Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [138]
Our first stop would be the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Built during the Tang Dynasty, it was seven stories tall, and was named the Big Wild Goose Pagoda because one day, right in this very spot, some monks got hungry, whereupon a big wild goose fell out of the sky. This seemed auspicious, demonstrative of a benevolent deity, and so they built a pagoda to commemorate this big wild goose that fell from the heavens. But by now I’d been in China for months and had seen and experienced approximately 742 pagodas. And so I had pagoda fatigue. I climbed it for the exercise and at the top peeked out of the window to see a couple waltzing below. I couldn’t see anything else, of course, because this was China and China lives in a cloud of smog.
Back down at the base, some tour group members, who had found the Big Goose Pagoda about as enthralling as I did, were asking our young and friendly guide Polly about Mao and his legacy.
“I think he was mostly good except when he got old,” she said. “I don’t think he was right in the head. There was the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976,” she went on. “My parents suffered. They were sent to the countryside. My mother could not go to school beyond primary school.”
And yet, as with so many of the Chinese people I had encountered, Mao was still mostly good in her world. This remained both fascinating and perplexing to me. He was a bad, bad man, Chairman Mao, and yet he was still regarded as mostly a good man among the people who had to endure his colossal badness. It’s a complicated country, China, full of complicated people.
We hopped back on the bus and continued with our tour. I’d hoped that we’d go directly to the Terracotta Warriors, the thousands of fearsome stone statues that Emperor Qin Shi Huang had constructed in the third century B.C. so that he’d have an army to rule the underworld. The Chinese refer to the warriors as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Clearly, this was something to see. It was grand. It was important. It was the Eighth Wonder of the World! So we should get going. Move on. Enough with the dawdling.
So we went to the souvenir factory.
See how the ancients made the Terracotta Warriors, said the sign as we hopped off the bus. It should have read, See how the moderns make cheap trinkets to sell to tourists. Here you could buy little warriors, big warriors, warriors on chariots, archer warriors, really, any kind of warrior. It was a warrior mill. But I was not yet so jaded as to resist bargaining for a box of mini warriors for my kids.
“Two hundred yuan,” said the saleswoman.
“How about thirty kuai,” I offered.
We settled at 160, not a strong performance on my part. I’d been schooled by this saleswoman, and I trudged back to the bus. Soon we went onward, not to the Terracotta Warriors but to the Huaqing Hot Springs, where we could see where Emperor Xuenzong cavorted with his favorite concubine during the Tang Dynasty. All right, I thought as I wandered the grounds. I’m bored senseless. So, I thought, perhaps I had indeed become that most insufferable of persons, a travel snoot. Onward to lunch, past the Eight Wonders of the World theme park, where along with the seven original wonders of the world the park had included replicas of the Terracotta Warriors. The Chinese will no