a large, concrete relief map of China, its crumpled mountains reaching halfway to my knee. We stomped over the earth, leaping from one stone section of the mini-Great Wall to the next, clearing entire river systems at a stride. I happened upon Sichuan, the home province of the Han family, and from on high peered down on its rosy surface, the paint coming up in flakes.
At the far end of the boulevard was the Hua Gate. Only a few years old, it was the largest gate in the world, a man told us. But it could only generously be called a gate.
“If it’s a gate, you should be able to drive through it, or something,” Cecily said.
But the Hua Gate’s purpose was not to be driven through. Instead it was some kind of Chinese national bicep for the flexing, the gaudy ornament of a nation newly confident of its dominion. It was a monumentally ornate, gate-like building, its vast doors closed off with walls of glass. Inside we walked across its marble floors and past its huge, colored pillars to find the stairs. Three stories up, under colored LED lights that gave the place a definite Vegas sheen, we encountered a Hall of Great Chinese, with thirty-two gilded statues of this emperor or that navigator or that inventor, all of them ancient, dating to an era somewhere between history and mythology.
In the center of the room was a translucent hemisphere with the outlines of what looked like seven continents floating on its glass surface. It took me a while to realize that they were not the seven continents but rather seven different iterations of China, the outlines of seven different dynasties through the ages, now floating free across the globe, unimpeded by other land.
The next hall up hosted the statues of thirty-two famous Chinese women. They floated in the moody, blue- pink light. Cecily’s eyes went from one to the next, wondering if someday there might be room for her.
Lying in the middle of the room, twenty feet tall if she had stood up, was the grandly naked figure of Nu Kua, the goddess who first created human beings. The humans she had created frolicked all around her: freaky little golden babies that looked to me like they were up to no good.
On the city outskirts, we stopped so I could take some pictures of the billboards. There were advertisements for SUVs and sixteen-wheelers and even coal trucks. What had caught my eye, though, was a series of municipal ads. One had a picture of the drum tower under a suspiciously blue sky. The adjacent billboard showed an idyllic meadow scene, complete with fluttering doves. In the distance were city buildings; in the foreground, a ladybug perched on a photoshopped leaf. Above it all lorded a brilliant, shining sun. It’s always nice to find propaganda that has an element of farce.
Overlaid on the picture was a message: LOVE LINFEN. PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. ESTABLISH THE IMAGE.
“Does he work for the environmental protection bureau?” the taxi driver asked.
“No,” said Cecily. I was glad to hear her back away from that one.
The driver was a waggish young man who liked to talk. “I heard that foreign media declared Linfen the most polluted city. That was embarrassing,” he said. “Is that why he’s taking pictures of the ads? During the Olympics they shut down a lot of coal mines and polluting industries, so it’s better now.” They were no longer the number- one polluted city, he said.
Cecily asked him who had taken the lead spot. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. At least it’s not us.”
It was five years earlier that Linfen had first been declared the most polluted city in the world. The rankings were the work of the Blacksmith Institute, a New York nonprofit dedicated to fighting toxic pollution in developing countries. The group’s website notes that, thanks to decades of environmental activism and legislation, “gross pollution” has been radically reduced as an acute problem in countries like the United States, but that in the developing world—out of sight and mind to most of us in the West—more than a hundred million people still face serious health effects from rampant industrial pollution and toxic waste. Blacksmith’s mission is to attack this issue by pinpointing locations where concrete action could have major benefits for the health of a lot of people. The organization then provides grants and other support to local partners, who attack specific problems.
Blacksmith released its first public report in 2006, as part of its campaign to bring attention to such areas. Called
PR-wise, this was a stroke of genius. People love top-ten lists. Top-five lists, top-one-hundred lists, lists of any length. Anyone who craves hits for a website need only publish an article with a headline like “Seven Most Egregiously Philandering Basketball Players,” and watch the traffic flow. Blacksmith’s list was no exception. The report was splashed across magazines and newspapers around the world.
But because the real point of any list, however long, is to know who’s at the top of it, a lot of the coverage focused on Linfen, which had taken the number-one spot. The city became instantly notorious as the most polluted spot on the globe. (Not incidentally, I believe this report to be the original source for the picture of Sad Coal Man.) And this is the continuing source of the city’s fame, fueling article after article about how Linfen is—or was, or may one day be again—the most polluted city in the world. It was the reason I’d first heard of Linfen, and the reason I was now there.
There was, however, a problem with the list.
It wasn’t Blacksmith’s fault, really. The report’s authors clearly understood that coming up with a list of the ten most polluted places in the world was, at some level, silly. It was the same silliness I encountered when I set myself the task of choosing destinations for this book. By what standard do you make the judgment? Health effects? Contribution to climate change? Simple grossness? Blacksmith’s focus—namely, industrial pollution with large affected populations in the low- and middle-income world—was tidier than mine. But even within that niche, it is ultimately fruitless to declare that the radiation in the Exclusion Zone is better or worse than the smog in Linfen. It’s comparing cesium apples to carbon oranges.
To account for this, Blacksmith did something very reasonable: it refused to rank the places on the list. The report even says so, on page 6: “It was not realistic to put [the locations] into a final order from one to ten.”
Instead, the list was ordered by country.
Nobody noticed. Such distinctions are no match for a reader’s desire to know
Also unnoticed was that Blacksmith intended Linfen merely as an example of its kind. “Linfen acts in the Top Ten as an example of highly polluted cities in China,” reads a note on page 14. “In terms of air quality, the World Bank has been quoted as estimating that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world were in China.”
Have a little sympathy, then, for the citizens of Linfen, who instead of a one-in-ten or a one-in-sixteen ranking had to carry the gold medal all on their own. Meanwhile, the Russian city of Norilsk, also on the list, dodged a cannonball of bad press, simply because
Linfen may well have improved since those days. Blacksmith is mum on the topic of late. After a couple of years they realized that providing fodder for sensationalist headlines—and alienating local governments and industry—was not in their strategic interest. They moved on to list toxic
Coal pervades Linfen. It feeds the furnaces of power plants and of single-family homes. In the form of coke, it fuels the sprawling steel plant just east of downtown, a coal-fired fantasia of industrial power that is the last thing an American expects to see in the middle of a residential area. Our very casual attempts to stroll into this steelmaking city within a city were shut down right at the gate, but the guards were friendly enough to let Cecily use the bathroom just beyond the checkpoint. (I recommend trying the coffee shop’s restroom first. Cecily described the one at the guard post as “horrible.”)
We wandered the plant’s margins, through a crowded neighborhood, poorer than the ones we had found near the drum tower. A small pack of boys bearing plastic firearms became our escort.
“Where is he from?” they asked.
“America,” Cecily said.
“How long have you been traveling?”
“Three years,” she answered.
