Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [139]
Meanwhile, we found our restaurant and began to graze through the buffet line.
“This is so good. Isn’t Chinese cuisine marvelous?” commented Janet, a kindly woman from Albuquerque.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s good.”
Actually, it was awful. It was the kind of food you’d find at the Lucky Dragon lunchtime buffet in Boise, Idaho. Reflecting on this, I concluded that I had also become a food snoot, the second most insufferable of persons.
At our table, we discussed leather goods. Normally, leather goods do not figure very prominently in my conversations, but Janet was a professional purveyor of leather goods and she’d come to China to do business-type endeavors with her manufacturers.
“About eighty percent of the manufacturing is done in China now,” she noted. More than ever, it seemed as if eighty percent of everything was manufactured in China. “So what are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m just kind of wandering around,” I said.
“And where have you wandered?”
I told her, and as I mentioned taking the train from Lhasa to Lanzhou, the other tablemates interjected.
“You took the train from Tibet!”
I had encountered English train buffs.
“What kind of engine was it?” asked an older man with a white mustache. “Diesel? Electric?”
I didn’t know. If he wanted information on the condition of the train’s squat toilets, I could have offered a few observations. But locomotive engines? No. I was busy reading about nefarious doings in the Vatican. If he wanted to know what it’s like to listen to “Billie Jean” at 15,000 feet as the train rumbled past a Tibetan nomad’s tent, I could have offered some insight. Or what it’s like to lie in the darkness inside a small compartment next to the noisiest man in China. Or the odd sensation of finding yourself in the most remote, inhospitable corner of Earth as you guzzle a can of Budweiser, a beer that you’re calling breakfast. These are things I could have helped him with, not train engines. Still, I tried to be helpful.
“Um…” I said. “I think it was electric.”
“Really. Are you sure? If it was electric, they’d need to construct a mainframe with about fifteen gigawatts of torque. Wouldn’t you say, Lester?”
“Provided, of course, they used an A-frame design. Did you happen to look?”
“Er…perhaps it was a diesel.”
“Yes. Quite likely. Now, I heard they blasted a tunnel through an ice mountain to build that railway. Did you see it?”
I don’t know. I was busy rummaging around trying to find the Imodium.
“Well, I slept through the highest parts of the journey,” I explained. Sensing the inadequacy of my answer, I hastened to explain. “It was dark. You know, nighttime. But I have a distinct memory of being awoken by a strange noise. We were in a tunnel. And the noise? It was different than a regular old train tunnel. It didn’t go clickety-clack. There was something otherworldly about it. Something…icy.”
“Marvelous, marvelous.”
Finally, it was time to see the warriors. We’d been told that we might have the opportunity to meet the farmer who’d found them one day in 1974 as he dug for a water well. He’d be in the visitors’ center signing books. Of course, it’s not always the same farmer who greets visitors, but China aims to please, and if visitors wanted to meet the farmer who’d found the Terracotta Warriors, then they’d meet the farmer who’d found the Terracotta Warriors.
The sight of this farmer’s findings is essentially an ancient mausoleum. It is near the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ruled during the Qin Dynasty. The emperor had found ruling the known world such an agreeable experience that he set off to rule the unknown world as well. And thus the Terracotta Warriors. Hundreds of thousands of workers had labored for years to give the emperor a life-size fighting force of thousands of stone statues to help him conquer that