Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [140]
And I could see why he might miss them. The Terracotta Warriors are extraordinary, an entire army of archers and cavalry, generals and foot soldiers, horses and chariots, and each statue is unique. True, Emperor Qin Shi Huang was the Henry Ford of his time, constructing assembly lines where workers fashioned the torso and limbs of each warrior. But every face is individualized, and to gaze upon these statues is to glare into the past. And there were thousands of them. More than 8,000 had been found thus far, but many more are believed to remain unearthed. More than 700,000 workers were needed to construct the warriors and the enormous mausoleum, and it took them nearly forty years to finish.
The warriors are contained in three pits. Pit one was the first to be excavated, and many statues had been reconstructed and repositioned to provide a semblance of what they must have looked like when they’d first been sent forth to the Other Side. The remaining statues that had been unearthed were still broken and severed, victim of a warlord’s looting just five years after they’d been interned. Polly informed us that they weren’t excavating any further until the technology was there to preserve what they’d found. The statues had been brightly painted when they were first unearthed, but the colorful artistry had disappeared due to sunlight and pollution. Nevertheless, they are an astounding sight. Earlier, I’d read an account of a tourist who had disguised himself as a Terracotta Warrior and who had hidden among these statues, standing rigidly at attention. I could understand the compulsion. Actually, no. Clearly this was someone off his meds.
On the way out, I discovered that the little figurines I’d bought before lunch could now be had for 10 yuan. And suddenly I no longer felt like a travel snoot. I felt like a chump.
23
It’s cold in Harbin. It should be cold. It would be unsettling if it were not cold. Harbin is north of Vladivostok, home of the Russian Pacific fleet. So it’s cold. This was not the tropics. Harbin is in the far north of China. So the coldness should be expected. But man, it’s cold in Harbin.
I’d felt this coldness, this very intense nostril-freezing coldness, the moment the flight attendant opened the door. We’d been crowding the aisles waiting to disembark the plane since, well, I don’t know, probably an hour before we landed. Please remain seated until we reach the gate. As if. This is China. We do not remain seated in China. And I further endured this bitter coldness in front of my hotel when I’d had to deal with the usual let’s-rip-off-the-dumb-laowai routine of the airport taxi drivers. It no longer even fazed me. It was normal, just part of the experience.
“Four hundred and fifty kuai, do you say? Well, yes, that sounds reasonable. But let me ask the doorman what he thinks.”
So I got the doorman and I got the guy at the check-in counter and I’d asked passing pedestrians in fur hats what they thought of this 450-kuai fare, and soon the cabdriver was surrounded by dozens of people heckling and jeering him because everyone’s been ripped off in China, everyone’s been cheated, tricked into overpaying, and no one liked it one bit, and now they had one of these cheaters on their hands and they shamed him and told me not to pay one yuan and to report him to the police. But this I did not do. I asked the crowd what is the standard taxi fare from the airport to downtown Harbin and that is what I magnanimously paid the driver, who slinked off into the night like a chastened fox.
I continued to experience this coldness as I waddled up the cobblestones of Zhongyang Dajie wearing seven layers of clothes, everything in my possession. My quest for a warm coat, abandoned in Xi’an, had suddenly become more urgent. Style? Who cares. A good fit? Immaterial. And soon I became the owner of an enormous