  In this paper we consider the field of local times of a discrete-time Markov
chain on a general state space, and obtain uniform (in time) upper bounds on
the total variation distance between this field and the one of a sequence of
$n$ i.i.d. random variables with law given by the invariant measure of that
Markov chain. The proof of this result uses a refinement of the soft local time
method of [11].
