T A B L E_T A L K

China lite: Join the discussion on travel in China and Chinese culture, without getting heavy or deep in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

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A resident's primer on the city's daily pleasures
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T H E_chinese_F R I E N D_________

FATE BRINGS TOGETHER AN OUTCAST AND A FOREIGNER ON A BUS TOUR IN CHINA.
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BY CHRIS TAYLOR

If I had not, in a moment of weakness, exhausted by the fury of China's bus station queues, decided to join a tour to the historic hill resort of Lushan, I would never have met Wang. We picked him up next to the train station. I can see him now, tossing a cigarette butt into the gutter and slouching aboard the minibus like a fugitive plotting his next move. His fingers were grimy and stained with nicotine. Rodents might have nested in his tufted hair. He slid into a seat and promptly fell asleep. I did not pay him much notice. My attention was taken up by the tour.

Chinese, like Japanese, are all for tours. Every self-respecting tourist attraction has its hierarchy of sights, its hoary accretion of wide-eyed lore and its filing-cabinet litany of statistics. Alone or in the wrong hands you might end up just looking in happy wonderment, but that would never do. Chinese like to come away from their holidays the better for them. We came to Mount Lushan to name the parts: the inspiration-seekers who had toiled up its slopes, the great and mighty (Chiang Kaishek among them) who had vacationed on its cool, mist-shrouded ridges, the makers and shakers (Mao Tsetung for one) who had drunk tea and debated China's unending national problems in its villas. We had come to see Lushan's pen-and-ink landscapes, its roiling cloudscapes, from the exact appointed vantage points that landscapes and clouds should be seen. We had come to get the facts.

They came thick and fast. We were group No. 28, and our guide, a young local woman in a no-nonsense red suit and armed with a shiny gold megaphone, provided committee-like statistics of every bridge we trundled over, the crops we passed by, the weather that drizzled miserably on us. "Lushan has an average winter temperature of 1.9 degrees," she announced as we rolled over a 79-meter-long bridge built in 1987. "You will note the peasants in the fields to your right planting rice. The average rice harvest in Jiangxi province ..."

Wang slept through the high-decibel, statistical assault like a baby. But at Lushan he was tapped awake. It was time for introductions. Wang was "Zhejiang friend." A timidly smiling gentlemen dressed in a shabby business suit, the washing instructions sewn onto the right cuff, was "Shanghai friend." A fresh-faced young couple who looked recently married were "Shandong friends." The sour, pinch-faced, cadre-like young man with acne that no one spoke to was "Hubei friend." I was "English friend."

Our first stop was the People's Hall. It was here in 1959 that Mao made a bellicose defense of his disastrous Great Leap Forward even as peasants across China starved. His portrait presided over the hall, which milled with the faithful, most of them dressed in uniforms of the People's Liberation Army. The auditorium was full of numbered chairs. On the stage were four more chairs identical to those provided for the audience. Historical significance notwithstanding, there is only so long I can look at a hall full of chairs. I drifted upstairs, where I found a photo gallery of Communist Party bigwigs at play -- Liu Shaoqi playing checkers with an unnamed minion, Mao at rest.

I was gazing at Mao, that aged infant, Mickey Mouse ears of hair at his temples, trying to imagine the man behind the mask with a party of army officers, when Wang bounded up beside me.

"What a load of bullshit!" he cried.

"Well ..." I said, momentarily speechless. "It depends on your politics, I suppose." The officers gave Wang a sharp look. He shrugged and sauntered off. The army officers stared daggers at his retreating back.

At Dragon Fountain Lake we had a tree to look at. It was a towering object, a cedar of some description, I guessed, and we stood before it in a small huddle, our necks craning heavenward, while our guide adumbrated its height, its age, the circumference of its trunk, its estimated number of needles; she listed the poets who had girded it in metaphor, the painters who had seized its essence with a few deft brush strokes. More tour groups arrived and formed patient queues behind us.

My mind, I'm afraid, temporarily stood easy under the assault of so much arboreal trivia, and when it snapped back to attention, I discovered the guide had been telling us that we were on our own for the next one and a half hours. She had, it seemed, been giving us detailed instructions about which path to take in order to get back to the minibus in time. I trudged off with the others, but she could tell I hadn't been listening.

"English friend!" she cried in a reproachful squeal through the megaphone. Approximately 100 heads turned. "Do you know where you're going?"

"Not really," I called back. "Don't worry. I'll just follow group No. 28. Wherever they go, I'll go."

"Well, don't get lost and hold us up."

Remember, I muttered to myself, no more tours. I cast around for Wang, but he was nowhere in sight, so I tagged along behind Shanghai friend. In the event, there was no need. The approach to Dragon Fountain Lake involved clambering down a steep flight of stairs. At the bottom was a pond and a concrete yellow dragon. A feeble fount of water dribbled from its jaws. A queue formed for photographs. When the photo session was over, we trooped back up the stairs to the minibus. To lose yourself on such an adventure, I concluded, could only be achieved by a desperate plunge into the undergrowth.

At the next stop, I didn't even leave the minibus. The guide promised wonderful views, but the mist outside was so heavy you might have carved it up and exported it to wherever in the world they are crying out for more mist. My fellow tourists trooped out in a plaintive chorus: "Aren't you coming? It's going to be very beautiful."

Wang returned about three minutes later. He stamped into the bus shaking his head in disgust. "That was a lot of fun. You can't see a thing in this weather."

The rest of the group were close on his heels. In the summer season, the guide explained, the views truly were very beautiful; this probably wasn't the best time to come to Lushan.

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N E X T+P A G E+| Wang shocks the tour group