A Day’s Labor up Mountain Tai on the Labor Day

Like most foreigners I have met here, I find myself in a love-hate relationship with China. Some days I wouldn't be any place else. Other days, I long for the first plane home. The fact is, China is not always an easy country for a Westerner to live in. A few weeks ago, Gail and I experienced four days of hell, our very worst experience in China up to now.

For Gail and I, our nightmare began innocently enough: We were invited by the International Cooperation Department at our university on a trip to Taishan mountain in Shandong province, the most sacred of all the five Taoist mountains in China.

Sounds like a nice vacation, you say? Well, stay tuned.

We set out on Wednesday evening, thirteen of us squeezed into a new Dodge van. Our first problem came when our driver got hopelessly lost in a sprawling construction zone somewhere outside of Tianjin. Until the 1980's, maps of China were considered a state secret and road maps still appear to be in short supply. The driver of our school van had no map at all. His method of navigation was to stop every ten minutes and ask directions from lethargic groups of late-night workers who always seemed to be leaning on their shovels, standing before ghostly, half-completed skeletons of future buildings. The workers pointed first one way and then another. Probably it was the most exciting thing they did all night, sending a van load of Beijingers on a merry chase to nowhere.

We drove until eleven o'clock, when we found a hotel. The next day we started off bright and early, at 6 AM, and logged at least another 13 hours in the van. We drove and drove through a flat, desolate landscape that looked half-torn down, or half-built up -- depending on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist. But anyway you looked at it, this was not the China of scenic postcards. Every now and then, I would ask one of our university friends which town we were passing. "Oh, no, this isn't a town -- it's only a district," they would explain. Just a formless sprawl, not the country, not the city -- drab rows of old red brick houses and occasional white brick factories and stores.

It often strikes me that the single most important fact to bear in mind about China is that 1.2 billion people live in this particular corner of the earth, one-quarter of the world's population. As China becomes more affluent, there are clearly going to be serious strains on the environment as well as a variety of other problems due simply to the staggering number of human beings.

In the past few years, greater affluence has meant that more people in China can travel within the country, particularly during the main holidays – such as Spring Festival and International Labor Day, May 1st. We didn't know that Taishan Mountain is the most popular tourist destination in our part of China for the May 1st holiday. It's one thing to contemplate overpopulation as an abstract concept, from the luxury of your armchair, and quite another to experience it first hand.

After a very long drive, we began our tourist odyssey on the afternoon of May 1st at Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, not far from Taishan Mountain. It is probably a very scenic town when it isn't so jam-packed with people.

Our first stop was the "Confucius Mansions," where the descendants of the philosopher lived in regal splendor until they moved to Taiwan in the 1940's. At the entrance to the Mansions, we stood with a huge throng of people who were pushing and shoving, apparently afraid they wouldn't get in. I allowed a few people to squeeze ahead of me, trying to be polite, but I soon realized that unless I did a little squeezing and pushing also, I wasn't going to get in myself. Once inside we joined a human river that swept us along through the different buildings and into the lovely garden in the rear -- at least it would have been a lovely garden except for the garbage that was everywhere.

The next day, at Taishan Mountain itself, everything was much worse – more crowds, more garbage. It's hard to say for certain, but I would estimate that at least several million people had come to Taishan Mountain that day. Personally I have never been in such a dense crowd in my life, and if I can help it, I never will be again!

We began at 7 in the morning at the foot of the mountain. The leader of the International Cooperation Department had decided we would take a bus half-way up the mountain, and then climb the rest of the way on foot. But this was easier said than done. The crowd around us was frantic and noisy. Buses kept appearing, honking their horns, speeding through dense groups of people who were forced to jump out of the way. As soon as a bus stopped, parents began shoving their children through open windows while everyone else stampeded toward the door. Gail and I refused to be a part of the stampede -- this wasn't our idea of climbing a sacred mountain! -- but our university friends were able to get on and forcibly save us seats.

We rode half-way up the mountain, and this is where the nightmare began in earnest. I will never forget climbing a stone path that was a dozen feet wide but so densely packed with people that in many places it was physically impossible to move in any direction. Normally this would be a very pretty walk, a two hour climb to the top of the mountain from the midway point where the bus had dropped us off -- but it wasn't at all pretty today. Most of the people were trying to head upward, but some were doing their best to go in the opposite direction and get down. Occasionally there would be a surge, like an irresistible ocean current, carrying us up or pushing us back. Gail and I found the situation more than unpleasant, it was positively dangerous. In a crowd like this, a person could get trampled.

The police were doing their best to cope with the situation. At one place along the path, they were refusing to let any more people enter, diverting the flow to a stream bed that ran roughly parallel to the main path. For about an hour, Gail and I joined the thousands of people climbing over boulders and around trees and shrubs. Many of the Chinese women were dressed in tight skirts and high-heeled shoes and were not having an easy time. Some people were crying, others were sick.

Finally we came out on the path again and could actually see the gate at the top of the mountain about a quarter mile away. But the crowd was now so dense that all motion had ceased. We stood in one place, our arms pinned to our sides, for nearly twenty minutes. The crush was so intense it was difficult to breathe. Finally Gail and I decided that this was hopeless; we managed to get into the downward moving current and after a while it became a little easier to move.

It was said that Confucius once climbed Taishan Mountain; I couldn't help but wonder what the famous philosopher would advise people if he were with us that day. But if you asked me, I would say, "don't plan to visit major tourist sites in China on national holidays if you can possibly help it!"

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