Black gold rush: Coal miners and surface workers at the Gu Jiao Collective Mine, Shanxi, China. Vanishing act: Visitors walk through the polluted air at Tiananmen Square. Beijing, besieged by pollution from everything from dust storms to burning coal, has pledged to clean up its heavily polluted air before 2008.

While visiting Beijing this past spring, I found myself gazing up at the city's impressive high-rise landscape one morning and suddenly realizing that I had seen neither the sun nor the sky since arriving. The natural tendency is to explain such a vanishing act as due to inclement weather or some other unique atmospheric condition. The reality is, however, that the penumbra that hangs so persistently over most Chinese cities is man-made, caused by a combination of emissions from coal-fired factories and power plants (a new power plant is brought online somewhere in China each week); the rapidly growing number of private cars and commercial vehicles (China produced only 640,000 private cars in 2000, but by 2005 it was producing 3.1 million); and the dust and sand that blows down from the deserts of Xinjiang and the steppes of Mongolia, turning Beijing's all-too-few spring rain showers into mud baths. As bad as this air pollution is, one tends to assume-in fact, wants to assume-that escape from the city will bring relief.

This April I set off in a van with my Chinese-born wife, a close friend, and our two boys (who were at school in Beijing) on a vacation-time expedition across North China's Shanxi Province to visit some Buddhist temples and grottoes and an ancient walled town. Having visited many provincial cities over the more than three decades I have been traveling to China, I was well-acquainted with their gritty industrial charmlessness, which can be so unrelieved in its bleakness as to make one forget that such a thing as natural beauty can exist in an urban environment. I knew that Shanxi was coal country: 70 percent of China's energy comes from burning this fossil fuel, meaning that China uses more coal each year than the U.S., the E.U., and Japan combined. So rapidly is the demand for energy increasing that experts believe annual coal production increased by 14 percent over the past two years. But even with this knowledge, I was still completely unprepared for what we found in Shanxi.

The first revelation was that, even after we had left Beijing, passed through the Great Wall, and gained the countryside beyond, the yellow of the sun and the blue sky remained stubbornly obscured. In fact, during the whole thousand-mile trip, the sky remained a persistent, fluorescent gray. And, save for a suggestion of color in the yellow loess earth of the region or the occasional dash of color offered by drifts of plastic bags that littered the roadsides, the Shanxi landscape looked as if it had been photographed out of focus in black and white.

The highways were an endless crawl of large, battered, and overloaded coal trucks, grinding sluggishly up hills and then hurtling down into valleys. The roadsides were relieved by occlusions of tin shacks and one-story brick lean-to structures occupied by greasy mechanics and tire repair shops, sooty outdoor restaurants, and truck stops where drivers could get a quick and inexpensive meal, a short nap, and maybe a local woman. Their earthen parking areas were drenched in waste motor oil, hydraulic fluid, solvents, and God knows what other toxic petroleum by-products. Living trees were few, but everywhere were wrecked vehicles, piles of fly ash and rubble, and of course, mountains of coal from the thousands of state-owned and privately run mines, many of them primitive, dangerous, illegal, and with some of the most appalling work conditions in the world today. And then, farther back from the roads were the voracious industrial users of this "black gold"-power plants belching clouds of bituminous brown smoke up into the exhausted air and cement factories with great plumes of white dust billowing up from the piles of kiln-cooked limestone like snow off the face of Mt. Everest.

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