Shadow of the Silk Road Read online

  But that afternoon a storekeeper offered me another Little Red Book, almost forty years old. It was stained with oil, and inscribed with its owner’s name, Yang Shaomin. Then an old unease came over me. The terror of the Cultural Revolution–its unknown millions persecuted, its hallmark mental cruelty–had never quite left me. Eighteen years ago I had encountered its human wreckage everywhere. I fingered the book tentatively, almost with reverence. It seemed to breathe a corrupt mana. I remembered photographs of Mao Zedong haranguing the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, and the ocean of Red Books lifted to worship him. Had this been one of them? It felt rough and small in my hands. In the back it enclosed a yellowed newspaper clipping of Mao’s thoughts. And as I fingered its paper, that nightmare became real again, and I wondered what had happened to Yang Shaomin, and what he had done.

  Then I was back in the daylit street. It was snarled with traffic, and children were coming out of school. Years before, they would have followed their teacher in a dutiful crocodile, the infants strung together by a long cord. Now they jostled and shouted and ran amok. Their satchels were inscribed ‘Happy Journey’ and ‘No. 1 Cool Dog’. I felt foolishly comforted. In the local cinema a Shanghai romance called Why me, Sweetie? was playing alongside Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

  Now I was walking in fascinated confusion. My eyes kept alighting on those vaguely disturbing advertisements featuring Europeanised models. Their eyes were unnaturally rounded, the epicanthic folds surgically cut, their noses subtly arched or thinned by photographic lighting, and the bud-like mouths were stretched in a Western smile.

  ‘We are not like our parents. We have no time and no security. You say we walk differently from the old, well that is why. It’s something nervous.’

  He seemed to wince across the restaurant table: a young man, barely twenty-three, with a pale, heart-shaped face. ‘Our parents’ world was safer: state pensions, assured jobs and housing. And they want to go on as before, cautiously, preserving. But my generation–our world depends on us.’

  He looked at once anxious and excited. This was the sea-change that was transforming China. All at once the future had grown more potent than the past. Change was rendering things obsolete. You could see this where high-rise apartment blocks barged into the old suburbs, bulldozing the clustered generations of the communal courtyard and banking up tiers of nuclear families in their place. Whole regions of the city had become unrecognisable, the man said. And of course it was not merely buildings that were being exchanged, it was the values they fostered.

  ‘I spent my childhood in those old hutong courtyards. Relationships were warmer then.’ His mouth puckered, as if hunting a lost taste. I wondered if he were not simply regretting being adult. ‘Now we live on the fourteenth floor of a skyscraper, and whenever we go out we lock an iron door behind us.’

  He was the awkward by-product of this changed world. He loved animals and green spaces–in childhood he had longed hopelessly for a dog–and was studying ecology with a tinge of despair at his country’s ruthlessness. He was an only child. ‘Most of my friends are outcomes of the One Child policy, state birth control. They call us “little emperors”. Parents and relatives all dote on these single children. But I don’t think it shapes us for reality. I read the other day of a ten-year-old boy who died drowning, trying to save his friend. He couldn’t swim at all. Everybody said: how brave! But I thought: that’s a typical little emperor. Stupid. He imagined he could do anything.’ His chopsticks dithered over chilli-flavoured chicken. He had eaten almost nothing. ‘There’s a kind of wisdom we’re not taught,’ he said. ‘And every family is full of silences.’

  With vague wonder I realised that to him the terrors of the Cultural Revolution were pure history. Mao Zedong had died years before he was born: a symbol, not a man. He said: ‘My parents never talk of that time. I think they don’t want to remember. So I’ll never know what they did. They were Red Guards, of course, and I heard that my father smashed up old things. He may even have killed a man. But I’ll never know.’

  He suddenly laughed. ‘The Cultural Revolution is a joke to my friends. When we take group snapshots we sing silly Mao hymns. That’s what they did in those days. They sang hymns before taking a photo. And if you wanted to buy a camera, the shopkeeper might not sell until you’d chanted two or three Mao hymns…’

  I said: ‘Can you imagine you and your friends at that time? What you’d have done?’ An old disquiet was surfacing.

  ‘No. I really can’t imagine this…or, well…no, I can’t…The truth is my whole generation is sick of politics. The government’s rotten. People just join the Party to get on. We want change, but nobody’s going to die for it.’

  I thought of the Tiananmen Square massacre. However incoherently, its victims had died for change. But even as I asked him, I realised he had been nine years old at the time.

  He said: ‘My father was working in Beijing then, and I was at primary school. I remember the noise and the soldiers, and later we saw blood in the streets everywhere. Soon afterwards I crossed that square with my mother, and I realised something terrible had happened. But that was all, and she said nothing. And now we don’t think about it much, or talk about that.’

  In his alert, restless eyes, I imagined misgiving. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I think they were brave.’

  For a while he picked delicately at the chicken in front of him, sometimes dabbing the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. Then he said with the sudden, paradoxical spareness of his people: ‘I’m afraid of death. And loneliness. When I close my eyes, I go cold. I think: death is like this. Blackness, where there’s no feel or taste. Many young people are afraid of it, I think. Old people can look back on rich lives, perhaps, and are not afraid…’

  I thought: everything was always assured to them.

  ‘…But we young people are unfulfilled, and afraid. Some of my friends go to the Buddhist temple, but only because they want something. I don’t believe in that. For us, after death, there’s nothing.’

  The valleys of the Wei and Yellow rivers, where Xian stands, were China’s ancient heartland. To the north the plateaux of windborn loam mount towards Inner Mongolia; to the south the hills, suddenly humid, are terraced for rice and tea. It was in the mild basin between, now spread with wheat and cotton, that the tyrant-emperor Qin Shi Huangdi proclaimed the first capital of a unified China in 221 BC, and was buried in a tomb guarded by massed echelons of terracotta warriors which came to light more than two thousand years afterwards. In his reign the fiefdoms of the past were brutally homogenised: their script, their laws, even their history. He knit together the Great Wall with the labour of a million conscripts and peasants, who died of exhaustion and were immured in it like landfill. The annals of all dynasties but the emperor’s were put to the flames, and dissenting scholars buried alive. Nothing survived that was not his. So a recognisable country came into being: a land in which diversity was morally offensive.

  The terracotta army still marches where it was found, through a subterranean vault fifteen miles east of Xian. Fear of the SARS virus, which was spreading north that April, had brought tourism to a standstill, and I found myself almost alone in the cold-lit tunnel. No photograph prepares you for these eerie legions. They move through the earth in their hundreds, eleven columns deep. Once brilliant in vermilion and green, shiny with black armour and pink skin, they have faded to spectral beige. Their robes fall thick and loose over their concave chests, and their hair is knotted in tight buns or bunched behind winged headdresses. Studded plate-armour overlaps their shoulders. But instead of the stone-hearted war engine a despot might demand, they wait in a disparate regiment of watchful and unequal men. Almost no two are alike. There are veterans with wide moustaches and sloping stomachs, thin recruits and scholarly-looking campaigners sporting little chips of beard. In the wan light their expressions are those of expectation, even alarm, as if they await the enemy charge.

  But everything wooden–all their
arms–has disintegrated. The fists of the spearmen are closed delicately around nothing. Arrows and lances, halberds and crossbows have left behind only splinters of bronze. Horses stand unharnessed to chariots which have gone, while their drivers’ hands extend to grasp thin air.

  Circling the dim gangway above them, you imagine this massed and intricate armament, with its mailed elite infantry and expendable conscripts, to be the upsurge of a self-sufficient realm: the country China claimed to be. But already I was dreaming of the road to the west, and it filled my head with a complex ebb and flow. Behind the terracotta horses the earth was printed with the rings of vanished wheels, for at the heart of the imperial armies rolled the leather-bound war chariots, manned by aristocratic archers and armoured spearmen. Yet the chariot was not a Chinese invention. For two thousand years before 221 BC these fleet cars had criss-crossed the steppes of Mesopotamia and southern Russia, and they reached China along the Silk Road a thousand years after their origin. The bronze metallurgy which shaped those vanished weapons perhaps originated in the steppelands too, and all the ancestors of those horses–alert and chariotless in the museum dust–had come along tracks from the west.

  Fewer than seven hundred figures have been restored out of an estimated six thousand. Many lie unexcavated under the roofs which crashed in at the end of the Qin dynasty in 206 BC: headless torsos and snapped limbs submerged in a mire of coagulated dust. In another pit an estimated nine hundred soldiers and ninety chariots lie buried under a debris of sagged timbers, where platoons of bowmen kneel to arms. Their bent fingers cradle weapons which have perished, but in the hardened loam nearby, the perfect outline of a long-rotted crossbow startles thoughts of medieval Europe. A Chinese invention from the fourth century BC, it travelled the Silk Road west, arriving in time to arm the phalanxes of Norman and Capetian kings, and to meet its nemesis from the English longbow at Crécy.

  These exchanges swarm with question marks. Chinese inventions which percolated along the ancient road–printing and gunpowder, lock-gates and drive-belts, the mechanical clock, the spinning-wheel and equine harness that transformed agriculture–flourished behind the Great Wall for centuries before emerging phoenix-like in the West. And the knowledge of other prodigies–iron-chain suspension bridges, deep-drilling techniques (the Chinese were boring for brine and gas at two thousand feet in the second century BC)–took over a thousand years to travel.

  But the notion of China as a sealed empire was breaking apart around me. Reassembled from the grave-pits, a terracotta messenger stood ready with his horse behind him. His harness and saddle were in place, but there was not yet a stirrup. The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brain-child as early as the fourth century AD, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily armoured and expensively mounted knight. To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder. The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.

  These imaginings followed me at will through the dim vaults of the Qin emperor. He himself lies a mile away beneath a 290-foot mound, where years before I had wandered alone. Now the Chinese tourist board had discovered it. A flight of steps beetled to the summit among firs and marigolds. Souvenir sellers thronged to meet me at the top, and a fancy-dress Qin dynasty band–drums, horns, squealing pipes–marched in from time to time to shatter the quiet.

  But beneath my feet the terrible emperor still lay entombed–if contemporary chronicles are accurate–in a vast and intricate facsimile of his empire, threaded by quicksilver rivers, set in motion by invisible machinery, with his executed wives beside him. Seven hundred thousand workmen, it is said, laboured on this mausoleum through the last years of his reign, and on its completion those who knew too much were immured inside by the descent of stone gates. Within the tomb-chamber, among mountains carved from copper and cities in precious stone, he rides in a boat-shaped coffin on a mercury river, which flows to a mercury sea beneath a night sky printed with pearl stars.

  So in death he contrived a self-contained mirror-kingdom, perfect control. Its gemstone cities were laid out for eternity, echoing the stasis of the heavens. The internal gates and passageways, raked secretly by primed crossbows, sealed the borders of his posthumous state. He had walled off the past and the future. His ancestry, like the Yellow Emperor’s, was probably barbarian; yet China was named after him. The seal-fat lamps which lit his tomb were supposed to last for ever.

  Huang found me outside my hotel, and had haunted it ever since. I wondered what he wanted. He spoke a breathy English, split by bursts of Mandarin, and above his broad peasant face his hair sprouted so low that it almost met his eyebrows. He invited me home to meet his family, but his family were not there. He was racked by some intense, festering energy.

  In his three-room flat, seated on rock-hard upholstery, he unfolded the old ambition of his people with a bright fixation.

  ‘I don’t want my life to stay level. I’m dreaming a big dream. I want my life to go like this! And this!’ His hand lifted in a jagged stairway. ‘I want to plant a flag on each step! Up, up from nothing, until I die.’

  His staccato voice rang through the apartment, where his absent womenfolk had left themselves behind in a whiff of cooking oil and some scattered dolls. ‘My father used to tell me that there was an order to things: first education…then work, then family, then friends. But first, education! You are like a tree, he said. Drinking, smoking, gambling are branches to be cut off. Cut them off, and you grow high.’ He stood up proudly, but he was barely five and a half feet.

  ‘We have many dangers now. Our society has changed very fast. We are addicts to gambling. Old people just lose a few kwai, and it doesn’t matter. But young people are ruined. And the massage parlours are everywhere, calling themselves beauty salons. They’re just brothels.’ On his rustic face a fastidious wince appeared, then faded. ‘It’s the modern West, it’s because of the fast change.’

  ‘Yes,’ I mumbled, feeling responsible. A generation ago all this had been unimaginable. Now, every night, my hotel telephone rang with a chirruping woman’s voice offering amo, massage.

  ‘My father warned me against these things. He noticed my friends. If they were dutiful to their parents, he approved. If not, they were like wolves, he said, bad for the spirit, and I should leave them. They will turn your heart sick, he said.’

  His father obsessed him. The old man had been persecuted in the Cultural Revolution for owning books. ‘He was paraded in a dunce’s hat, with his arms wrenched out of their sockets.’ Huang let out a tremor of strained Chinese laughter. ‘But now he’s gone home. He’s retired to the village of his childhood.’

  ‘The village that persecuted him?’

  ‘Yes. But to trees now, and flowing water, and a newspaper.’

  But he had left behind this son tormented by a zeal for self-improvement. In a belated Maoist spirit Huang had recently volunteered to help farmers, harvesting vegetables into a basket strapped to his back. ‘Useless!’ He tossed some invisible cabbages over his shoulder. ‘Within two days I was like a cripple.’ He was wincing. ‘Soon afterwards my father asked me to join a charity. There are poor people in the mountains here, people who have nothing. So I go with my wife and daughter into the mountains–nine hours, up and down, to a part we’d seen on television–and we find a poor village and a man with four children, and I talk with him, and say don’t be afraid. He has no money, no school for his sons. Just some wheat. So I give money for his oldest child to go to school for the first year. This is big education for me, for my wife and daughter. I ask my daughter to talk with the man’s children, and she bursts into tears because they are so poor…’

  His face had simplified into theatrical fervour. Only afterwards did I wonder if his tale were true, or if he had merely witnessed i
t on television and longed in fantasy to fulfil his father’s ideal.

  ‘I don’t know what the government can do about the peasants,’ he said. ‘I’m not interested in politics. I don’t want to touch them.’ He swept away a whole troubling world with his hand. ‘I’m an accountant with the municipality. I just work with a computer. But I’m thirty-six already, and I must change my life. I want to dream a big dream and go abroad.’ His face split into a tense, euphoric smile which now never left it. ‘A year ago I helped a Brazilian tourist. He’s a lawyer. He is my only foreign friend–and now you.’ I felt sudden misgiving, the start of a delicate interplay of debt and request. But he said: ‘I want to go to Brazil. During the day there I’ll work at anything, but in the evening I’ll give Chinese lessons. Free, no charge! Money is important, of course, but later. First, friends. Friends will be more important for my life.’ It was a twisted version of his father’s advice. ‘Maybe after a year I’ll have five people studying Chinese–all new friends. Here!…here!…and here!’ He planted them in space, like aerial seeds. ‘Soon maybe one of the friends will tell me: Oh, Mr Huang, I have good news–my father or my uncle works in a company that needs…’