Shadow of the Silk Road (3 page)

The terracotta army still marches where it was found, through a subterranean vault fifteen miles east of Xian. Fear of the SARS
virus, which was spreading north that April, had brought tourism to a standstill, and I found myself almost alone in the cold-lit tunnel. No photograph prepares you for these eerie legions. They move through the earth in their hundreds, eleven columns deep. Once brilliant in vermilion and green, shiny with black armour and pink skin, they have faded to spectral beige. Their robes fall thick and loose over their concave chests, and their hair is knotted in tight buns or bunched behind winged headdresses. Studded plate-armour overlaps their shoulders. But instead of the stone-hearted war engine a despot might demand, they wait in a disparate regiment of watchful and unequal men. Almost no two are alike. There are veterans with wide moustaches and sloping stomachs, thin recruits and scholarly-looking campaigners sporting little chips of beard. In the wan light their expressions are those of expectation, even alarm, as if they await the enemy charge.

But everything wooden–all their arms–has disintegrated. The fists of the spearmen are closed delicately around nothing. Arrows and lances, halberds and crossbows have left behind only splinters of bronze. Horses stand unharnessed to chariots which have gone, while their drivers’ hands extend to grasp thin air.

Circling the dim gangway above them, you imagine this massed and intricate armament, with its mailed elite infantry and expendable conscripts, to be the upsurge of a self-sufficient realm: the country China claimed to be. But already I was dreaming of the road to the west, and it filled my head with a complex ebb and flow. Behind the terracotta horses the earth was printed with the rings of vanished wheels, for at the heart of the imperial armies rolled the leather-bound war chariots, manned by aristocratic archers and armoured spearmen. Yet the chariot was not a Chinese invention. For two thousand years before 221
BC
these fleet cars had criss-crossed the steppes of Mesopotamia and southern Russia, and they reached China along the Silk Road a thousand years after their origin. The bronze metallurgy which shaped those vanished weapons perhaps originated in the steppelands too, and all the ancestors of those horses–alert and chariotless in the museum dust–had come along tracks from the west.

Fewer than seven hundred figures have been restored out of an
estimated six thousand. Many lie unexcavated under the roofs which crashed in at the end of the Qin dynasty in 206
BC
: headless torsos and snapped limbs submerged in a mire of coagulated dust. In another pit an estimated nine hundred soldiers and ninety chariots lie buried under a debris of sagged timbers, where platoons of bowmen kneel to arms. Their bent fingers cradle weapons which have perished, but in the hardened loam nearby, the perfect outline of a long-rotted crossbow startles thoughts of medieval Europe. A Chinese invention from the fourth century
BC
, it travelled the Silk Road west, arriving in time to arm the phalanxes of Norman and Capetian kings, and to meet its nemesis from the English longbow at Crécy.

These exchanges swarm with question marks. Chinese inventions which percolated along the ancient road–printing and gunpowder, lock-gates and drive-belts, the mechanical clock, the spinning-wheel and equine harness that transformed agriculture–flourished behind the Great Wall for centuries before emerging phoenix-like in the West. And the knowledge of other prodigies–iron-chain suspension bridges, deep-drilling techniques (the Chinese were boring for brine and gas at two thousand feet in the second century
BC
)–took over a thousand years to travel.

But the notion of China as a sealed empire was breaking apart around me. Reassembled from the grave-pits, a terracotta messenger stood ready with his horse behind him. His harness and saddle were in place, but there was not yet a stirrup. The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brain-child as early as the fourth century
AD
, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily armoured and expensively mounted knight. To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder. The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.

These imaginings followed me at will through the dim vaults of the Qin emperor. He himself lies a mile away beneath a 290-foot mound, where years before I had wandered alone. Now the
Chinese tourist board had discovered it. A flight of steps beetled to the summit among firs and marigolds. Souvenir sellers thronged to meet me at the top, and a fancy-dress Qin dynasty band–drums, horns, squealing pipes–marched in from time to time to shatter the quiet.

But beneath my feet the terrible emperor still lay entombed–if contemporary chronicles are accurate–in a vast and intricate facsimile of his empire, threaded by quicksilver rivers, set in motion by invisible machinery, with his executed wives beside him. Seven hundred thousand workmen, it is said, laboured on this mausoleum through the last years of his reign, and on its completion those who knew too much were immured inside by the descent of stone gates. Within the tomb-chamber, among mountains carved from copper and cities in precious stone, he rides in a boat-shaped coffin on a mercury river, which flows to a mercury sea beneath a night sky printed with pearl stars.

So in death he contrived a self-contained mirror-kingdom, perfect control. Its gemstone cities were laid out for eternity, echoing the stasis of the heavens. The internal gates and passageways, raked secretly by primed crossbows, sealed the borders of his posthumous state. He had walled off the past and the future. His ancestry, like the Yellow Emperor’s, was probably barbarian; yet China was named after him. The seal-fat lamps which lit his tomb were supposed to last for ever.

Huang found me outside my hotel, and had haunted it ever since. I wondered what he wanted. He spoke a breathy English, split by bursts of Mandarin, and above his broad peasant face his hair sprouted so low that it almost met his eyebrows. He invited me home to meet his family, but his family were not there. He was racked by some intense, festering energy.

In his three-room flat, seated on rock-hard upholstery, he unfolded the old ambition of his people with a bright fixation.

‘I don’t want my life to stay level. I’m dreaming a big dream. I want my life to go like this! And this!’ His hand lifted in a jagged
stairway. ‘I want to plant a flag on each step! Up, up from nothing, until I die.’

His staccato voice rang through the apartment, where his absent womenfolk had left themselves behind in a whiff of cooking oil and some scattered dolls. ‘My father used to tell me that there was an order to things: first education…then work, then family, then friends. But first, education! You are like a tree, he said. Drinking, smoking, gambling are branches to be cut off. Cut them off, and you grow high.’ He stood up proudly, but he was barely five and a half feet.

‘We have many dangers now. Our society has changed very fast. We are addicts to gambling. Old people just lose a few kwai, and it doesn’t matter. But young people are ruined. And the massage parlours are everywhere, calling themselves beauty salons. They’re just brothels.’ On his rustic face a fastidious wince appeared, then faded. ‘It’s the modern West, it’s because of the fast change.’

‘Yes,’ I mumbled, feeling responsible. A generation ago all this had been unimaginable. Now, every night, my hotel telephone rang with a chirruping woman’s voice offering
amo
, massage.

‘My father warned me against these things. He noticed my friends. If they were dutiful to their parents, he approved. If not, they were like wolves, he said, bad for the spirit, and I should leave them. They will turn your heart sick, he said.’

His father obsessed him. The old man had been persecuted in the Cultural Revolution for owning books. ‘He was paraded in a dunce’s hat, with his arms wrenched out of their sockets.’ Huang let out a tremor of strained Chinese laughter. ‘But now he’s gone home. He’s retired to the village of his childhood.’

‘The village that persecuted him?’

‘Yes. But to trees now, and flowing water, and a newspaper.’

But he had left behind this son tormented by a zeal for self-improvement. In a belated Maoist spirit Huang had recently volunteered to help farmers, harvesting vegetables into a basket strapped to his back. ‘Useless!’ He tossed some invisible cabbages over his shoulder. ‘Within two days I was like a cripple.’ He was wincing. ‘Soon afterwards my father asked me to join a charity. There are poor people in the mountains here, people who have
nothing. So I go with my wife and daughter into the mountains–nine hours, up and down, to a part we’d seen on television–and we find a poor village and a man with four children, and I talk with him, and say don’t be afraid. He has no money, no school for his sons. Just some wheat. So I give money for his oldest child to go to school for the first year. This is big education for me, for my wife and daughter. I ask my daughter to talk with the man’s children, and she bursts into tears because they are so poor…’

His face had simplified into theatrical fervour. Only afterwards did I wonder if his tale were true, or if he had merely witnessed it on television and longed in fantasy to fulfil his father’s ideal.

‘I don’t know what the government can do about the peasants,’ he said. ‘I’m not interested in politics. I don’t want to touch them.’ He swept away a whole troubling world with his hand. ‘I’m an accountant with the municipality. I just work with a computer. But I’m thirty-six already, and I must change my life. I want to dream a big dream and go abroad.’ His face split into a tense, euphoric smile which now never left it. ‘A year ago I helped a Brazilian tourist. He’s a lawyer. He is my only foreign friend–and now you.’ I felt sudden misgiving, the start of a delicate interplay of debt and request. But he said: ‘I want to go to Brazil. During the day there I’ll work at anything, but in the evening I’ll give Chinese lessons. Free, no charge! Money is important, of course, but later. First, friends. Friends will be more important for my life.’ It was a twisted version of his father’s advice. ‘Maybe after a year I’ll have five people studying Chinese–all new friends. Here!…here!…and here!’ He planted them in space, like aerial seeds. ‘Soon maybe one of the friends will tell me: Oh, Mr Huang, I have good news–my father or my uncle works in a company that needs…’

So he was planning to make the move most coveted now: out of administration and into business. He had grown up in the new China of Deng Xiaoping, the land where riches were glorious, an arena of accelerating mobility.

But I felt an amazed misgiving for him. I said: ‘Do you know anything about Brazil?’

‘Brazil is in South America. It has some economic problems. Many people have no job. But some economies are better than
here in China, some companies. I’ll make contacts in these businesses…’–he began planting airy seeds again–‘touch…touch…touch! I’ll find a company with big production. Maybe they are making this’–he picks up a tinny bell from his table. ‘So I’ll send one of these to friends in China who’ll find a company to make them cheaper. After that we sell them back to the Brazil company. This, this!’ He taps the bell, which doesn’t work. Then he advances down other avenues, to other schemes. And slowly, as he juggles with a ferment of percentages and notional deals, my fear for him dissipates. I start, with dim foreboding, to pity the Brazilians. I imagine Huang conquering the world. Under his squat hands the tinny bell gets substituted by a porcelain saucer, which is joined by a vinegar-pot. They move across the table and rehabilitate themselves in another security or investment portfolio (I’ve lost the thread). He is talking like a machine-gun. His mind has a tough, calculating acumen. His English floods into Mandarin. His eyes never leave my face. They glitter with an innocent cunning. ‘…The company puts its own label on it, of course–but same quality! Then…’

After that I understood nothing he said, in either language, but became lost in a narcoleptic mist of figures, and only emerged after seeming hours to hear: ‘But I won’t stay in Brazil, because this country not so good economy. I’ll go to a better country…’

Xian was once the greatest city in the world. For three centuries after
AD
618, under the royal name Changan, ‘Eternal Peace’, it incarnated the zenith and decline of the peerless Tang dynasty. For twenty-two miles its ramparts enclosed nearly two million inhabitants, and immured them again in a nest of inner walls and gates, as ward after ward piled up around a vast chessboard of avenues. The nine-mile walls of today’s Xian trace merely those of Changan’s inner city. On one side it sucked in tribute by canals stretching to the South China Sea; on the other it stood as a lodestar at the eastern end of the Silk Road, where the Tang empire stretched to the Pamirs.

Its aristocracy survive in the damp murals of their tombs pockmarking the Wei valley. Along the underground walls their women walk in décolleté bodices and silk gowns, chatting together or playing with pet cicadas. Fabulous birds flutter for a moment out of the plaster. Beneath their chignons, piled up like crowns and cats’ ears, the faces are dimpled by tiny mouths and lizards’ eyes. They look like exquisite children. Their men, meanwhile, are playing polo, a game imported from Persia, in a charge of weightless cavalry. Under these dim vaults their lives are reinvented in a vacuum–their colours faded to rust and grey–yet are sweetly precise. When they follow the chase, their hunting leopards perch on saddles behind them, with a falcon or two, while a pair of provision-laden camels lumbers contemptuously behind.

They inhabited a city of fabled refinement and excess, whose street plan mirrored an imagined cosmic order. In spring its boulevards drowned in a snowstorm of apricot and peach blossom, with women sailing through the air on swings. These were the people, connoisseurs of the peony and the courtesan, who lifted to their lips the amber wine-cups which now rest in the city museum. Its cabinets still shine with their vanity: gold hair-pins, petal-shaped mirrors, silver censers for the wardrobe.