Special Report: China Says: Ni hao!

Majesty, squalor, civility and smiles in a gee whiz Instamatic Blur

And I only wrote half of what I saw…

— Marco Polo, recalling his travels in China, A.D. 1324

The People’s Republic of China is as much a land of paradox and poesy, blood, sweat, glory and incongruity as the riven country that greeted Marco Polo. The temples and tombs, palaces and pagodas and gardens, majestic mountains and mighty rivers, art and artifacts as old as civilization: they are all there, glittering, tangible and not quite believable. Off the usual tourist track are the ramshackle tenements, mud-walled village cottages and the grinding labor of the peasant, equally hard for the Westerner to comprehend. They will all become picture postcards of the mind, but on first encounter they are closer to hallucination than reality.

A tourist is prepared for the pyramids or the Parthenon. But the Great Wall of China? More than 2,480 mortised miles of esplanade, built over the bodies of 300,000 serfs and some of the world’s ruggedest mountain terrain, to no ultimate military purpose. On a windswept turret of the wall completed in 214 B.C., in a 500-year-old pavilion of the Forbidden City or Soochow’s leaning Tiger Hill Pagoda (it has a 3¾° tilt), the visitor is not so much awed as numbed. Who were—and are — the people who could construct such fantasies? What else have they wrought? Are there other such marvels and monstrosities to be seen or expected? The Foreign Friend, as he is designated today, faces the same quandary that confronted the great Italian: Can I record half the things I have witnessed? Will anyone believe me if I describe them?

The latter-day Polo, the F.F., comes with camera, tape recorder and ballpoint pen. Thus he returns with certain authenticated truths. He comes also with the knowledge that he is visiting the world’s most populous nation, perhaps a billion people inhabiting a land mass only slightly larger than the U.S. It is of course a Communist nation long opposed to America. It is an authoritarian society in which the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s sayings, statue or visage (often today paired with that of Chairman Hua Kuo-feng) dominates every public place—though Mao buttons and the once ubiquitous little Red Book of Mao’s quotations are seldom seen today. The people professedly live and work by Mao-Marxist cliches insisting that everyone’s labor is for the greater good of socialism. In reality, as in any other country in the world, that means work hard and make a buck.

Descending from ship or train or plane, with a minimum of immigration fuzzbuzz, the F.F. sees the world’s most intensively cultivated fields, wheat and rice and sorghum and countless vegetables, pressing to the edge of every road, rail and airport runway. He sees the back streets of cities, busy from dawn to dusk, where every human activity save copulation is conducted alfresco. Then occurs the gee whiz Instamatic Blur. The people smiling and waving and clapping from city sidewalks and country lanes. The painfully hand-inscribed WARMLY WELCOMING boards. The impression, away from every preprogrammed and official event, that this is an extraordinarily relaxed, amiable and open society.

Interpreters, guides and Responsible Persons (i.e., bosses) have received the message: Be nice to our Foreign Friends; they are our guests. In the villages and factories and back streets that are visited without advance notice, the people are as warmly receptive as any on the scheduled tour. Only in these places, in small takes, can the visitor fight free of Instamatic Blur. He/she will not begin to understand China; even the Chinese do not profess to understand China. However, by osmosis and ingestion one can return home with vivid brush strokes on the mind.

China is … China, the ancient Middle Kingdom, the world’s oldest continuous civilization, a people and a nation that for 4,000 years has regarded the rest of the planet with condescension, if not contempt. China is at the same time a modern country of exquisite civility and, for now, past its sanguinary internal disruptions, of eminent practicality. The People’s Republic, urgently in need of foreign funds, technology and support, has only in recent months begun to lift the Bamboo Curtain for Americans; 15,000 U.S. tourists will have visited the mainland by year’s end.

The average visitor today does not venture far beyond two dozen cities, though the Chinese promise access next year to such regions as Szechwan, Inner Mongolia, even Tibet, all hitherto denied the ordinary voyager. Though the Foreign Friend’s days are rigorously ordained —factory, school, temple, tomb, museum, commune, clinic, department store and garden—any early-rising, enterprising F.F. can roam at will, sniffing, savoring, snapping, visiting and, with the help of an interpreter, freely conversing.

The Chinese are dismally housed, for the most part, with one of the world’s densest urban populations. Yet in Shanghai or Canton, there is little sense of the tensions and frictions so close to the surface of American, European or other Asian cities. One explanation is that the citizenry is governed by a public ethic that was not evident before the 1949 Revolution, or Liberation, as the Chinese prefer to call it. If, for example, a young person comes home with a wristwatch or a transistor radio that has obviously been stolen or otherwise illicitly acquired, he must not only surrender it; he must also undergo a somewhat Orwellian regimen of “self-criticism.”

Life in China begins before dawn. On city streets, which are the patios and front yards of the oppressively cramped worker, mothers braid daughters’ lustrous black hair in time for school, sisters hang out the laundry on poles, grannies mold patties of coal dust and mud, fuel for the evening meal. Aunties hurry home with the rice ration in open bowls. Fathers split wood, small children chop vegetables. Good ole boys play Chinese chess or pai-fen, a complicated poker.

People of all ages stop to buy rice porridge or yu-t’iao, a deep-fried cruller that sells for 20. Others, in every available space, are somberly engaged in t’ai-chi-ch’uan, the balletic, trancelike exercise that is supposed to tone all muscles and compose the soul.

The streets are amazingly clean. A mother, holding up a baby boy for a bowel movement on the sidewalk, swiftly bundles up the deposit, which will find its way to a paddy field. Nothing reclaimable or recyclable is left for the garbage dump. There are no garbage dumps to be seen in China. Bands of women polish the streets with straw brooms. In Canton, the trash receptacles are big blue porcelain urns that would grace any American front porch. There are no dogs in Chinese cities.

By 5:30 a.m., in every town and village, the streets fill up with traffic. The narrow roads are as cram-jammed as a Los Angeles freeway — but not with cars. Olive-drab trucks and gray buses honk furiously through an almost impermeable mass of freight-laden pedestrians, carts hauled by horses, water buffaloes, tractors and bent-over peasants, and seas of bicycles and tricycles, many also laden with cargo. Fortunately for the traveler, most cargo is dispatched through the efficient railway system; other long-distance shipments go by boat, sailed, put-putted, poled and paddled along China’s endless rivers, canals and coastline.

There are no private cars in China.

In fact, there is only 1 automobile per 10,000 people, which works out to fewer than 100,000 cars in the whole country. Any non-taxi is reserved for high party or military officials, who are cozily protected from the vulgar gaze by frilly curtains. Workers-mostly transport themselves by bicycle (“self-moving vehicle”), a sturdy unisex model that does not have gears, pump or lights, although it is equipped with a bell, in constant use. To buy a new jingling bike, a citizen must produce around $90 and a form from his place of work certifying that he needs one for the good of society. Nonetheless, there are 2 million bicycles in Peking alone, perhaps twice as many in Shanghai. On city streets they form the Great Wheel of China. Non-bicyclists travel by shanks’ mare, jampacked buses or a three-wheeled, one-cylinder contraption that can take six passengers. Rickshas have been abolished since the Revolution, but there are still a few pedicabs, tricycles built for three in which the driver pedals and two passengers ride in self-conscious glory.

By and large and mostly small, the Chinese are quite homogeneous in appearance: black-haired, dark-eyed, flat-nosed, small-boned, flat-breasted (the slim, trim women, that is) and fresh-complexioned.

There are no blonds to be seen in China. Thus it should come as no surprise —though it does—that a bevy of American tourists attracts wondering, chuckling crowds. Foreign Friends soon realize that they are both funny (peculiar) and funny (haha) to the Chinese: redheads and blonds and curly longhairs of all colors and sizes and shapes, adipose executives, buxom wives and bewigged widows, all big-nosed, round-eyed, redolent of alien fragrances and, by Chinese standards, outsize, oddly dressed and—face it —ugly. “Are all Americans old?” a shore-bound group from the M.S. Lindblad Explorer is asked. “Are most Americans fat?” The inquiring interpreter is most respectful: old age and adiposity (viz., Chairman Mao) are venerated in China. No, it is explained to him, anyone who can afford a first-class cruise-ship ticket is not likely to be either very young or too lean.

The well-prepared winter visitor brings long Johns and sweaters. In summer he comes with short-sleeved wash-and-dry shirts. There are no neckties in China. The climate in summer is a sauna bath; almost everything worth seeing requires climbing. A must in any season is Lomotil or another anti-diarrhetic, and throat lozenges, to combat the dust and coal smoke in the air. The F.F. must be prepared in advance for the virtual or entire absence of: air conditioning, ice water, ice cubes, ice cream, poached eggs, hamburgers, French fries, lamb chops, orange juice, cocktails, nightclubs, good grape wine, potable soft drinks (a prevalent banana concoction tastes like carbonated Brylcreem); cigars, low-tar cigarettes and Di-Gel; Kleenex, Band-Aids, shower curtains, shoeshines; and, with no sense of loss, lawns, pubs, sidewalk cafes, casinos, credit cards, commercials, news, Muzak, golf courses, public tennis courts, headwaiters, muggers and prostitutes.

Whatever else may be missing in the People’s Republic, China and the Chinese more than compensate the open-minded visitor. The Foreign Friend leaves with indelible memories effaces and places, good manners and memorable food, candid conversation and cultural confrontation. A jumble of vignettes on a parchment scroll:

In front of The East Is Red department store in Wusih, Carl Schweinfurth, a 6-ft. 6-in. businessman from Mount Vernon, Ill., snaps a Polaroid picture of a young mother with babe in arms. Two minutes later, he hands her the color print. Within one minute after that, a crowd of perhaps 500 people has assembled to look and marvel at the picture.

After much fingering, it is courteously returned to Subject Ma. After this a quintet of F.F.s take a stroll through Wusih’s back streets. They are immediately surrounded by laughing, chattering locals, many descending from homeward-bound bicycles. “Ni hao! Ni hao!” (How do you do?) Congeniality on such a scale can be slightly frightening, but it is authentic and spontaneous. Back in the hermetic bus on the way to the railroad station, Richard Lloyd Jones, president of the Tulsa (Okla.) Tribune, mops his brow and remarks: “This is how F.D.R. must have felt riding down Pennsylvania Avenue the day he repealed Prohibition.”

The Chinese word for train is literally “fire cart.” The Shanghai Express, though, is no coal burner. A sleek Diesel locomotive hauling 20 cars leaves from the Shanghai Station’s Platform 5 for points west and north at precisely 6:30 a.m. From the engine to the rear two cars reserved for the F.F.s, the train is a vivid green with a yellow midriff stripe. The passenger takes his choice of a seat designed to accommodate two or three people on each side of a linen-spread table on which covered mugs of hot tea are waiting. The window is lace-curtained, the seats are adorned in immaculate, frilly-bottomed slipcovers. On each table there is a live potted plant, a bonsai tree or a cactus. The tea is constantly replenished by one of the white-jacketed attendants, four per car; the humid air is churned by eight overhead fans. The toilet, like all Chinese toilets except those in hotels and the better restaurants, is a hole in the floor. The cars are of Victorian design but recent manufacture. “If only we had sherry and biscuits,” muses a Briton, “this could be the Flying Scotsman 40 years ago.”

Plane travel for the long-legged American can be agony. CAAC, the national airline, apparently arranged its seating for friendly pygmies. Other F.F.s, half-paralyzed in flight, are resuscitated with free Chunghua cigarettes, bags of candy, and People’s Kool-Aid, when what they need is a massage and a double martini. The cigarette-puffing pilot wears no uniform or cap, only the white shirt and baggy blue pants of the worker. Given decent weather, planes leave and arrive on time. The air lanes are as vacant as Wall Street on a Sunday. The airports are as empty as a cathedral on a Monday. Clearly, airports are primarily military airbases, though Peking’s runways are now being widened for tourist-bearing jumbo jets. On the tarmac at Kweilin are rows of biplanes, all gassed up to fight World War I.

The Chinese are decently if unimaginatively dressed. In most cities men and women wear light shirts over dark trousers, though some city women now sport brightly printed blouses and skirts. The occasional high official may be spotted by his well-cut, gray, unbaggy Mao suit with four pockets on the tunic (lesser ranks have only two). Though the Chinese are renowned for making seductive jewelry, no man or woman in the People’s Republic seems to wear any: no beads, bracelets, bangles, necklaces or rings on ear or finger. Asked why not, a pretty young interpreter snorts: “I’m not an aborigine!”

The Chinese are as enchanted by the foreign phrase as is the Westerner by their proverbs. After only one day of shepherding Americans, a thirtyish male guide has learned to say (repeatedly), “Let’s get the show on the road!” Using another terminological acquisition at every opportunity, he inquires, “Are we all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?” Not all such cultural exchanges are so felicitous. On a flight from Shanghai, Mr. Liu, a Responsible Person, warns: In the event of airsickness, “please use paper bag for environmental hygiene.”

A pharmacy in Kweilin dispenses a range of panaceas that includes ginseng cigarettes (for smoker’s cough) and Male Silkworm Tonic (for impotence). At clinics in Shanghai, Wusih and Foshan, tour-weary Foreign Friends seek massage and acupuncture treatment for whatever ails them. Frances Aldridge of Key Biscayne, Fla., gets needles in her neck to assuage a pinched nerve. She swears it works. Her husband Frank takes acupuncture for an arthritic foot and thereafter climbs mountains without a cane. Their joint bill: $2.

Chinese gastronomy is among the world’s most elegant and diverse.

There are more than a dozen different and distinct regional cuisines, and in each city the cooks vie to outdo their competitors elsewhere. A banquet consists of several dozen delicacies, orchestrated with regard for flavor, texture and color. Each begins like an opera, with an enticing overture leading ineluctably on toward the major arias. Because they lack space for pasturage, the central Chinese south of the Yellow River do not eat much beef or lamb. Most specialties are based on chicken, duck, pork, bountiful vegetables and a huge variety of fresh-and saltwater fish and shellfish. It is basically a cuisine of survival, in which every last conceivably usable ingredient goes into the pot. How about smoked ducks’ tongues? Fish eyes and spiced chicken feet? Wine-braised camel’s hump, a delicacy of the Manchu emperors, is not, alas, generally available.

In Canton, the epicurean epicenter, a banquet mounts to such glories as Phoenix Meets Dragon hi Brilliant Courtyard — a spicy consummation of chicken breasts (symbol of femininity) and ham (for masculinity) — and a casserole of clear-simmered Lions’ Heads; lacking lionburger, they consist of leonine pork meatballs in a gingery sauce. Some dishes, such as egg fu yung and fried rice, are familiar to Americans, since at least 90% of all Chinese food served in the U.S. is based on Cantonese recipes. But the real meal in China — Peking duck, for example — could not be mistaken for one in Chinatown, U.S.A. Almost all Cantonese dishes are steamed or stir-fried. Texture and flavor are not masked by heavy sauces that elsewhere can disguise unfresh ingredients. In Canton, they say, the shrimp come wiggling to the table.

At the Soochow Hotel, the masterpiece of the meal is Beggar’s Chicken, fit for a millionaire. The bird is wrapped in lotus leaves, encased in clay and baked for four hours. The very special guest is allowed to break open the potterized poultry with a golden hammer. In Kweilin’s Li River Hotel, the aesthetic highlight is a bowl of bouillon on which float three yellow-eyed ducklings made of egg white. The culinary triumph is a sweet-and-sour fresh-water mandarin fish, confected with ham, onion, potato, sausage, mushroom and ginger. It is sculptured to resemble a squirrel, hence the dish is announced in advance by one interpreter as “tree rat,” provoking preprandial nausea among several F.F.s.

Anywhere in China, the banquet follows protocolar rules as rigid as those of the minuet or mah-jongg. Beside every place setting are three glasses: a big one for beer and two shot-size glasses that will briefly contain mao-tai, a colorless 160-proof liquor that could power China’s first moon shot, and a red, rice-based wine that tastes like a blend of Campari and cough syrup. The beer, bitter and warm, is served immediately and may be immediately sipped. The mao-tai and the wine, however, are reserved for toasts, which soon ensue, copiously, capaciously and loquaciously. Most are raised — and why not? — to Friendship Between Our Peoples. One of the first words the F.F. learns is kan-pei! Bottoms up! (literally, dry glass). Several hosts between toasts indicate that it is inadvisable to take only a sip of the rocket juice. “You have to drink in one gulp,” advises one Responsible Person. “Otherwise you get headache.”

Amazingly, by 6:30 a.m. the overtoasted F.F.s are out of their hotel rooms and banging spoons for breakfast. (They dutifully use chopsticks for every other meal.) After such curiosa as fish-flavored omelette and jasmine tea cakes, washed down with surprisingly good coffee, the Westerners stand meekly, punctually, hi line to See China. What they get to see ranges from astounding to zilch.

Peking (pop. 7.5 million) is one of the great monuments of civilization. Off T’ien An Men (Gate of Heavenly Peace) Square, the vastest (100 acres) public plaza anywhere, lies the Forbidden City, now styled the Former Imperial Palaces. This manic maze of pavilions and palaces and gardens is a wonder of the world. Assembled over five centuries by 24 celestially approved emperors and more than a million laborers, the Forbidden City is not only a marvel of space, extravagance and style but also a dazzling repository of art, in gold and silver, ivory and jade. Restored and main tamed by a crew of 1,000, it makes Versailles look like a nouveau riche country mansion. In the hills northwest of the city is the Summer Palace, which was largely destroyed hi 1860 by Britain’s Lord Elgin, son of the seigneur who took the marbles from the Parthenon. Rebuilt hi 1888 by the dotty Dowager Empress Tz’u Hsi, diverting funds allotted for naval construction, the imperial plaisanterie occupies 700 acres and attracts huge numbers of Chinese rubbernecks. And then there are the Ming Tombs and, a few hours away, the Great Wall. Otherwise the city is nondescript and marred by Stalinoid architecture.

Shanghai, the world’s largest metropolitan area (pop. 10.8 million), is China’s leading trading center and second biggest industrial city. Gone are the 60,000 foreigners who ran the city as a fiefdom for a century. Gone too are the singsong girls and the 30,000 prostitutes who once plied the streets, and the opium dens and the gambling halls. The people are louder and livelier and more independent than the prim Pekingese. Shanghai has the vibrancy and hustle of New York. It boasts 140 round-the-clock (jih-ye) shops and eating places. Shanghai winks, but never sleeps.

The Bund, the magnificent old waterfront promenade, is decaying, but is as imposing as ever in the pre-smog morning light. The ornate colonialist skyscrapers now house party and government offices. Gone from hi front of the old Hongkong & Shanghai Bank are the bronze Britannic lions. Another old bank has been transformed into an absorbing museum of ancient art. The Peace Hotel, built as the Cathay by Sir Victor Sassoon hi the mid-1930s and now the premier hostelry for Western visitors, is creaky and listless, but it can still mount a banquet worthy of an Emperor. At a school hi Shanghai’s Yangpu district, 34 exquisite young voices rehearse a song that turns out to be pure Maozart: We Follow Our Chairman. In a nearby room at the Children’s Palace, a finely tuned orchestra of eleven-year-olds, playing traditional Chinese fiddles, flutes, dulcimers, string drums and mandolins, bursts out with My Old Kentucky Home. More than 1,000 children a day study the arts and sciences at this school “hi order to achieve modernization.” Carefully selected from ordinary schoolrooms, they return to regular classes after a year of intensive instruction and impart their skills to other kids.

A hour’s ride from downtown Shanghai is a teeming farm called the Hsinching People’s Commune. It is a model establishment, or it would not be on the F.F. itinerary. As the buses arrive, all hands of all ages are out to greet them, all smiling and hand-clapping (it beats weeding). The F.F.s, after Ni haos! and handshakes, are waved toward basins of cool water and stacks of fresh towels. Then they troop in for the Brief Introduction, the ritualistic prelude to any tourist attraction.

The Hsinching commune, like any farm within hundreds of miles of Shanghai, exists to meet the city’s insatiable appetite. Its 2,330 acres are planted mostly with vegetables, though the commune also raises rice, wheat, animal fodder and some livestock. The peasants are particularly proud of their plump chickens, which they say are of a Chinese breed; in fact, they are White Leghorns and (appropriately) Rhode Island Reds.

Hsinching has a population of 21,626; the peasants privately own and cultivate 8% of the land. The commune has a busy, fair-sized hospital staffed by 30 nurses and 40 paramedics, “barefoot” doctors: its bare-toothed dentist boasts that every last piece of equipment was made in Shanghai.

Shanghai boasts China’s best department store. Called Number One, the stark, cavernous but well-stocked emporium attracts 100,000 shoppers a day. There are always eager crowds, but no lines, around the toy counter, which offers such items as a huge stuffed panda for $47, a solidly built dump truck for about $4.75, and a battery-powered submachine gun for $6.25. A Shanghai-made black-and-white TV set costs around $428, a solid-state radio $33. A nice chess set goes for $8.50, good basketball shoes for $5.25. The high-collared Chung-shan chuang, the so-called Mao jacket, made of heavy blue or gray cotton and well stitched, is a bargain at $11; a matching Mao cap costs $1.50. Friendship Stores in each city, catering to foreigners, offer more exotic but in many cases bargains-priced goods such as embroideries, porcelain, jade jewelry, furs, silks, scroll paintings and antique furniture. The attendants seem scrupulously honest. At some of the antique stores, though, the young comrades behind the counter are apt to be woefully ignorant of the objets d’art they are selling. In Wusih, a customer reasonably well versed in Chinese asks a salesgirl the exact meaning of the calligraphy on a 200-year-old wall scroll. Her hesitant reply: “Aim high to build our country,” which is purest Mao. The scroll actually reproduces a philosophical poem by the Ch’ing dynasty’s Tsu Shao-tseng.

Some of the most attractive handicraft objects are to be found at small stores off the tourist track: lacquered woven bamboo handbags, hand-painted nesting boxes in all shapes, ceramic poudriers that could be used as cigarette boxes, silken parasols, cloisonne bangles. Many of these eyecatching, easily stowed artifacts are sold in the U.S. for ten times the going price in China.

Hotels range from shabby-chic to seedy, the best being reserved for Western visitors. Kweilin’s three-year-old, 300-room Li River hostelry is about average. The rooms are furnished in Grand Rapids style. The beds have pallets, but no springs, no Western-style mattresses, no top sheets; maid service consists of dumping a clean sheet and a blanket on the bed, to be made up by the guest. There is a plentiful supply of mineral water, beer, soft drinks and cigarettes, and a thermos of hot water and a package of tea leaves. There are also small red ants in the bed, but they are not predatory. The Kweil-inese are trying, however. A paper strip across the toilet seat announces, in Chinese and English: DISINFECTED. There are two differently scented bars of soap, both pink; the toilet paper, also pink, is labeled (in English) Kapok, The Most Luxurious Toilet Tissue.

Better by far is the Tung Fang (meaning Eastern) Hotel hi Canton, China’s southernmost big city, the commonest point of entry and sole destination of many Foreign Friends. The Tung Fang is a bustling, 2,000-room place with a new air-conditioned whig. The rooms ($12.50 for a double) are larger, more comfortably furnished, mattressed and ant-less. At the Tung Fang it is even possible to obtain a few ice cubes, and the laundry service is Chinese-immaculate and cheap (a shut well ironed for about 50). The hotel has also recognized the F.F.’s paramount problem: What to do after 9 p.m.? Its cavernous eighth floor has been designated Cafe-Bar. Therein until midnight the visitor can eat watermelon or sherbet, sip his choice of poison, from tepid beer to fu-te-ka (vodka), and yak until yawn. Sorry, no floor show, dancing or Hangchow-panky, though such dubious distractions are doubtless only a few short years away.

Canton is sassy, sophisticated — and shabby. Its 3 million people are uniquely exposed to the outside world. Within hiking and swimming distance are British-ruled Hong Kong, where many thousands of mainlanders have relatives, and Portuguese-administered, anything-goes Macao. The twice-yearly Canton Trade Fair lures swarms of foreign wheeler-dealers, from Macy’s and Neiman-Marcus, Fiat and Hitachi. Yet Canton is no showcase. The Cantonese do not radiate the physical vitality of most urban Chinese; many are poorly clothed. There are more people milling aimlessly and noisily around than in other Chinese cities. The Pekingese call the Cantonese “shrike-voiced barbarians.”

A” “he same time, the Cantonese have he most attractive zoo (more than 200 species, with four show-stealing pandas); one of the world’s most renowned botanical gardens, Yueh-siu Park, with more than 100 varieties of orchid; the exquisite Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, built circa A.D. 480; and the nearby Temple of Brightness and Filial Piety, built some 2,400 years ago. A short air hop from Canton is tranquil Kweilin, a delicate beauty spot on the fabled Li River, ringed by eroded limestone peaks that could have been assembled by a stage designer.

Wherever the visitor goes, he is charmed and intrigued by the place names. A limestone peak in Kweilin is called Piled Silk Hill for its varicolored layers of rock; the structure at its top, up 400 (count ’em) stone steps, is the Cloud-Catching Pavilion. A little pleasance in Wusih has been known for 470 years as Leave Your Pleasure Garden—ever since the man who built it was summoned to high office in far-off Peking and, not being able to take his heart’s delight with him, bequeathed it to the populace. The spectacular park in Soochow bears, after 41/2 centuries, the sardonic name of Humble Administrator’s Garden; the grounds were constructed over 16 years by a corrupt official who was anything but hum ble. After his death it was gambled away by his son hi one night. A mountain on the Li River is called Elephant Trunk Hill be cause, with only a slight squint of the imagination, it looks like a mighty pachyderm slurping from the stream. An adorn ment of Peking’s Summer Palace is called the Jade Belt Bridge; it might well girdle a goddess.

The Chinese seem to be more relaxed at work than almost any other people in the world. They make time to gossip, rest their eyes and sip tea. The applicable Confucianism here may be: “The able man is never busy; the busy man is unable.” Nonetheless, Chinese workers put in long hours, six days a week, with only six days off a year for national holidays. This seems to be true at every level of society. Though productivity is still low by Western standards — mostly for lack of modern machinery — the Chinese have made dramatic economic progress in the past 30 years. At plant after plant, commune after commune, the F.F. is treated to a list of impressive production gains. “God!” exclaims a Western rancher after hearing one such catalogue. “If only I had some Chinese workers!” Some Chinese exemplars might even apply to Western bosses. Lars-Erik Granqvist, skipper of the Lindblad Explorer, sought out the head of the biggest Shanghai shipyard to discuss terms for drydocking his ship next spring. Finding no one in what passes for the executive suite, the captain learned that the shipyard’s Most Responsible Person was down on the wharf, doing his required weekly stint as a common laborer.

— Michael Demarest