When a Billion Chinese Jump

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.⁴¹ Historians 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

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.⁴³

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,”⁴⁴ which 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.⁴⁵ The 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.⁴⁷ Such, 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.

Wandering Xanadu, I was almost alone. Modern China was in too much of a hurry to bother with ruins, especially Mongolian ones. I met only two other visitors. One of them, Lu Zhiqing, a sculptor, told me he had come in search of inspiration for a statue of Kublai Khan he had been commissioned to erect in front of Shangdu’s Summer Palace Hotel. He was disparaging of the Han attitude toward the past.

“We deliberately neglect chunks of history, especially the contributions made by minorities. Kublai Khan was the greatest of them. In his day this would have been a far more beautiful place. The Mongolians traveled, so they always found beautiful spots with tall grass and plenty of water for the horses.”

But Lu was optimistic that modern China was moving in the right direction. He said his income had doubled in the previous five years and the environment had improved: “I am an artist, so I see things in terms of colors. When I was a child, the sky was so polluted that it was often yellow, red, or black. It is better now, but we must do more. What we need in China is more green and more blue.”

“But you are a communist. Shouldn’t it be red?”

“Ah, that is history. That is from the West, from Marx and Lenin. It was good for the country …” He paused. The conversation had turned toward politics, a dangerous subject to discuss with foreigners. Instead, I asked what was the biggest change he had observed in his lifetime. The answer was predictable: “My life has become better. So has the entire country.”

We returned to Beijing, driving through another grit storm, skirting the dried-up salt bed that was all that was left of Anguli Lake, and overtaking flatbed trucks carrying turbines to the wind farms rising up across Inner Mongolia. We curled down steep winding roads through the hills, passed the Great Wall, a dam, a coal train, and a half-completed concrete theme park. Every few kilometers, I saw red-armbanded volunteers sitting at the side of the road. I was curious. We stopped to ask what they were doing. “Watching out for forest fires” was the reply. It was a sensible precaution. There had been no rain for several weeks. The hills were dry and brown. The sky was the color of cement. The artist’s ideal of more green and more blue did not look as though it would be realized anytime soon.

AFTERWORD Peaking Man