Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

I felt like celebrating. I had made it all the way from Shangri-La, the longest land journey of my life. It was a moment to celebrate. I asked a taxi driver to take me to the best restaurant in town.

Functional and fluorescent-lit, the Eastern Cloud Attic looked much like any other restaurant in the town, but it offered a slightly wider selection of food. I told the waitress I was in the mood for a feast and ordered frog, snake, pigs’ ears, mushroom, mutton, and baijiu. I gorged myself, taking pleasure from consumption rather than the grim surroundings.

The owner, a chubby florid-faced Han, was delighted at the business and the rare foreign visitor. He told me he too was a newcomer to Shangdu: “I have three restaurants in my hometown, but I decided to move here because it has a new power plant. That will bring many opportunities.”

He invited me to join his table, where he held court with a dozen friends and hangers-on. There was a cook, a businessman, a driver, and a minor official. We drank baijiu, then toasted each other, then drank more baijiu.

“You are my first English friend. Drink with me in the spirit of international friendship,” he said. Then he looked around at his friends and cracked a joke: “You are not Japanese, are you?” he laughed. The hangers-on grinned. “If you were I would kill you here and now. I hate Japanese.” Guffaws erupted from around the table. I was reminded of the patriot on the train across the Tibetan Plateau. Was it the harsh environment or did the pioneers of China’s remote regions get their sense of humor from the same joke book? My celebration was over. I had eaten and drunk too much and had more than my fill. It was time to return to the hotel.

Kublai Khan was a big man with a huge appetite. The portraits of the Yuan emperor, as the Sinophile styled himself, show him to be the most corpulent ruler in China’s history. He was a brilliant leader but a troubled man. Under his rule, China’s territory was expanded to include Tibet, Yunnan, and much of Southeast Asia, paper currency was introduced, and water was diverted to Beijing, which he established as the capital. Yet he was never embraced by the Han as one of their own, and many Mongolians hated him because he took on Chinese airs. In later life, the mighty khan overstretched his empire, overconsumed, and increasingly retreated to the grasslands where he felt most comfortable. 40After the death of his son, he began binge eating, eventually dying in 1294, massively overweight and suffering from gout. His political legacy was short-lived. The Yuan dynasty ended less than a century later in famine, corruption, and war. “Toward the end of his life Kublai became depraved” read the final inscription of a Chinese exhibition on Mongolian history. “So go all emperors.”

Xanadu is a symbol of his confused cultural legacy. Built around 1256, it was a walled capital the size of Beijing’s Forbidden City that encompassed a park, trees for his falcons, and two homes. As well as a permanent marble structure, the khan-emperor also constructed a palace fit for a nomad: a round, domed structure made of gilded cane that could easily be taken down and rebuilt elsewhere. 41Historians have speculated that he moved between them according to the seasons, but he may also have been pulled from one to the other depending on whether he was in a Chinese or Mongolian frame of mind. It cannot have been easy to span a cultural divide marked so tangibly by the Great Wall. In the West, however, Xanadu is not associated with confusion or decline. Far from it. The name is synonymous in the English-speaking world with the ultimate escape, a manmade paradise. This is largely thanks to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” In 1798, the poet dreamed of an all-powerful ruler who ordered the creation of “a stately pleasure-dome.” Bursting with sexual energy, the verse explored the power of creation and destruction and man’s futile efforts to control chaotic nature. It was a dark vision, prophesying floods, war, the eruption of mountains, sunless seas, and lifeless oceans. But it was also ripe with images of fertility, of savageness and magic, of an earth so alive it almost seemed to be breathing: 42

It was pure romanticism. Like James Hilton with Shangri-La, Coleridge never set foot in the Oriental paradise he imagined so vividly. He is believed to have written “Kubla Khan” in an opium-induced reverie at a farmhouse near Exmoor in the southwest of England. He never finished. Of the two hundred lines he composed in his dream, he wrote down only a quarter. They were published as a fragment, subtitled “A Vision in a Dream,” 44which has since inspired—and sold—countless stories, films, and pop songs. Coleridge’s incomplete fantasy is now far more powerful than the imperial citadel on which it is based.

The next morning, I visited the ruins that were all that was left of the Great Khan’s stately playground. For several decades the site had been completely neglected. During the Cultural Revolution it was part of a closed military region. Such was the panic over imaginary Mongolian independence movements in those days that even the mention of the ancient khans would have been enough to warrant imprisonment or worse. A local farmer told us the land was owned back then by the May 1st Collective. Most of it was now privately farmed. The owners grew potatoes for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sand breaks suggested they too were having to fight the encroaching desert.

All that was left of the powerhouse was a square mile of grassy banks and stones on a windswept plain. There was no sacred River Alph, only a trickle on the largely dried-up bed of a stream. If there had ever been “sunny spots of greenery,” they had shriveled up or been submerged under the scrub. The only sign of natural life or human activity were a snake asleep among the rubble and some empty beer bottles. There could be few more striking examples of how empires fall as well as rise.

No single factor can explain the fall of dynasties, but environmental historians believe individuals or civilizations often bring about their own annihilation by losing touch with their roots, overconsuming or failing to recognize ecological limits. Initial success often proves the origin of later failure. Perceived strengths turn into fatal weaknesses.

Take the Maya of Central America, whose culture was so prodigious that they expanded to the point of destroying the dense rain forests where they lived and hunted. 45The fall of Sumerian civilization has been blamed on overrapid urbanization and a bronze industry that polluted their farmland. Alexander the Great might not have been driven to ultimately destructive conquest were it not for the deforestation of his Macedonian homeland. 46

But perhaps the most disturbing case was that of the Easter Islanders, who outgrew the capacity of their small isolated territory in the South Pacific. Initially successful in food gathering, they had an advanced culture for their age and gave thanks by making giant statues called ahu. Logs were felled as rollers to move the giant stones to ceremonial sites. But as the population expanded beyond the carrying capacity of the island, competition for food and materials to build statues intensified. When the islanders’ fortunes began to fail, they started to fight and were more desperate than ever to erect statues to regain the favor of their ancestors. The once densely vegetated island was completely stripped of trees. With no wood left for homes, the islanders retreated to the caves. They died out soon after. 47Such, at least, is the explanation offered by environmental historians. There were other possibilities. But civilizations, it seems, tend to fall much more quickly than they rise. By the time people realize they have hit a tipping point, it is too late to do anything.