Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux Page A

on the floor of the valley, but the rest inhabited the terraces of cave dwellings with their crudely cut doors and windows in the reddish rock. The place looked very strange and primitive, but walking around, I could see that life was going on as normal—the people tended vegetable gardens, they fished, they did their laundry and cooked and aired their mattresses and ran a few shops and had a school and a brickworks. And they were located in a dramatic cleft in the mountains and must have known how lucky they were to have this space and this good air.
    One of the weirder Chinese statistics is that 35 million Chinese people still live in caves. There is no government program to remove these troglodytes and put them into tenements, but there is a scheme to give them better caves. The
China Daily
(19 May 1986) described how a farsighted architect, Ren Zhenying, had designed "an improved cave" by making the caverns larger and adding bigger windows and doors and ventilators. One model cave had forty-two rooms, and a number of three-bedroom apartments. He was quoted as saying, "It stays cool in summer and warm in winter and saves energy and land that could be used for farming."
    It seemed to me a kind of lateral thinking. Why rehouse or resettle these cave dwellers? The logical solution was to improve the caves. That was very Chinese.
    It was a bit like steam locomotives—those brand-new antiques that they turned out year after year. The design was not bad—it just looked old-fashioned, and in a coal-producing country, the steam locomotive was very economical.
    If this was a time warp it was a very reassuring one. My hotel bedroom had a spittoon and a chamber pot. The armchairs had slipcovers and antimacassars, and the varnished desk was covered by an embroidered cloth, and it held a water jug, a propped-up calendar and a vase of plastic flowers. In the drawer was a small bottle of ink, and a penholder with a steel nib. None of it could be called modern, but most of it was unbreakable.
    It seems comic and perhaps absurd to most Westerners; but it is not a joke—not in a society where they fish in rivers using nets designed 2000 years ago. China has suffered more cataclysms than any other country on earth. And yet it endures and even prospers. I began to think that long after the computers had exploded and the satellites had burned out and all the jumbo jets had crashed and we had awakened from the hi-tech dream, the Chinese would be chugging along in choo-choo trains, and plowing the ancient terraces, and living contentedly in caves, and dunking quill pens in bottles of ink and writing their history.

3. Night Train Number 90 to Peking
    Never mind that their uniforms don't fit, that their caps slip sideways and their toes stick out of their sandals; what most Chinese officials illustrate is how bad-tempered and unbending Chinese bureaucracy is. They are in great contrast to the average person who doesn't wear a uniform, who is fairly flexible and who will probably be willing to make a deal. Such hustlers are found in the Free Market—as the new bazaars are called—and not on Chinese railways.
    The glowering and barking woman at the gate at Datong Station at midnight was exactly like Cerberus. Three minutes before the Lanzhou train pulled out she slammed the entry gate and padlocked it, leaving a group of soldiers and many other latecomers clinging to the bars and making them miss their train. As a further indignity she switched off the overhead lights of the ticket barrier and left us all in the dark. She would not let me through until the Peking train pulled in. And then she slammed the gate again and made more latecomers watch while I boarded. It is not merely unbending; there is often a lot of sadism in bureaucracy.
    It was almost midnight. I found my berth in the sleeping car and, ignoring the other occupants (was one a woman?), went to bed. At 5:30 in the morning, Chinese bureaucracy rose up again and