Mr. China Read Free Page A

of pavilions and sweeping tiled roofs in the Forbidden City caught my imagination and I wanted to see them for myself. I knew that
parts of China had been open to foreigners from the early 1980s and when I met the odd person who had been there I questioned them eagerly. Some seemed lost for words, almost annoyed by the place:
‘Don’t go there, it’s absolute chaos.’ Others seemed puzzled in an amused sort of way: ‘Of course, it was all very interesting, but the people were a bit odd. They
always pretended that they didn’t have train tickets when you knew that they did, or that the restaurant was full when you could see that it was empty.’ But for some it was in their
blood. They seemed possessed. And when they couldn’t explain exactly why, it fed my curiosity.
    Slowly, an idea developed in my head: why not head back for England overland through China and take the Trans-Mongolian railway through Moscow on the way? So I started reading up about China and
found that the pass over the mountains from northern Pakistan had been opened. I heard that it was possible to follow the Silk Road along the northern edges of the deserts in north-western China.
There was also a southern route but no one knew whether it was open. I tried to learn the odd phrase of Chinese, for emergencies, but the words came out in a way that just drew blank stares. Still,
I persisted and, the following spring, I set off for China.
    I went in through the Karakoram Mountains, where Afghanistan, Pakistan and China meet. The mountains there are capped with thick glaciers and in places the road almost disappears. At last it
descends towards the deserts in north-western China. Heading east towards Beijing, I followed a string of oasis towns on the edge of the desert. After ten days in a bus, aching and bruised, I
reached the railhead and boarded a train for central China. Three months later and a stone and a half lighter, I slipped through the Wall and crossed the grasslands to Moscow.
    As I sat on the train through Russia and watched the endless pine forests recede towards the east, I couldn’t assemble all the things that I had seen into any coherent form in my mind: the
street urchin who pushed a knife through his wrist for a few coppers, the blind people’s massage parlour, the pickled human heads in an underground city, peasant villages and huge polluted
cities, the crush of people in the stations. But I had a sense of something so vast and so old, so chaotic and so utterly foreign, that it took me right out of myself.
    I knew that I had barely scratched the surface, but I could see that hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese were on the march for a better life. It was like Hong Kong but on a cosmic scale. I
felt energized; there was such a sense of purpose in among the chaos. An age-old culture had somehow taken a wrong turn, but I could feel the determination to catch up.
    And there was something else, something funny about China that told me not to take it all too seriously. I had just caught the tail end of the planned economy, where Beijing still tried to
manipulate the minutiae of China’s vast economy. On the macro scale it was madness; how could the bureaucrats in Beijing coordinate the annual production of a billion pairs of trousers, or
two billion pairs of socks across a country several times the size of Continental Europe? Even on the streets I often found that common sense seemed swamped by some vast nonsensical central plan.
It completely inverted the normal relationships where the customer was king. Here the planners provided everything and the customer, it seemed, was supposed to be grateful. Huge arguments arose
over the simplest of transactions. At times, for example, it might take half an hour to persuade a receptionist to let me stay in a hotel. She’d say that it was full and that there were no
rooms available. At first I was puzzled and went away wondering where all the guests were. But I figured out