It was another chilling day. Clouds of grey dust blew through the city and across the utterly flat countryside; cyclists and workers on foot struggled head-down into the wind with their fur caps’ ear-flaps streaming behind them, disciplined and determined, getting there.
The Wall itself is impressive enough, but to our minds it was slightly disappointing. The only section open to the public was entirely rebuilt 37 years ago. In effect, we were looking at a replica. There seemed to us something very Chinese about this wish to demonstrate what good condition everything is in, as if ruin would be a loss of national face. It’s rather like rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall, or those endless blocks of Workers’ Apartments – an impressive but mis-aimed effort. Much more fascinating were the miles of out-of-bounds ruined Wall, snaking into the furthest distance along the wild crest of the hills.
For the first time we saw Kurt and Julie at work. They wanted a shot of someone climbing on the outside of a guard tower. Tony volunteered. The Arriflex camera was set up, Kurt crouched over it, Julie directed the bazooka-like microphone, Danny did the handclap that would enable later synchronization of sight and sound, and off Tony went. He climbed nimbly up the Wall, crawled through an arch, and ran round to the bottom again, his film career over. But Kurt coughed and said ‘Vun more time please?’ We would come to loathe and dread those words.
Tony climbed the Wall again and again under Kurt’s direction while we huddled in the bitter wind, at once amused and apprehensive. When the climbing take was done to Kurt’s satisfaction, ‘And now, Tony, one more time for the close-up of the hands, yes?’ The hands were turning blue, but Tony complied. Then the cameras were carried to the top of the wall for close-ups of Tony’s face. We began to realize that this film would not be a hand-held camera cinema vérité job. Instead Kurt had a very clear idea of what he wanted; he was manufacturing a reality, and directed his actors accordingly.
Someone remarked that if it was this cold here, imagine what it was going to be like on Everest. Kurt jumped on the remark, ‘Good, that is good! Vill you say that again please … Yes, and then he say …’ So Nick and I made our ‘spontaneous’ remarks half a dozen times while camera and sound were co-ordinated and we finally got it right.
Mixed reactions in the team. Jon admired Kurt and Julie’s professionalism, Sandy was fascinated by the imaginative and technical aspects of filming. Some were amused (particularly those who weren’t being filmed), while others felt unease and the first stirrings of resentment. Are we going to have to do this on the hill? Bugger that. Acting made us feel foolish because we were very bad at it, and that too generated irritation.
‘When he gets behind a camera,’ Jon noted, ‘amiable Uncle Kurt suddenly becomes Joseph Goebbels.’
Signs of private enterprise at the Great Wall included women and boys selling I CLIMBED THE GREAT WALL T-shirts, Red Guard hats, postcards and paintings, at considerably cheaper prices than the official Tourist Shop. This was clearly permitted; our impression was that whatever happened in China was permitted. If it wasn’t permitted, it didn’t happen. Smiling was permitted, and the Chinese tourists at the Wall seemed to be having a marvellous time, taking pictures of the Wall, each other, and of the strange, jabbering foreigners climbing up the guard tower.
Then on to the Ming emperors’ tombs, with lunch on the way, ready and waiting for us in a barn-like restaurant. The tombs are approached by a long, wide avenue lined with giant guardian warriors like 20-foot-high chess pieces, and a menagerie of stone elephants and camels. Inevitably some of the lads tried to climb these. The smooth, rounded backside of an elephant proved too hard, but Chris made his first ascent of a camel, leaping for its ear and mouth then pulling up from there (’Very necky’). He tried to repeat it for Kurt but found himself running out of strength – he’d been much too busy in the last two months to train at all – and had to be assisted by a leg-up from someone remaining out of the shot. ‘Film is to snaps what the Himalaya is to Scotty,’ Jon wrote that night. The tombs themselves are all underground and in the end only Rick, Nick and Sarah, who had managed to escape the filming, had time to see them. Jack checked his watch. ‘And now we go back to hotel.’
Meanwhile Mal, Allen Fyffe and Dave Bricknell had gone to the CMA offices to check over our ‘protocol’ for the Expedition – part schedule, part financial agreement, detailed down to the last Yuan and yak for carrying gear from Base to Advance Base. Then they went shopping for the kind of common, heavy things there had been no point in bringing from the UK: pans, kitchen utensils, kettles and stoves. With a poor interpreter, this turned out to be a struggle.
They were taken to a store that sold electric toasters. Mal eventually explained that these would be of limited use at Base, and said we wanted the kind of stoves rural people used to cook with – thinking of the paraffin stoves used in Nepal and Pakistan. He was told that in that case we’d need to buy an awful lot of coal. It appeared there were no paraffin stoves in Peking, and precious little paraffin. This was baffling, because most of such stoves one finds in the Third World are marked ‘Made in China’. We were assured we’d be able to buy them in Chengdu (our next stop in southern China) or in Lhasa.
The shopkeepers also appeared taken aback when they heard of the one huge and five medium-sized cattle we wanted to buy. Even when the cattle resolved into ‘kettles’ we had little satisfaction, so they too were put off till later.
Back at the hotel, a demonstration of Chinese punctuality. Jack announced, ‘It is now one minute to seven. At seven o’clock we will eat dinner.’ We sat in silence for some forty seconds. ‘Now we go to dinner.’ We descended the stairs and entered the enormous, empty dining room on the stroke of seven.
Dinner as always in China was a survival of the fastest; those who were slow with chopsticks tended to go hungry. Tony fantasized about chip butties as he tried yet again to pick up a slippery fungus. ‘So where’s the tomato ketchup?’ the homesick Lancastrian complained. The food was never inspiring, but this was compensated for by the bottles of Green Leaf beer that came with every meal. ‘Alcohol is very good for the high altitude,’ Urs asserted enthusiastically.
‘Is it really?’ Danny asked innocently, eager to learn from these old-timers’ experience.
‘For sure,’ Sandy replied, ‘it stops you from ever getting there!’
That evening Jack took us through a recognizably ‘downtown’ area of Peking where there was a certain amount of night life, and turned into a theatre where we were to see a show of acrobats. The theatre was shabby and so was the audience; the sets were grubby, the costumes worn and tatty – holes in the tights and missing sequins – the music and lighting were hamfisted, the magicians were embarrassing with their transparent tricks … Against this shoddy and cut-rate backdrop shone an incomparable display of dance-juggling-contortion-tumbling-gymnastics.
We sat transfixed, hooked to every impossible development. Allen Fyffe reflected that if these near-children ever took up rock climbing, they’d be tackling 6b routes inside a week. The acrobats had that ideal combination of strength, balance, muscular control, nerve and absolute concentration. Like climbing at its most extreme, what we saw transcended the physical and became pure expression, devoid of practical value. In the finale, the whole troupe built a pyramid of themselves, an inverted pyramid resting on one person’s headstand on a chair tilted back on two legs, each branching out higher on each other’s legs, arms, shoulders, heads, backs … If we were to climb our mountain, that is the way it would be done.
Bob So far China has made a very good impression on me, and I found the fantastic, relaxed ability of the acrobats to be inspiring in its accomplishment. At first sight this does seem to be a much more equal society than Western or other Asian ones – there seems to be no grinding poverty, and if there are fat cats then the material signs of them are few. The people are obviously worked hard, but the cheerfulness and tranquillity that is seen
