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spend more time with these clay ghosts. She laughed: “You are breaking the record of the
Australian man who spent two hours here!”
Bill and Lin Xi reached a compromise, and one hour later we strolled out of the pit and
arrived for the last seating at an auditorium-size dining hall. Lin Xi showed us to a table,
pointed to the buffet lines in an adjoining room and disappeared. The food was neither
good nor bad, neither Asian nor Western. After the meal we left Xian's Terra-Cotta Army,
walking past the phalanx of souvenir stalls, and climbed into our car.
My eyes were burning. I rubbed them until I could open them again and looked out-
side. The leaden sky had been blocking the sun since we arrived. I asked Lin Xi when it
was going to rain and rinse away the heavy, foul-smelling air. “The pollution is pretty bad
here,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “This is mist. Xian has always had yellow mist. We say that dogs
bark at the sun, not the moon. Seeing the sun is rare. You can call this fog, if you like.”
I started to challenge her when Bill gently touched my arm and put a silencing finger
to his lips. Lin Xi had her playbook that required all good tour guides to deny the country's
abysmal pollution.
We had been lucky until Xian. It rained most of the time I was in Beijing, and during
our long weekend in Shanghai a strong wind off the river swept much of the filth away
from the city. But now we were in the interior of China, in a city ringed with factories,
caught inside the pollution that blankets much of the country.
After seeing the soldiers we drove back into the city, past block after block of twenty-
story look-alike concrete apartment buildings, all obscured in the soupy atmosphere. We
had arrived at our next destination—the magnificent, brooding city walls of Xian, the
longest left standing in the country. “The walls date from the Ming Dynasty and stretch
eight miles,” said Lin Xi. “It took eighteen years to dig the moat and build the walls.”
At the top of the walls Lin Xi suggested we bicycle around the top of them. I started
coughing, and coughing, and then sneezing. The air was impossible. I was reminded of
the series of stories preceding the 2008 Beijing Olympics of athletes questioning whether
they would compete in air that could harm their lungs. The marathon world record hold-
er, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, dropped out of that event rather than compete in Ch-
ina's polluted air. Their complaints forced the Chinese government to make rare admis-
sions that air pollution is a public health problem; to improve air quality for the Summer
Olympics, the government ordered the temporary suspension of factories surrounding the
city and instituted a policy to stagger the use of automobiles in the capital—a policy that
has remained in force. After the Olympics the government reverted to their old habit of
denying the true dimensions of the problem publicly, while in private taking extraordinary
precautions for their own health, purifying the air in their own homes and offices with ex-
pensive filters.
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