The pits

I read in a travel book about a place called the Zibo Funeral Pits. There, the book said, within a monarch’s tomb, are hundreds of intricately buried dead horses.

I thought the place sounded interesting and so asked some Chinese people about it. Most people had never heard of the dead horses, and others only thought is sounded familiar. All of them knew of Zibo however, and they always made a funny expression when I mentioned the place. This raised my curiosity even more about the pits, so I asked Seabass if he wanted to investigate. Both of us felt the need to get out of town, so this sounded like a good excuse.

Seabass asked another colleague of ours if he wanted to tag along as well. His name is Eric. From Boise, Idaho, Eric is skinnier than me. He stands about five foot eight, wears thick rimmed glasses and has a curly black mat of hair.

I asked a Chinese friend of mine to gather basic information about where we were heading. I got what I figured we needed from my friend and early Saturday morning we three set out in a taxi for the train station far on the other end of Qingdao. We caught the train after waiting a couple hours at the station.

As is so often the case, we were the only three Westerners on the train. We ate some snacks and I watched Eric slather his tongue deep into a water bottle. Our conversation soon directed to the subject of water and how frequently we have to replace the ten gallon jugs in our apartments. Seabass and I had both replaced ours many times.

“I’ve never replaced mine,” said Eric, unconsciously slithering his tongue into the bottle for every available drop of liquid.

“Are you serious?” I asked him.

“Yes. Now the water’s turning green.”

Seabass and I put our heads in our hands and chuckled.

“What do you drink?” Seabass asked him.

“Schweppy.” Schweppy is what the Chinese call Sprite. “I don’t like water,” he added, as his tongue still searched the last molecule of H20. “I hardly ever drink it.” At that I was struck with an image of his internal organs being shrunken into sugary Schweppy raisins.


Let me just stop here for a second and add a few more facts about this character. Eric, in his own way, is a great gimmick. His gimmick matches anything Seabass or I can create. For example, he wears a large wooden skull, resembling a shrunken head, as a necklace. He goes nowhere without it. Apparently, he bought in Taiwan last summer when he received a scholarship to study Chinese there. The skull keeps evil spirits away, which is a worthy reason to wear it, but our school recommended to him that he tuck it away so his students don’t have to see it while he teaches them. Eric’s Chinese is solid; he just doesn’t use it frequently because he’s shy. Another thing about Eric is he avidly collects knickknacks that few others would buy. These items include strange foods that he often gives a whirl (I always ask for a bite whenever I see him with some), cartoons and bizarre dolls and antiques that are probably worth millions.

While we all got stares on the train to Zibo, the ones Eric gets are different. They, as far as I could tell, never treat him to that skeptical eye so often felt by Seabass and me. Rather, they look more fascinated by him than anything else. Eric, while shy, is easy-going, and doesn’t seem to mind.

On the train, we chitchatted with a few traveling Chinese people. One particular group of four young men and three women, on their way to Tai Shan, a famous Daoist Mountain, thought it odd that we were headed to Zibo. Their unified description of the place was that it was dirty. We mentioned the dead horses but they shook their heads, having never heard of them.

At the Zibo stop, we hustled to the train station exit. I saw an information booth near the exit and suggested we ask how to reach the horses. I handed the thick-shouldered man sitting behind the glass window a piece of paper that said the name of the place we were headed. I thought perhaps there was a train we could catch to head there. He shrugged, said something absolutely unintelligible and handed me the paper back. This was a poor start.

It turns out Zibo, unheard of by anyone outside China, probably even outside Shangdong Province, is a quant city of 4 million. On a map, Zibo is just another speck on your way from Qingdao to Beijing. But this is typical of China. If a city has fewer than six million people, you get the mark equivalent to what a U.S. map would give a town of 30,000.

We walked toward a large, bleak square that lay before the train station and spotted a bus station. We asked several bus drivers for help and added up the scraps of information to find the bus, or rather small van, which would take us to the dead horses.

For almost an hour, we rode the bus through coal-produced haze. We arrived in Lanzi Qu, a town that was not on any of our maps, probably because it’s made up of only 500,000 (just a guess) Chinese people. I asked the female ticket collector, yes there is still a person who collects tickets, even on an eight-person van, where the horses were. She nodded and told me to sit down. Eventually, she told us to get off. I was excited because after all this effort I thought we finally reached the dead horses.

We looked around, but found no dead horses, only eyes on us. We asked about the horses and everyone shook their heads. Seabass, Eric and I started to realize perhaps something was wrong. Probably, that something was us.

We wandered through the city, asking random people for help. At last, we bumped into a pudgy Chinese man from Qingdao who could speak some English. He deciphered what we were looking for and asked around for more information. He found us the bus we wanted, an even smaller van, and we piled in. We were bewildered that our trip included so many vehicles that never brought us to our destination.

Soon, we were deep in the countryside. Fields stretched into the hazy distance, some brown and barren, some green with cabbage and lettuce and others grey and yellow because farmers burned piles of dead vegetation.


At one point, we saw a farmer plowing his empty field. The animal pulling the iron plow was not a horse, but a woman, probably his wife. Harnessed over her shoulders, she strained and pulled the plow through the dirt, dust lifting into the air.

A group of small buildings finally appeared ahead. We bounced and rocked on the dirt road until we reached a black stone wall. The van stopped in front of the wall’s gate and we stepped out. We all looked back toward the female ticket collector, but she, uninterested, did not return an interested glance. Rather she returned a, ‘well, you got here, now what are you going to do? But wait, before you tell me, let me close the door so I can’t hear you.’ And that’s what she did.

We looked through the gate and down the long entryway toward the modest building that apparently held the horses. We then looked back at the van. The van wasn’t moving. We looked at each other and a thought crossed my mind.


It was too late. Rather than continue down the small dirt road through the village, the van pulled a quick U-turn and drove back the way it came. We watched it pull away and fade into the fields. None of us said anything because we didn’t want to make what all of us were thinking true. We had no choice but to create the illusion that the bus would return.

We looked around us. From across the street, two men eyed us and smiled, but not necessarily in a friendly way. It was more a grin of what do you think you’re doing here strange, wealthy, white tourists?

What can you say? They’re right. Their worn wool slacks, gray coats and leather shoes were stark contrast to my white cargo pants, Seabass’s bright orange hoody and Eric’s well, you know, everything. We were out of place, more so than usual. Hell, I was staring at myself.

The two men near us were a couple of the youngest. There were a few children over-wrapped in layers of clothes, but mostly we saw wrinkled men wearing wool caps and wrinkled women with their hair in buns. The lack of youthful adults probably stems from the fact that making pennies in these towns would require a hard day’s work. If you could, you would probably head to the Zibos of China. There you might just land a dollar-a-day factory job.


More and more eyes gazed on us. Others would pass by on their bicycles and slow down to see if what they saw was really what they thought they saw.

Used to this feeling, just not in such a bucolic scene, we went toward what we understood was the museum.

It wasn’t much to look at. Inside, we were greeted by three young women. The eldest of them, probably about 30 or so, liked us the least for whatever reason. She displayed her lack of enthusiasm for our visit, likely the only one they had seen this day, with short remarks and by barking orders at the other women. The others were friendlier.

The tomb does see tourists, but rarely Americans, the friendlier hosts would later tell me. Mostly, they see Koreans and Japanese.

The youngest of the women became our guide. She talked to us in Chinese, which was not unexpected, except that she treated us as if we were a group of 50, not three. She spoke at the top of her lungs, which was basically gibberish to us at any volume (someday I hope this won’t be the case).

We entered into a dim, window lit hallway. Our guide’s womanly voice echoed through the building and penetrated our skulls. She pointed to the long glass case that protected the horse skeletons, about 145 of them aligning in two rows.

The site was discovered in 1964. Jing Gong, a monarch in the Qi State from 547 to 490 B.C., wanted the horses buried this way. According to records, Gong was renowned for building palaces, living in luxury, carrying out oppressive taxation (and severe punishments to those unwilling to pay) and collecting horses. Archeologists believe the funerary horses were probably anesthetized and buried alive. They all lie with the same pose, one front leg over the haunch of the horse before it, and the other front leg over the neck. How strange it would have been to be a fly on the wall during the creation of this tomb. All told, there are six hundred horses buried there. Archeologists only exposed a portion of them.

The sight, which predates Xi’an’s terracotta army by nearly 300 years, was indeed curious. But, once we took a lap up one row of dead horses and back past the second row that was it. Ten minutes, or two very stretched paragraphs in this story, and we were done. The same math that I was considering was already grumbling out of Seabass’s mouth.

“It took us an hour to get to the train station, another hour or two of waiting there, three hours to get to Zibo, an hour to get to the next town, an hour to find the last bus, and another hour to get to here,” he said. “That’s nine hours.”

It was hard for me to be so coldhearted with my calculations because this trip was my idea. I didn’t respond. Instead, I waited for him to vocally address the rest of the numbers that were awaiting us on our way home. He held back though, letting his initial equation sink in for its full effect.

Eric bought a porcelain horse in the gift shop and five minutes after the tour we were back outside and walking the path back toward the road. I watched eagerly for the bus to show up so I could run ahead, tell the driver to wait, and then yell at my two colleagues to hurry up so we could get home. Complete vindication would be had.

No such luck however. In fact, we moseyed to the road because each of us knew we had unfathomable time to kill. At the road, we passed our eyes over the poor hamlet and then the other way toward the countryside from which we arrived.

“There’s not going to be a bus, is there?” I said it. The fact was hanging in the air all that time. I felt good to acknowledge it.

“Nope,” said Seabass as he and Eric sat down along the road. Eric looked up at me, his Jack Nicholson eyebrows raised excessively.


“Maybe we could catch a taxi,” I suggested, then pulled my fingers down my face knowing that what I said challenged the position of the 93-year-old village idiot. I smiled dumbly and changed the subject. “Look at the kids playing soccer behind that building there.”

Minutes turned into the first hour. We were visited by several villagers curious about us, but mostly we were ignored. We went for a short walk to check out a few houses. The road was dirt of course. A few elders sold cabbage in the road, but there wasn’t anybody to buy it.

“I don’t think there’s a hotel here,” I said.

“Nope,” answered Seabass.

We didn’t go too far because we were afraid we would miss the bus. But our concern was unfounded because the bus never came. I went back into the museum and asked the girls if they knew anything about getting a ride back to Lanzi Qu. They told me they believed the bus would come soon. Soon turned into awhile and the only thing that passed us on the road was on foot or with two wheels. The sun was sinking lower on the horizon.

Then something with four wheels appeared on the horizon. It was a taxi dropping off what appeared to be a farmer. Excitedly, we hailed the taxi. We were lucky. On the way back we never saw the bus. We forked the money over to have the woman driver take us all the way back into Zibo where we caught the train and went home.

I would later learn we hadn’t even visited the best site to see the dead horses. The better one was 10 miles away from where we had been.


China-Deep out.

Community service

Look, we realize we can't always be goofing around and having the time of our lives. We need to give back as well. What better way to give back to society than by becoming superheroes?

Seabass, when the mask is on, is now Dong (East in Chinese).
I, Brusie, am Xi (West in Chinese).

Together we make the dynamic duo named DongXi*. We use aliases because we don't want the attention for our good deeds. Better said, we're not narcissistic Mother Teresas. Anonymously, we want make the world a better place.



*The translation of the Chinese word dongxi is "things." Also, when used in the phrase, "Wo de Dongxi," this implies your knickerknackers.