For the centuries China was the dominant force on the planet, yet its very existence was only a legend in the West. Its capital, too, was unknown other than as the culminating point for the fabled Silk Road. There at its termination stood the city of Xi'an, where Kublai Khan's favorite son maintained a splendid palace. Xi'an was a magnificent metropolis, the largest in the world, set on a great plain "in the midst of level emptiness... flat as a mirror."
It is in that ancient capital, three thousand years after its founding, that J. D. Brown finds himself subsisting on the local economy, a teacher of English; and it is from that vantage point that he probes the enormity into which he has impulsively cast himself, the continuum called China.
It is a startling contact with a part of the planet that could well qualify as another world altogether. Not the garish tourist attraction we are often presented with, but the moody repository of a merciless and endless history. "One is dropped into the well of time: mud villages and villagers unmarked by the press of 23 centuries; molded clay, still fresh and living along the road-side, watching strange caravans pass today as they have always passed on the road to the capital; sights enough to singe the modern senses, to rearrange Western vision of the world and pack it into a crease reptilian in its intensity."
"Any journey worth taking," writes Brown, "is an act of self-excavation." Not since Alex Shoumatoff and Bruce Chatwin hit the road has there been such a literate traveler.
It is in that ancient capital, three thousand years after its founding, that J. D. Brown finds himself subsisting on the local economy, a teacher of English; and it is from that vantage point that he probes the enormity into which he has impulsively cast himself, the continuum called China.
It is a startling contact with a part of the planet that could well qualify as another world altogether. Not the garish tourist attraction we are often presented with, but the moody repository of a merciless and endless history. "One is dropped into the well of time: mud villages and villagers unmarked by the press of 23 centuries; molded clay, still fresh and living along the road-side, watching strange caravans pass today as they have always passed on the road to the capital; sights enough to singe the modern senses, to rearrange Western vision of the world and pack it into a crease reptilian in its intensity."
"Any journey worth taking," writes Brown, "is an act of self-excavation." Not since Alex Shoumatoff and Bruce Chatwin hit the road has there been such a literate traveler.
