Datong

The five-hour bus journey from Tai Yuan to Datong, through sprawling arid mountains and across flat yellow floodplains, proved to be more spectacular, but no less diverting, than our destination. Datong was once an ancient city of some renown. A glazed screen of nine beautifully depicted dragons, which used to be the frontage of an imperial palace, still remains like a single soldier flying the flag of a fallen company. There are a few old temples and, in the centre of the city, an impressive, well-preserved Drum Tower. Now, however, all about you, filthy black buildings crumble and fall, some through old age and neglect, some through the unstoppable will to progress of developing construction-crazy China. Datong is one dirty, smelly, derelict building site. At night, off the main drag, there are no streetlights and no pavements. Instead, you walk up and down huge piles and mounds of broken earth and concrete in the dark, sometimes a drop of six or ten feet behind the ascent awaiting the oblivious pedestrian like a bear-trap. The dirt streets are flanked by squatting men and women, who display their wares of screws, nuts, bolts, engine parts, shampoo, face cream, hairbrushes, on dirty sheets or rugs. They call out to you in Chinese as you pass, Spark plug? Wanna buy a spark plug? Or, Nuts and bolts! Nuts and bolts for sale here! (At least, I presume that was what they were saying.) And yet despite the crumbling chaos, it’s a huge city, developing, destroying, rebuilding, regenerating, regurgitating. Tai Yuan now seems positively modern, Harbin a gilded metropolis.

Late afternoon, from the top of the Drum Tower, Clive and I watched a department store on the main street stage a fashion show of wedding dresses. The girls were stunning, although totally depressed. Despite the sunshine, the temperature was chilly, and these delectable young girls had to walk out, strutting and pouting, to the high-pitched refrain of Chinese pop songs, in skimpy white, peach, pink or purple dresses, pose alluringly, then leave the stage, to hoots and whistles from the huge crowd of dirty workers and scruffy young families gathered around the raised stage. The incongruity of it, the majority of the onlookers surely unable to afford these skimpy yet extortionate dresses, the girls, certainly not from rich families themselves, or they wouldn't have had to do this, being ridiculed by them, the attempt at glamour, sophistication, sexiness, in this run-down, beat-up mining town, the miners, workers and housewives, beset by conflicting feelings of jealousy and glitter, wanting more but hating every minute of it. Throughout this weird sideshow, all around for miles the city of Datong lay before us, crumbled, broken, rows of tumbled down, windowless shacks interspersed with huge concrete blocks covered in soot.

Tonight we ate sushi in a wonderful restaurant called the Yonghe Dajiudian, which is credited as being the best restaurant in the province. It stands like a neon beacon amidst the broken pavements and run-down streets. We were given warm facecloths to wipe our grimy hands, china cups filled with delicious green tea, well-presented dishes brought by the polite pretty serving staff. The floors and tables were shining and pristine, the tablecloths a sparkling white, the wine glasses polished to a perfect shine. We ate and drank like kings for an hour and a half, without even having to refill our glasses. As I sat back in my mahogany chair, sated and tired, I looked out of the window and saw a little boy, only six or seven years old, standing alone on a huge pile of beaten earth and stone in the middle of the dug-up road, silhouetted darkly against the dusk, brandishing a long stick like a tiny warrior celebrating some kind of hollow victory. As the sushi turned in my stomach, guilt, horror and sadness combining to pin me to my comfortable chair, the little soldier waved his stick and conquered his imaginary world from the summit of his huge mound of muck.