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.Sometimes a wall dipped into a valley, and in these low places the structure had been harvested as clean as the fields.The brick facing was completely gone: all that remained was the foundation and the hard-tamped earth interior, pockmarked and crumbling from the elements.This naked wall crossed the valley floor and climbed once more into the hills, until finally, after it reached a certain elevation, the bricks reappeared.The line of destruction was level on opposite sides of the valley, as if marking the tide of some great torrent that had swept through Hebei.But this flood had been human, and the watermark was one of motivation.It measured exactly how high people were willing to climb for free bricks.In the village of Yingfang, I stopped to examine one of these bare sections, and a farmer named Wang Guo’an joined me in the road.“It was in better shape when I was young,” he said.“A lot of it got torn down during the Cultural Revolution.”He was referring to the political campaigns that lasted from 1966 to 1976, when Mao Zedong encouraged the Chinese to attack anything traditional and “feudal.” Some sections of the Great Wall were damaged during this period, and Wang could remember villagers in Yingfang tearing down their local fortifications and using the materials for other building projects.He took me behind his home, where old bricks had been piled into neat four-foot-tall stacks.“Those are from the Great Wall,” he said.“You can tell from the mortar—that’s the kind they used in the old days.They came from a big tower in the village.”I asked if people still ripped up the wall, and he shook his head.“The government around here won’t let you do it anymore,” he said.“These bricks were first taken forty years ago.People used them to build a house, which was recently demolished.Now we’ll use them to build something else.”In these crowded landscapes, everything was a potential resource.Hebei is about the same size as the state of Washington, but the population is more than eleven times higher—sixty-eight million people total.Hills have been carved into crop terraces; roads serve to dry vegetables; passing cars double as threshers.If there’s wall within reach, it’s used, sometimes twice.Able-bodied people often lead double lives—they might farm for a while and then head to the cities.They serve on construction crews; they do roadwork; they spend time on factory assembly lines.The most jobs I saw listed on a single business card was twenty-seven.That was in Shanxi Province, just beyond the Hebei border, and I met the man at a funeral.In this part of China, even funerals have a bustling air, and I stopped for processions all across the north.They took place in the road, as public as the threshing, and usually the participants invited me to the banquet that followed.It was possible to drive from funeral to funeral all the way across Hebei and Shanxi, and in fact there were people who lived this way—an endless road trip where every stop represented somebody else’s final terminus.In the town of Xinrong, I met Wei Fu and his wife, who specialized in performing traditional Shanxi opera at memorial services.They drove an old Beijing-brand flatbed truck, and they had customized the back for performances.In Xinrong they parked on the main street, set the brake, removed the railings, and erected an awning and two huge Peavey speakers.Within half an hour they had a stage, and hundreds of people gathered in the street to watch.The funeral was a seven-day event; it was especially elaborate because the dead man had owned the biggest shop in Xinrong, the Prosperous Fountainhead Store.The family arranged the man’s coffin right at the entrance, and even in death he was doing good business—the street crowd overflowed into the shop, where people bumped past the coffin and bought snacks to eat while listening to opera.A day later I stopped at another funeral just after the grave had been filled.It was in the countryside, on an open plain marked by a huge Great Wall signal tower.There weren’t any cities nearby—in China, where the law requires most citizens to be cremated, only outlying rural regions are allowed to conduct burials.Near the tower, twenty men and women had gathered, wearing white sackcloth tied at the waist with red rope [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]