Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [32]
Much of the wall we see today, however, was built in the sixteenth century during the Ming Dynasty. Scholars still speculate as to why, exactly, the Ming emperors went to such great lengths to build a wall that Mongol invaders could, very simply, go around. Some have posited that the Great Wall was reflective of imperial paralysis—Should I attack the Mongols? Should I trade with them? I dunno. Maybe I’ll just build a really big wall.
And, of course, the Chinese are very fond of walls. All the farms we passed had walled compounds. In restaurants, patrons prefer to be seated among the walls within the private dining rooms. Karaoke is conducted not out in the open, but behind walls. It is a nation of walls. Walls are celebrated; they are insisted upon. There must always be walls. And so it’s unsurprising that the greatest wall ever built is in China.
But this wall, unlike most in China, was not ultimately effective. Subsequently, over the centuries that followed its construction, it was allowed to fall into ruin, becoming nothing more than a brick repository for nearby villages. Why buy new bricks when there’s a really big wall nearby, just sitting there doing nothing? It was simply a huge, pointless wall that went on and on and on. So they took the bricks, built homes, shops, and wells until some enterprising official discovered that there was good money to be made with the Great Wall, that tourists would flock there wanting camel rides and bird whistles, and they could combine a trip to the Wall with a visit to the Traditional Medicine Center. And a jade factory too. Build it and they will come, he thought, and so he took pen to paper.
The Great Wall which be created by the human being will be your nice mind forever!
And so it is.
6
I had, during my time in Beijing, already managed to find myself yearning for a place far, far away from the pounding of jackhammers and the wailing of buzz saws and the unrelenting honkyness of urban life in China. This, I recognized, was not a good sign when confronted by a journey through coastal China, a region proudly called home by hundreds of millions of people. But really, you could say that about any region of China. Beyond the deserts of Xinjiang and the cold steppes of Inner Mongolia and the lofty summits of Tibet, every region in China calls itself home to hundreds of millions of people. It is indeed a very crowded country. And so, for what I hoped might be a brief respite from the urban whirl, I’d decided to climb mighty Tai Shan, the most revered mountain in China. It is said that those who climb Tai Shan live to be a hundred. I wasn’t at all certain I wanted to live to be a hundred, but I did know that I’d like to have the option.
I had often been cautioned that in China I should put my regular glasses aside and replace them with special lenses that allow me to see things in the Chinese context. It was always the same words: Chinese context. And so that is what I did. Somehow, I had managed to navigate the tumult of the Beijing train station and boarded the train to Tai’an, 250 miles to the south. And so, rolling out of Beijing and into Shandong Province, I took my glasses off and put my magic spectacles on and looked out the window and viewed the world within the Chinese context. There, I observed. The hundreds of people scavenging in the dump. It’s fine. Fifty years ago, they would have been dead from hunger. Look. A bird’s nest, the first evidence I had yet encountered that there are, in fact, birds in China. True, I hadn’t actually seen the bird, but a nest