Riding the Silk Road in China

...Immediately outside Lanzhou was the large area of truck gardens and orchards that surrounds every Chinese city and supplies the free markets...

...It also boasts a factory—perhaps the last of its kind in the world—that still manufactures steam locomotives according to the antique Russian pattern...

...To hear the words of the Master thus transformed from dogma to opinion set me to thinking fast about what stage we had reached in the calendar of the Chinese Revolution...

...Until recently they were off bounds to foreigners, perhaps because the Chinese atomic testing grounds are not far away in the deserts to the west...

...Lady Chatterley's Lover is still banned, and there has been a purge of allegedly obscene books...

...There are no Russian-style queues, and food rationing no longer exists...

...Thence we proposed to journey via Taiyuan to Xi'an—which, apart from its historic interest as the old T'ang capital of Chang'an, is the main hub of air travel in central China—and on to Lanzhou, the capital of the desert province of Gansu, a long, arid corridor between Mongolia and the marchlands of Tibet...

...He suggested that we travel up the Silk Road into the Gobi Desert, a trip requiring a good two days...

...But modern Chinese are very puritanical, and such actions, however reprehensible we may find them, probably have considerable popular support...

...But a street or two away, in an ancient temple the townspeople were turning into a museum, we were shown unanticipated and uncelebrated treasures...

...Once we came upon a deserted city, its packed dirt fortifications still standing high...

...In the peak days of the Silk Road, Dun Huang was a great junction...

...Lanzhou is a very strange industrial (own, stretching over 40 miles along the Yellow River and vastly polluting it...

...Apparent, too, is the emergence of the mature native styles of the T'ang and the Sung, both generously represented in friezes depicting donors and devotees, town scenes and country scenes, armies marching and merchants traveling the Silk Road—a lively documentary record of life on the edges of the Gobi Desert a thousand years ago...

...The original Silk Road, an old camel and wagon trail used by traders and travelers as late as the 1930s, has been replaced by one of those rough Chinese inland roads that are built almost entirely bv gangs of men—and sometimes women as well—as projects to ease a pressing unemployment situation (trucks to carry material and diesel-powered rollers are the only machines involved...

...Considering that it has stood for 15 centuries, enduring the weather as well as political storms, it still looked amazingly pristine...

...In Lanzhou we hoped to find transport on the Silk Road to the most magnificent of all Chinese sites—in terms of art, if not history—the so-called Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, at the great oasis of Dun Huang in the Gobi Desert...

...It was in connection with Datong's coal mines that we first saw China's new pluralist economy at work (outside, that is, the Beijing luxury hotels under joint government-private ownership...

...Behind the great altar where it lay were stored five lifesize bronze Buddhas brought in from abandoned desert temples...

...on the outside were prayers for the living, on the inside for thedead...

...Had the third coming of Deng Xiaoping been the equivalent of the ninth Thermidor in the French Revolution...

...Since there is a good deal of unemployment among youths leaving school, it is easy to recruit labor...

...It withered as soon as it was founded...

...I had a birthday at Lanzhou, and the local cultural office treated this as a reason for holding a sucking pig banquet, which meant second-class honors according to Chinese protocol...

...Three of the older men we met in the temples told us they had been at Wutai San since early childhood...

...Zhou Enlai was remembered with respect and affection...

...The Cultural Revolution was almost universally condemned, though here I must point out that much of the time we were with intellectuals, many of whom had been agricultural exiles or had suffered the excesses of the Red Guards...

...Fortunately, the Chinese—reflecting most of the peoples around the Pacific Rim— have a talent for mitigating the environmental effect of industry by preserving such inner city amenities as parks and temple gardens, and by planting every street of sufficient width with shade trees, frequently using hardy species like plane that are notably pollution-resistant...

...The other 500 Dun Huang caves—of which we saw the 50 best—were illustrated with frescoes and populated with painted clay statues...

...In one hamlet, where we stopped to see an unusual pagoda, they insisted on delaying us for a couple of hours to prepare a lavish rustic midday banquet...

...and by the Chinese themselves in the shape of the Red Guards...

...When we reached the caves, sand martins swooped over us from the tiny burrows they had themselves pecked out above...

...Let me give a framework to our trip...

...We were given the freedom and means to go wherever we wanted, but we paid our own way...

...And it provides a whole education in the interaction of the Greek, Indian, Persian, and Chinese artistic traditions in the cultural melting pot of Central Asia during the high period of the Silk Road...

...Gandhi's Emergency, and in Turkey under martial law when soldiers with automatic weapons stood on every street corner in Izmir...

...I was in General Odria's Peru, and was myself dragged from a collective by the Guardia Civil...

...I couldn't help noting that whereas India remains a seemingly irreversible caste society, China has considerable class mobility—much like our world—and an egalitarian feeling quite unusual in Asia...

...Finding the hotels there crowded and expensive, they pooled their profits and built their own hotel in the capital...

...The upper walls of this miniature St...

...The city was built by an emperor who dreamed the site was auspicious, and he sent thousands of people out to create a community in the waterless wasteland...

...Its crumbling earth walls and ancient T'ang and Sung temples stand on a vast coal bed with deep seams and surface outcrops...

...What we saw when we arrived at Yungang was a rather different aspect of the Chinese genius for collective effort...

...The abundance of consumer goods on a basic level is obvious throughout China...

...One of them was a beautiful and colossal reclining figure of Sakyamuni in Nirvana, more than 20 yards long, made by Sung artistsamillenniumago...

...The earlier caves were simpler, and open to the air and sky, though beam holes around the immense Buddha figures suggested that canopies of some kind must have once sheltered them...

...Although we inevitably encountered Party members, of all levels, their partisanship was neither evangelical nor obtrusive...

...The old traffic of the Silk Road ended half a century ago, and the only camels we saw were drawing carts in the widely scattered oases...

...The villagers, with unvarying hospitality, gave us tea and often more substantial entertainment...

...Here the streams still ran toward the Yellow River, and in the cheerless gravelly uplands we saw many groups of people busy by the river banks panning the shingle and washing it in sluice boxes and rockers in the traditional manner of placer miners...

...The monks of Wutai San had hung on obstinately through times of danger and neglect, and eventually thepilgrims returned...

...Beijing is not any better guide to the country's whole reality than Washington is to the whole reality of the United States...

...They were among the finest pieces of Chinese metalwork any of us had seen, yet they sat unrecognized in this little town on the Silk Road...

...Beyond, as the land rose, we entered grazing country, with stark mud villages, big herds of sheep and cattle, and even, in one fairly high settlement inhabited by outlying Tibetans, a few yaks...

...Too much has been given...

...A service was going on in a Lamaist temple, the monks chanting the sutras in their strange jundering way and the novices playing small instruments rather like oboes...

...When the bell rings, it is believed, all the prayers are activated...

...Everywhere we encountered evidence of the new winds that have been blowing through China...

...The pilgrims came from all directions...

...Women and old men were doing a brisk business in Buddhist rosaries (108 beads in length) on the stairways of the temples, and the big glass boxes in front of the altars were full of small bills (which can represent as little as three cents) and aluminum coins...

...The largest of these figures, a Sakyamuni with his two favorite disciples, Ananda and Kasyapa, was about 75 feet tall...

...The people we encountered were not afraid to speak their minds, particularly when it came to the mistakes committed by their rulers in the past...

...Of course, oppressions are going on...

...Yungang is well of f the ordinary tourist route...

...A major reversal of the steady opening of Chinese society initiated by the Deng Xiaoping leadership appears unlikely at this stage...

...The powerful carving of its distinctly North Chinese face and the crisp delineation of the draperies were very much in the Greek style that lingered so long in Buddhist statuary...

...1 know what it feels like to be in a country where the people are oppressed and the instruments of oppression are visible...

...I remembered the old Chinese poems written in the T'ang era about the desolation of these distant frontier lands and the despair of those who were sent to guard them against the cruel and resourceful Huns...

...through the low mountains near the Great Wall, where the valleys were poetically white from the blossoming of thousands of wild plum trees...

...Since there is no airport at Datong, we went there by rail, traveling "soft" (upholstered seats with antimacassars) on a grimy old train whose final destination was some remote town in Sinkiang...

...so did Marco Polo, and the Jews who later settled in Kaifeng...

...In the process it has lost almost all of its traditional character and become an example of undisciplined urban spread...

...Its citizens may not be free by our lights, but they do not behave like a tyrannized people...

...by White Russian soldiers fleeing Bolshevism, who camped there and caused smoke damage with their fires...

...We had a setback at Lanzhou that turned out to be a stroke of good fortune...

...Then it spread along the Silk Road through central Asia into China, where the earliest caves, at Dun Huang, are thought to have been dug out in the late fourth century...

...The later and more elaborate caves, which we entered first, lay behind a cut-rock colonnade whose massive pillars suggested an eroded temple in the ancient Egyptian city of Karnak...

...Not only every kind of food, but clothes, toys, books, furniture, shoes, goldfish, embroideries, and suiting and dress materials were for sale in large quantities...

...But the cult of personality is virtually dead...

...We also passed through industrial towns like Taiyuan, a steel-making center (my wife counted 60 factory chimneys from our hotel window...

...He banged it with a log on a chain whenever a donation was dropped in his glass box, sending out a deep tone that rang across the valley and faintly echoed from the hills...

...DATONG, WE DISCOVERED, IS a coal town...

...It was an opportunity we had not expected, and we agreed immediately...

...The first relates to the fact that since I am by way of being an Old India Hand, a comparison of the two cultures came immediately to me...

...Often we would travel many miles without coming upon another vehicle or a habitation that was not a ruin...

...A brightly-colored volcanic range to the north bordered on Mongolia...

...I suspect most of them were drawn by an interest in history, a veritable desire to repossess the past that the Chinese are displaying these days— quite a turnaround after the Cultural Revolution's attempt to wipe out respect for old things...

...At no time was I put in a position where I felt praise was expected of me...

...It was a sedately paced steam locomotive, fueled by bituminous coal that gave off a dense black smoke, and the grit settled gently onto our hair and clothes as we chugged along...

...A little over a week after leaving Wutai San we were in Lanzhou...

...A decade ago Lanzhou was a sleepy provincial capital of 300,000...

...Peter's were decorated with numerous Buddhas in light relief, painted in luminous greens and turquoises, and the ceiling was embellished with flying devas whose swirling draperies gave the impression of flames...

...Now the sanctuary has 500 monks, including many young novices, and a few nuns...

...Two people were imprisoned—two too many, without question, but better than the thousands victimized in earlier purges...

...The quest for the Four Necessaries—currently a washing machine, a color television, a motor bike, and a video projector—is increasingly coming to determine vital arrangements like marriages...

...I never sensed that smell in China...

...and over the parched-looking northern Shansi plateaus of tawny loess, populated by large herds of small sheep and dotted with clay-walled villages, ruined forts and beacon towers of tamped earth...

...young people bowed, and an old man prostrated himself before he laid a miniature statue of Buddha on the knee of a huge figure...

...The adjoining cave had been made into the form of a high dome...

...We had to climb a snowy pass 9,000 feet high to get into the remote valley of the sanctuary, and another 8,000 feet high to get out...

...They were shrewd enough to hire good managers, and the venture is apparently flourishing...

...and popular satisfaction with the degree of economic and social —if not political—freedom being permitted...

...In another temple an old monk sat beside a huge bronze bell weighing five-and-a-half tons...

...I was in India during Mrs...

...We had come down from the mountains into the plain of Shansi, stopping at villages where there were ancient temples...

...Even on May Day, when we arrived, there were night frosts, and the daytime temperature hovered below 40 degrees...

...Expecting to encounter mainly old people, I was surprised by how many young people we met, particularly young parents teaching their children to make offerings and prostrate themselves before the great images...

...Large numbers of people were obviously earning a living in their own way, in their own time, and prospering...

...The comparatively few people who visit come to see the caves...

...In all these situations a shared fear was heavy in the air, and I know its smell...

...One was an abbot in burnt-orange brocade robes who invited us to take tea in his parlor...

...anyone could believe what he liked and practice the ceremonies he preferred, so long as his religious organization was genuinely Chinese...

...But it was the influence of India that was immediately evident in the sculptures...

...Because it would be unsafe for planes to fly during the next day or two, the head of the Cultural Bureau offered to make the departmental bus available to us...

...The Chinese passion for commerce has come to the surface again, and everybody who can manage it is trading and trafficking like mad to acquire consumer goods...

...Necessity led us through Xi'an, a kind of transport knot for all the airlines of central China...

...too much is expected by the people...

...Into the dim heights of the dome rose the figure of a seated Buddha more than 60 feet high, with a disciple—merely life-size— standing on his thigh...

...ATRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Riding the Silk Road in China BY GEORGE WOODCOCK Beding I went t? China eager to see it as wholly as I could—not merely as the Party and its political power structure and its often apparently capricious displays of authority, but as a living, growing society whose unofficial collective forces have increasingly been bringing about changes in direction...

...I calculated that more than 3,000 vendors, most of them peasants bringing in their produce, had come and gone by closing time, and this was only one of several markets in the city...

...We saw only one other Caucasian there, a lost-looking Australian girl, but the site was full of Chinese on holiday carrying their little mass-produced cameras...

...Only a few oases large enough to maintain real towns can be found on this long road...

...As we drove out to the caves at Yungang, about seven miles from the city, the roads were swarming with decrepit old trucks and little tractor-trailers loaded with shiny black coal...

...The trail leading west toward Khotan and Kashgar (and ultimately to Afghanistan, Persia and the Aegean Sea) crossed the one going north from India and Tibet into Mongolia...

...There are fewer police in sight than in Paris or Madrid or Rome, and the only soldiers we saw were men on leave...

...Following many centuries of careful maintenance, it was finally left to the weather, and we drove beside its crumbling remnants practically all the way to Dun Huang...

...The distance was about 800 miles— first through the hill ranges that skirt the Yellow River to the north, then up the He\i Corridor, a huge tongue of wasteland that reaches to the northwest and unites with the Gobi near Dun Huang...

...At last, late on the second long day, we passed through a tract of desert glittering like snow from deposits of saltpeter, and reached the green oasis of Dun Huang...

...Most countries, when you reach the hinterlands, turn out to be very different from what political leaders and diplomats and the majority of foreign correspondents perceive in the ambience of the capital...

...Through the centuries they have suffered many assaults: by iconoclastic Moslem invaders, by rapacious collectors for European and North American museums...

...The high road that crosses the Gobi Desert to Sinkiang now runs north of Dun Huang, leaving it a rather laid-back small town...

...Had the direction in China shifted irreversibly in 1977, as it did in France with the fall of Robespierre...

...The old city dates from Han times, 2,000 years ago...

...The practice filtered into Afghanistan, as the gigantic figures carved into a cliff face at Bamiyan attest...

...The sand dunes beyond it made a dramatic pattern of highlights and shadows as the sun went down...

...Dun Huang was our final destination...

...for pillows we were given sacks of rice that rustled sibilantly and insistently under our heads...

...I was struck by three broad characteristics of China today throughout my travels: a resumption of pride in the past and reverence for tradition...

...My second conclusion is also a comparative one...

...During the feast my wife talked to a local Party functionary about what we had seen at Wutai San...

...A first-class banquet, given to heads of state and similar dignitaries, features birds' nest soup and sucking pig...

...Within roughly 100 years a whole array of caves—more than 50 of them, large and small—had been excavated, and over 50.000 statues had been fashioned inside, varying from enormous to minuscule...

...Most of them were lodging in the houses of local people, but a cooperative of villagers was building a hotel complex—using traditional craftsmen, whose forefathers had built temples for centuries, to create structures that would harmonize with the setting...

...Why, there are 900 Catholic churches open and flourishing in China, he said, adding with a chuckle that China is the only country where one can hear a Latin mass: The Chinese bishops did not attend the Vatican Councils that established the vernacular mass, and the Pope was unable to hunt them down as heretics...

...Half were plain cells where the monks lived...

...Of course, he assured her, religion was now entirely free in China...

...We wanted to see what remained of all the religious monuments after the long decades of struggle against Japan and revolutionary war, and the destruction wrought by the Cultural Revolution...

...Our first days were spent in Beijing...

...Some of the partnerships are genuine cooperatives...

...Wang Meng's Ministry of Culture, anxious to establish friendly relations with foreign writers and artists, was hosting my wife and me together with aCanadian painter, born in China, and his wife, an art dealer...

...Chinese opera, which we attended as often as we could to enjoy the regional variations, has moved away from the propagandist uses it was put to during the Cultural Revolution and is once again an escapist art...

...Only in such places as the old religious sanctuaries did the birds survive...

...The authorities did react—after an inexplicable delay—to the student demonstrations of last December...

...China, I found, is no exception...

...The first cave we saw contained a pagoda 50 feet high that had been carved in situ, like those in early Indian Buddhist caves...

...From there we wound our way back through Lanzhou and Xi'an and down to Guangzhou, where the fertile landscape seemed to be half water compared with the aridity of the north, but the relics were fewer because of thedampness...

...The Yungang grottoes are located in a sandstone cliff about a half mile long, crested with the remains of mud-walled medieval fortifications...

...WhileMao's errors in his last years were admitted, his younger days as a revolutionary leader were often mentioned with admiration...

...After leaving Datong we spent a long day traveling through the mountains of Shansi to Wutai San, one of China's five sacred mountain sanctuaries...

...Urban people on fixed salaries miss out on all this, and the many Party cadres who are complaining that the liberation of trade has gone too far may be motivated more by envy than doctrinaire conviction...

...At most I was asked for advice and sometimes for criticism...

...We had decided to seek out the places where Buddhist art once flourished, following a line that would run west and south into Shansi and then across northern China to the Gobi Desert...

...Gorgeously coif fed and bejeweled actresses and actors sing in their plangent voices of the loves of long-dead emperors, lords and ladies...

...The main dish—consisting of stewed chicken with deep-fried hardboiled eggs—was called Son and Mother, and the toasts in fierce rice spirits were numerous and always bottoms up...

...We heard sparrows singing overhead— an unusual sound in modern China, where small birds were almost exterminated in a grain-saving campaign that had direecological consequences...

...We moved across the plain west of Beijing, green with its winter wheat crops...

...it started at six in the morning and ended about five in the afternoon...

...These were the routes by which intellectual, spiritual and material imports reached China: Nestorian Christian and Manichean missionaries came...

...But most of the visitors were Han Chinese...

...Moreover, although Yungang is not an active religious center with priests and monks, we saw expressions of the devotionalism whose resurgence is also a part of contemporary China...

...behind the high snow ridges of the Qilian Shan to the south lay the Tibetan frontier...

...As the elderly abbot went on to tell us of a colleague who had been killed by the Red Guards, one felt he was mainly grateful to have survived...

...Eventually we came to the Great Wall —not the restored and well-tended monument we had seen near Beijing, but the utilitarian wall of tamped earth and brushwood fascines built by the Han dynasty 2,000 years ago to protect the Silk Road...

...In sum, it seems to me that the current campaign against "bourgeois liberalism" is less a sign of the Stalinoid Right's ascendancy than of an oscillation in the dominant Center...

...Over such stretches the presence of the Wall— in some places eroded by the wind to within a few feet of the ground, in others still standing 15 feet high with its watchtowers massively tall—gave us a brooding sense of the human life that had existed there...

...The hotel was primitive...

...Young though the season was, with tiny green needles just beginning to appear on the larches and the first almonds blooming by the temple walls, the valley was already full of pilgrims...

...too much has been committed...

...In the mid-fifth century the reigning Wei emperor sent a monk called Tan Yao to begin work on the Yungang grottoes...

...We stayed the night in one of them, ancient Zhangye, where the monk Fa-hien spent the winter of 400 CE in the course of his great journey to bring back Buddhist scriptures from India...

...Since then the city has grown by 2 million...

...I hope 1 am not...

...Nostalgia hangs in the air as audiences of workmen and market women listen critically to every note and applaud famous stars in their 50s and 60s...

...Produce is swapped for other goods or vended in the free street markets that operate in every town...

...Recounting his experiences during the Cultural Revolution, he described how the Red Guards had forced him to crawl on the ground while they beat him so badly that his hearing was permanently damaged (he was almost deaf)· At present, he said, the Chinese authorities are giving all the monks small pensions—enough to buy their rice and oil—and are restoring the temples as national monuments...

...The key destinations at the western end of our journey were to be Datong, near the great fi fth-century cave shrines of Yungang, and Wutai San, the ancient religious sanctuary in the heart of the holy mountains to the north...

...1 may be wrong...

...Nevertheless, much of the caves' contents has been splendidly preserved— thanks to a climate where less than an inch of rain falls each year...

...The bell was covered inside and out with little scraps of paper bearing petitions to Amitabha, the Buddha of the Westem Paradise...

...I also came away with two other conclusions that may set my view of China somewhat apart from that of Western journalists anchored in Beijing...

...and little medieval towns like Pyngyao, where men were wheeling the nightsoil through the narrow streets in neat little wooden barrels on handcarts, and the old heavily tiled buildings were hung with ancient metal signs depicting the occupations of the proprietors...

...The purpose of my visit was not primarily to perform historico-political analyses, but at such moments I could not help pondering the meaning of the signs...

...This was being taken into the town to be sold, or to the countryside to be bartered...

...Offerings of incense, cakes and money were left in many of the caves...

...The monks were patronized by traders and travelers who made offerings and sought auguries before setting out on thedreaded trek across the Taklimakan Desert (the path was marked with the bones of men and animals who had died trying to make the crossing...

...The sort of institutionalized servility that corrupts both master and servant in India simply does not exist among the Chinese...

...Yet in terms of recent Chinese history, their response was notable for its mildness...

...Back at Lanzhou, we visited a free market in the streets near our hotel...

...One of the officials I met in Datong told me with a mixture of admiration and wry irony about some peasants of a district in Shansi who had become so prosperous with their farming and trading that they had to make frequent business trips to Beijing...

...The fact that the painter in our little group spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese enabled us to talk with ordinary people (who outnumber Party members 25:1) without having to resort to the very agreeable young official from the Ministry of Culture who accompanied us to make our arrangements...

...That was the only place we were aware of the considerable flow of tourists the Chinese authorities contrive to channel into a limited circuit of famous sites...

...To get to the caves we walked through a kind of garden that contained temple buildings from the much later Ming Age...

...The notion of a Communist government as protector of ancient ways struck us as a bit strange, prompting my wife to remark with mock innocence, "But I thought Marx said that religion is the opium of the people...

...but every 15-20 miles—a night's camel ride—there would be the mud ruin of a caravansary...

...others are run by groups of smallscale entrepreneurs who employ their own workers...

...No intellectuals were sent to the country, and I learned that a university administrator deprived of his post as a result of the riots was not only allowed to carry on his research but was even chosen as a member of a scientific mission to be sent abroad...

...Mining is divided between State-owned enterprises that operate the deep shafts, whose chimneys and surface buildings tower on the edge of town, and hundreds of little mines dug into the walls of gulleys in the loess formations, worked by individuals or small partnerships...

...Our outlays were considerably less than the tourist agencies would have exacted, yet we were spending good foreign currency, so everybody's face was properly saved...

...I was in Nasser's Egypt in 1961.1 was in the Greece of the Generals, and in Franco's Spain...

...In the millennium that Dun Huang flourished as a major Buddhist center— from the fourth century to the Yuan dynasty in the 14th—better than a thousand caves were dug in a long cliff of conglomerate that edges a little oasis about 10 miles outside the city...

...I suppose one could define our status during the trip as that of paying guests...

...Driving through the countryside of Guangdong, we saw ample evidence of peasant prosperity: Big horseshoe graves are being built again, ornate houses are under construction (narrow and three or four floors high, to conserve the profitable land), and dense columns of produce trucks stand at ferry points...

...The Hexi Corridor was sometimes sand dunes, sometimes vast stretches paved with dark pebbles...

...Most important, the road from India brought Buddhism to China and subsequently to Japan, and it enabled Chinese pilgrims like Fa-hien and Hsuen Tsang to journey in the opposite direction to the lands where their beliefs originated...

...In the early days of Buddhism in India, the customary way of giving monumental and permanent expression to the faith was by enlarging natural caves, or excavating new ones, and carving in the living rock statues symbolizing—and later depicting—the Buddha...

...We were booked to fly to Dun Huang, but news came of a sandstorm accompanied by a rare rainfall, resulting in what is known in the Gobi Desert as a "yellow rain...

...In a month of traveling I saw only one publicly displayed portrait of Mao, the gigantic specimen in Tiananmen Square, and none of Deng Xiaoping or any other living leader...

...The peasants, of course, are running their own plural economy, tending patches of land and rows of plastic greenhouses either individually or in small partnerships (the great communes of Mao's day have long disintegrated...

...People went liiere—ill hey went al all—for a look at ils extraordinary museum of neolithic pottery and Han relics taken from the tombs along the Great Wall...

...Rummaging in the ruined buildings within the gates we found shards of Ming pottery...

...Ah, that was Marx's opinion," answered the Party man, lightly going on to other topics of conversation...

...Thousands of young men had apparently left the nearby towns at the news of a gold strike, and the authorities were glad to let them go: A gold rush might be an extreme manifestation of the new spirit of free enterprise, but it helped solve the employment problem...

...Its surfaces, and the grotto walls, were covered with miniature relief scenes of the Buddha's life, in a manner reminiscent of the Greek-influenced carving of Gandhara in North India...

...A party of Mongolian lamas wore sheepskin garments under their maroon robes, and a trio of tall Tibetan monks answered our greeting and gave their blessing in the broad accent typical of Kham, the eastern province of their country...

...Some dated from the T'ang dynasty 12 centuries ago, their elaborate roof timbers admirably preserved in the dry North China climate...

...a return to religion among all generations, so that Catholic seminaries as well as Buddhist temples are full of novices...