and one of the greatest in the world. I had never even heard of these caves before coming to China, but I had studied Buddhism in my youth and wanted to give members of the tour some background on Buddhism before we visited the caves on the next day. I asked Drin to arrange a lecture room; he reported that we were in luck: incredibly, an American woman, who had just opened a cafe in this remote small town in central Asia, would enjoy hosting some other Americans.

Outside the airport, in the parking lot, an enormous sign in English and Chinese read MAO TAI IN SOUTH, HUANG TAI IN NORTH, so maybe we could get a real drink at the cafe, I wondered.

That night we walked the short distance from the hotel to The Manhattan Cafe. Dunhuang was a one-street town and the Manhattan Cafe smack in the center, across from rows of shops lit up, and on the sidewalk hundreds of tables set up with things to sell. This, Drin explained, was “the night market.”

“Is that anything like night soil?” the teenager asked.

We filed into the cafe which to our astonishment was decorated with reproductions of paintings by modern American Indian artists, Lee Teter’s Still Standing, an eighteenth century Delaware Indian reaching out to the burnt stump of an American Chestnut tree, the forest that was his home (before the white man took it all away); and prints of Shelley Niro, a Mohawk photographer; and a couple of prints by Edward Curtis for traditional flavor.

A beechwood bar ran along one wall, shiny and clean and American, and then a wooden railing separating the bar from a host of little cafe tables like you find in the states, like on the waterfront in Brooklyn.

We sat down two to a table, chattering away, and in came the waiters shrieking about something and distributed menus all around, but there was no Huang Tai on them or Mao Tai either, only ice-cream sundaes and hamburgers and cherry cokes.

The owner, the young American woman, came over and introduced herself though it was hard to hear a word she said, maybe 30 years old and from Long Island it turned out. I didn’t want to ask how she had gotten here, but she told me it was all her husband’s idea, that he had phoned her in Manhattan from Beijing and said that he had just bought a cafe in Dunhuang.

“How has it been?”

“Last winter was horrible. There’s no way to imagine. It’s fantastically cold here, and the winter lasts five months. There’s no heating in the houses except for the bed, which has an oven under it.”

“A kang, eh?”

“What?”

I wondered who came in here, except for tourists, of which there could not be many.

“Is that your mother?” I asked about the middle-aged woman I espied sitting at a far table and smoking a cigarette. The woman smiled my way. Probably rich, if she lived in Long Island. And now her daughter was living in Dunhuang!

“She’s over for a few weeks, to visit,” the owner explained.

“Hey, I hope you don’t mind--I wanted to sort of, well, give a little talk, about the Buddhists and stuff.”

“Oh, you going to see the caves? Of course--no problem.”

After a cherry coke, I stood up and tried to get the attention of the crowd, but the six or seven waiters at the bar were still shouting at each other for some reason, and the Midwestern divorce lawyer was shouting volubly to her roommate, a single very nice and apparently unhappy woman, way overweight, an auditor for the Illinois state income tax.

“Sakyamuni,” I began, “was a prince in a petty kingdom in what today is Nepal.”

The divorce lawyer ignored me and spoke even louder.

“When he learned that men suffered outside the walls of his father’s house, he went into the world to discover the secret of suffering, and how to avoid it. He learned that suffering came from desire for the world, but because the world was not real, such desire could only bring sorrow. The solution was simple: renounce the world and transcend suffering in direct knowledge of pure being. There, in pure being, the self, source of desire and suffering, will dissolve. Knowledge of pure being, and the dissolution it brings, is obtained by meditation and by abstinence from sex and liquor.”

I noticed that the New Yorker matron in the back corner was paying more attention than anyone in the group .

“Here in Dunhuang, the most important center on the ancient Silk Road, Buddhist priests came from India, bringing with them the good news of Sakyamuni, who at the end of his life entered Nirvana and became the Buddha, which means ‘the one who knows.’

“Buddhist teachings had a profound influence on Chinese thought, perhaps because they offered a place for the individual, the man who has on his own merit decided to take control of his destiny as a sentient being. Of course in Confucian and Taoist China the individual exists solely to fill a place in the social order--such is his real purpose. So Buddhism offered something that was missing, and at the same time easily coalesced with traditional Chinese indiffer