The Golden Buddha

On Sunday Tam and I took a forty minute bus ride right past Nan Gang with Clive, a tall, blond Cambrian who has a constant ironic twinkle in his eye not unlike an inscrutable Buddha, to see the temples.

You approach them down a long green-and-white tiled street bordered by building sites, half-built skyscrapers looming like ghostly sci-fi skeletons, scaffolding covered in dirty green canvas, the sounds of jack-hammers, the thump and crunch of metal on stone, clouds of brick-dust, workmen bawling at each other, the smell of metal and fire.

Pay five Yuan, however, and you are inside the tranquil Ji Le Si (Temple of Heavenly Bliss). You are met by a fifty-foot tall Golden Buddha, who placidly surveys the ever-changing city from his meditative sitting position, like a resigned grandparent realising he now lives in a new era which he'll never quite get the hang of. Then the smell of burning incense sticks, the jangle of cowbells in the breeze, silent shaven-headed monks going about their daily rituals, temple buildings with pagoda roofs, golden statues inside with different deities, paths round the outside, symmetrical.

The temples (there's another, less interesting one alongside) had an aura of bare, ascetic vulnerability, with the leafless winter trees, the silent monks in rough cassocks, the incense mixing with the dust from the construction site on the other side of the road, the cowbells intermingled with pneumatic drills. The new world seemed distant, but impinging, the old world hanging by a thread, a hazy cloud, ready to be blown away in the next gale. China, a work in progress: all that which wasn't destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, or in the previous feudal dynasties of war, famine, fire and flood, has a much more dangerous enemy now: progress.

I asked Clive how the monks justified the five Yuan entrance fee. Wasn't Buddhism the antithesis of capitalism?

'Well, monks still have to eat, don't they?' he replied pragmatically. 'Thought for the day,' he continued. 'Funny, isn't it, this huge city of anything between six and nine million, that no one's ever heard of?'

'Right enough. I'd never heard of it before I came here.'

'What you saw last Friday night, you know, the violence, the debauchery, the prostitutes, all comes from Harbin being a crossing town.'

'A crossing town?'

'Yes. It's a major railway crossing: Beijing to the south, Vladivostok to the east, to the west Russia then Europe via the Trans-Siberian Express...'

'Of course! In fact, when I finish my contract here, I don't want to fly home, I want to take the train to Moscow, to Paris!'

'Watch out for thieves if you do. Anyway, what I was saying was, we're in the Wild East here, and there are plenty cowboys about. Much of the land is still wild, and many of the people here are too.'

We went back out into the dust and the hammering and waited for a bus.

You can get on a bus in Harbin and travel for as long as you like for one Yuan (the cheap busses) or two (if you want heating/air-conditioning). Naturally the one Yuan busses are the more crowded. Naturally the two Yuan busses are the more comfortable.

In this world you get what you pay for. The one Yuan busses have holes in the floor; the seats, if you can get one, are filthy and often broken; the suspension is long gone, so every bump on the broken-up tarmac roads is a killer; the driver's a boy-racer, competing with busses from rival companies to get to the stops first. Pedestrians and cyclists beware: these busses stop at nothing, not even at red lights.

A middle-aged woman is usually sitting halfway down the bus, next to the exit doors, to collect the money. Her secondary job is to stick her head out of the window and scream at the top of her voice the number of the bus, the price, and the route, telling punters at the roadside in no uncertain terms to 'GET ON THE BUS!' She promises them seats when there are none. She tells the standing customers to 'MOVE TO THE BACK!' every time more punters get on, trying to squash in as many fare-payers as is humanly, or inhumanly, possible.

'Standing Room Only' does not do justice to these death traps. The conductress justifies her existence by constantly fitting thirty or forty more people onto the bus than it was originally designed for. When the bus brakes suddenly - in fact the busses always brake suddenly, with no thought for the people's comfort or safety - the standing customers go flying forwards like human dominoes, only saved from broken bones or suffocation by the fact that there are so many people standing, it’s impossible to fall right over; you're just left at a forty-five degree angle to the floor, your elbow in someone’s midriff, someone else's elbow in your back.

Outside the Ji Le Si today we got on one of these busses. As the doors rolled open, we could see a mass of assorted arms, legs and bums, none of them seeming to belong to a whole human body. The conductress told us to 'GET ON THE BUS!' assuring us there was plenty room. We didn't want to, but we were beginning to lose feeling in our toes, ears and noses. It was getting late and it was getting cold. Tam and Clive squeezed on first, managed to get onto the top step, then half onto the floor proper. I jumped on as the bus started to pull away but found that I couldn't actually get in. I started to topple backwards just as the exit doors snapped shut. I grabbed an overhead rail and clung on grimly, feet dangling, missing floor. I hung on until the next stop, then realised the greater danger that awaited me. A bunch of people had edged and pushed around the exit space and, as soon as the doors opened, they would shove themselves off the bus and take me with them!

I desperately tried to find a foothold but couldn't. The doors swooshed open. I gritted my teeth and gripped the rail as tightly as I could. Then an avalanche of humanity swept over me, through me, people pushing, shoving, elbowing, until my body was parallel to the ground in a Superman pose. I stayed in this aerodynamic position for some time until all had gone through and the doors snapped shut again, nearly slicing off my feet, which were just beginning to return to earth after their maiden voyage.

Public transport was never such an adventure in the UK. At least I have a story to tell her during our Sunday night phone call.