Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

the Olympics, the Chinese government had gone to extreme lengths to reduce the city’s famous smog. Anything for a coming-out party. If this was reduced smog, though, it was still pretty impressive. I had noticed the haze days earlier as well, on our way through the airport to Guiyu.

“Is that the famous Beijing haze?” I’d asked Cecily.

She looked out the window. “I think it’s just because it’s going to snow later today,” she said. “The forecast is for snow.”

Pre-snow haze?

“I think so,” she said.

“No, Cecily,” I said, laying down some ground rules. “It’s pollution, okay?”

Now, on our way back, she abandoned the snow excuse. Instead, she mentioned that fog was in the forecast.

“There has been fog for three days,” she said.

“Smog,” I said.

“Fog.”

“Smog.”

“Fog.”

She was an uncompromising negotiator. But later in the evening, after we retired to our hotel rooms, she sent me a text message to tell me that, on television, the news was that it had been the most polluted day of the year so far. I win, Cecily.

Night. Beside the highway, the squat, flaring glow of a refinery floated by, bladerunner-like in the haze. We watched from the pitch-darkness of Liu’s cab.

The most polluted city in the world. The beams of oncoming headlights writhed in the heavy air. We were driving to Linfen. Through the city’s outskirts and onto a broad multilane highway, an empty avenue of streetlights, the smog unbelievably thick. We passed a carved sign: WELCOME TO LINFEN. With perfect timing, a truck piled high with coal came onto the road in front of us. A chunk of coal skittered loose and obliterated itself against the roadway, joining the stains that marked the passage of previous coal trucks.

Linfen is a coal town, and legendarily dirty. In fact, hardly anybody outside China has ever heard of the place, unless they’ve heard of its pollution. That was the only reason I had heard of it, and the only reason you’re hearing about it now. Linfen sits at the heart of China’s coal country, in Shanxi Province. But to visit Linfen is not merely to travel to another time, to remember how industry used to dominate the landscape around American and European cities. Linfen is also a convenient symbol of what China is doing to the global environment—the same thing we’ve been doing for a hundred years.

Let’s run some numbers. China’s consumption of coal doubled in the decade leading up to 2010, to more than three billion tons. That’s nearly half the world’s annual supply. About three-quarters of China’s electricity comes from coal, and as the country’s electrical needs have skyrocketed, so has coal-fired power generation. China is not only far and away the world’s biggest consumer of coal but is also its biggest consumer of energy, and its biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. And even though China is fast becoming a world leader in renewable energy, like wind and solar, it is coal that has powered the nation’s precipitous rise.

This matters. The coal gets burned over there, but the carbon dioxide goes everywhere. So if, by some miracle, the West manages to stop screwing over the global climate—well, we probably won’t. Regardless, China has picked up where we haven’t left off.

The most polluted city in the world. We were downtown now. There was dust everywhere, thick on the cars, thick in the air, coating the buildings. Finally, I thought. Someplace really grim. A polluted place that isn’t nice. A place I can point to and say, Yes. It’s even worse than you imagine.

Cars swam past in the murk as we parked and headed into the hotel. In the lobby, the staff seemed to have lost our reservation, seemed in fact surprised that anyone would want to stay in their hotel for an entire night. A dwarf stood by the desk, looking me up and down with a sneer of disbelief.

I shuffled upstairs to my room, past the hall attendants, who insisted on taking my key and opening the room. It seemed less a point of hospitality than a security procedure. My room smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and urine, and I went to sleep grateful, having at last found what I came for.

The next day, though, the spell was broken.

Preferring something less redolent of gambling and low-rent organized crime, we changed quarters, moving to the Honglou, a nice hotel near the university and in sight of Linfen’s drum tower. After dropping our bags, we went to check out the city.

If you’re counting drum towers, the one in Linfen is supposed to be the second tallest in China, at 150-some feet. At the base of the tower, a worker was sweeping the sidewalk, pushing a carpet of beige powder as he went. I noticed again that everything in Linfen was dusty. A brown film coated cars that had been parked outside for even a single day. In the lobby of the Honglou, a woman had pushed a dust mop back and forth over the wide marble floor, Sisyphean and smooth.

We climbed the tower’s dusty stairs. Inside, we stared up at the ornate wooden vault of the ceiling. Drum towers and bell towers used to be important features of Chinese cities, timepieces to mark the day’s passage. But that’s all over now. Besides, when exactly would you drum the sunset in Linfen? When the sun disappears behind the smog? Or sometime later, when you assume it has reached the horizon?

From the balcony, we looked onto the hue and drone of the traffic circle that surrounded the tower. To the south, down the crowded boulevard of Drum Tower Street, we could see only a few blocks before the traffic faded away into the haze. It was like a thick mist lay on the city—but there was nothing misty in this mist, nothing damp or fresh.

At this moment, though, something began to dawn on me. I was having that feeling. That good feeling. The sensation of having woken up in an interesting new place. Oh, no, I thought. Not again.

Was Linfen really all that bad? True, its smog was the smoggiest smog I had ever seen. Smog to irritate your throat. Smog to keep you coughing through the night.

Still. I pointed my camera down Drum Tower Street. If I zoomed in all the way and took a photo where the buildings dissolved into the murk, Linfen appeared oppressive, unbearable. But if I zoomed all the way out, Linfen looked like…just another place.

Later, I showed the zoomed-out photo to my friend James, to show him how, at a visceral level, Linfen wasn’t so horrifying. He looked at me archly and said that, to him, it still looked pretty terrible. His amateur meteorologist side kicked in: he estimated the visibility in the photo at a quarter mile. The same as in a heavy snowstorm.

So don’t let me tell you it’s not bad. It’s bad. It’s really bad. Chronic respiratory disease and even lung cancer must stalk the city’s boulevards and alleyways. Schoolchildren surely contend with lungs seized by asthma. And doubtless, Linfen is symbolic ground zero for what the human race is about, these days. But when I looked down on the city from the drum tower, I saw not only smog but also cars and buses, and the KFC, and people going about their lives.

I put it out of my mind. We went down the stairs and crossed the street to check out the large civic plaza that faced the tower. Drum Tower Square, as I choose to call it, was festooned with decorations for Spring Festival. Festooned is the only word. Large mutant rabbits made of wire and fabric loomed over us. It was the Year of the Rabbit, and although Spring Festival—that’s what they call Chinese New Year in China— had already ended, that didn’t save us from being leered at by cartoon bunny rabbits everywhere we went.

The main problem with the plaza was its heartwarming display of healthy civic life. People gathered here and there in small crowds, singing old Communist anthems with obvious nostalgia. Passersby came together in circles around street musicians. In the back of the plaza, an ad hoc dance hall had been set up, complete with amplified music. Couples twirled through an unorthodox rumba. One pair glided across the stones of the plaza with eerie smoothness, the woman’s long black hair swinging over the purple velvet of her overcoat.

The dance music, too, was an old propaganda song, Cecily told me. The Communist Party saved the people, went the lyrics. The dearest people of all are the communist