Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  “Two thousand yuan,” the shopkeeper said. He saw me recoil; it was nearly two hundred and fifty dollars. “But we can go cheaper,” he said quickly.

  “You know,” Goettig said, in English, “nothing else in here would break if it fell.”

  He was right—it was all Strange in a strictly solid sense. And why had a jade ship been there in the first place? As a last resort, I hoped that maybe Goettig’s size would discourage violence. He was six feet one and well built, with close-cropped hair and a sharp Germanic nose that the Chinese found striking. But in truth I had never known anybody gentler, and we shuffled meekly toward the door. The men were still standing there.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t think we want to buy anything.”

  “Zenmeban?” the shopkeeper said softly. He had stopped smiling, and now he pointed at the shards on the floor. “What are you going to do about this?”

  In hushed voices, Goettig and I conferred and decided to start at fifty yuan. He took the bill out of his wallet—the equivalent of about six dollars. He handed it to the shopkeeper, who accepted it without a word. All the way across the parking lot I expected to feel a hand on my shoulder. I started the City Special, spun the tires, and roared back onto Highway 110. I was still shaking when we reached the city of Zhangjiakou. We pulled over at a truck stop for lunch; I guzzled tea to calm my nerves. The waitress became excited when she learned we were Americans.

  “Our boss has been to America!” she said. “I’ll go get her!”

  The boss was in her fifties, with dyed hair the color of shoeblack. She came to our table and presented a business card with a flourish. One side of the card was Chinese, the other English:

  United Sources of America, Inc.

  Jin Fang Liu

  Deputy Director of Operations

  China

  Embossed in gold was a knockoff of the Presidential Seal of the United States. It looked a lot like the original, except the eagle was fatter: the Zhangjiakou breed had pudgy wings, a thick neck, and round legs like drumsticks. Even if it dropped the shield and arrows, I doubted this bird would be capable of flight. The corner of the card said, in small print:

  President Gerald R. Ford

  Honorary Chairman

  “What kind of company is this?” I asked

  “We’re in the restaurant business here in Zhangjiakou,” Ms. Jin said. She told me her daughter ran another restaurant in Roanoke, Virginia. I pointed at the name in the corner of the business card. “Do you know who that is?”

  “FuTe,” Ms. Jin said proudly. “He used to be president of the United States!”

  “What does he have to do with your company?”

  “It’s just an honorary position,” Ms. Jin said. She waved her hand in a way that suggested: No need to tell Mr. Fu Te about our little truck stop in Zhangjiakou! She gave us a discount and told us to come back any time. A couple hours later, near the Inner Mongolian border, I pulled over on the side of the road and got the City Special stuck in snow. It took us a while to find a farmer with a tractor that could pull us out, and by now I wondered if I’d ever make it back to the Great Wall. The snow was falling harder, and things were getting Stranger; that evening, in the town of Jining, we checked into a hotel called the Ulanqab that had a bowling alley in the lobby. We registered at the front desk, surrounded by the crash of balls and pins.

  Early the next morning we set off determined to make it to Hohhot. At the entrance to Highway 110, the local government had erected a sign with changeable numbers, like the scoreboard at Fenway Park:

  AS OF THIS MONTH,

  THIS STRETCH OF ROAD

  HAS HAD 65 ACCIDENTS AND 31 FATALITIES

  The snow had stopped falling, but the temperature was brutally cold. From Jining to Hohhot there was nothing but empty steppe—low snow-covered hills huddled beneath the howling north wind. We passed Liberation trucks that were stopped dead on the road; their fuel lines had frozen, probably because of water in their tanks. After fifteen miles we crested a hill and saw a line of hundreds of vehicles stretching all the way to the horizon—Jeeps, Jettas, Santanas, Liberation trucks. Nobody was moving, and everybody was honking; an orchestra of horns blared into the wind. Never had I imagined that a traffic jam could occur in such a desolate place.

  We parked the City Special and continued on foot to the gridlock, where drivers explained what had happened. It all started with a few trucks whose fuel lines had frozen. The trucks stalled, and then other vehicles began to pass them on the two-lane road. While passing, they occasionally encountered an oncoming car whose driver didn’t want to budge. People faced off, honking angrily while more vehicles backed up; eventually it became impossible to move in any direction. Potential escape routes along the shoulder were quickly jammed by curb-sneaking drivers. A couple of motorists with Jeep Cherokees had taken advantage of their rear-wheel drive by embarking off-road; usually they made it about fifty yards before getting stuck. Men in loafers slipped in the snow, trying to dig out City Specials with their bare hands. The wind was so cold it hurt just to stand there. Meanwhile, truckers had crawled beneath their rigs, where they lit road flares and held them up to frozen fuel lines. The tableau had a certain beauty: the stark snow-covered steppes, the endless line of black Santanas, the orange fires dancing beneath blue Liberation trucks.

  “You should go up there and get a picture of those truckers,” Goettig said.

  “You should get a picture,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere near those guys.”

  At last, here on the unmarked Mongolian plains, we had crossed the shadowy line that divides Strange from Stupid. There was no sign of police or traffic control, so Goettig and I watched the flares for a while and then turned around. This time the Sinomaps came through—I leafed through the book and found a back route to Hohhot. The moment we arrived, the City Special celebrated by breaking down. The vehicle wouldn’t start, and finally I called Mr. Wang at Capital Motors. “No problem!” he said. “We can come get you.”

  “Umm, I don’t think that’s possible,” I said.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “In Hohhot.”

  “Where?”

  “Hohhot. The capital of Inner Mongolia.”

  “Waah!” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “All the way to Hohhot! Not bad!”

  As always, Mr. Wang took everything in stride. He told me to find a mechanic, do whatever was necessary, and save the receipt. Goettig planned to catch a train out of Hohhot, but he hung around long enough to help get the City Special working. We push-started the Jeep and drove it to a garage, where they replaced the starter for a little more than a hundred bucks. The mechanic chain-smoked State Express 555 cigarettes the whole time he worked on the engine, but after Highway 110 it seemed as harmless as a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

  WHEN THE CITY SPECIAL returned to working order, and the weather improved, I finally found the walls again. There were plenty of them out here—of all the places I’d been, Inner Mongolia most belied the singular nature of the term Great Wall. On my first journey I had followed the Ming wall along the southern border, and now I drove nearly two hundred miles northward to another barrier. It was over eight hundred years old, dating to the Jurchen Jin dynasty, and the thing was so weathered that it had faded into the steppes: a long grass-covered bump, thirty feet wide and three feet tall, heading straight as an arrow to the horizon. I couldn’t have found it without a local resident, who sat in the passenger’s seat and directed me across a stretch of grassland. After he told me to stop, and we got out of the City Special, I realized that I had parked atop the relic itself. “It’s not a problem,” the man said. “They just don’t want people to drive on it for long distances.” Another hundred miles to the west, outside the city of Baotou, I stopped at a barrier that dated to the Warring States period, which had ended in 221 BC. It was the oldest wall I ever saw—after more than twenty-two centuries the structure was still impressive, as tall as a man and
visible for miles.

  In this featureless landscape the barriers seemed quixotic, the markings of lost empires that had vanished into the steppes. Even modern buildings looked temporary, especially in the north, where sheepherders’ shacks were constructed with their backs to the northwest, because of the relentless wind. They were low structures, crouching behind curved walls of mud that had been designed to shed the grit that blows off the Gobi Desert. Apart from herdsmen, few people live in this region, and there are almost no shops. One afternoon I drove for a hundred miles, and the sole indication of commerce was a hunchbacked shack with a lonely sign in front. It advertised an Inner Mongolian two-for-one: “Car Repair/Medical Clinic.”

  The biggest city in Inner Mongolia is Baotou, and the sudden size of the place, surrounded by empty steppe, feels surreal. The population is over a million and growing rapidly, mostly because of new money from the central government’s Develop the West campaign. The Party is attempting to counterbalance the growing economies of the coast, but for the most part investment in the west has been a failure: these regions simply don’t have the necessary resources and proximity to foreign trade. Nevertheless, money flows into certain designated cities, and when I drove through Baotou the place was in the midst of an artificial boom. City planners had turned it into a frenzy of detours and road construction, and everything was clogged with automobiles; I had never heard such honking. Throughout the city, in hopes of managing the new traffic in the way that scarecrows manage birds, the government had erected fiberglass statues of police officers. These figures were located at major intersections and roundabouts, where they stood at attention atop pedestals. They portrayed officers in full uniform, complete with necktie, visored cap, and white gloves. Each statue even wore an ID tag with a number. In Baotou I never saw a live cop.

  Driving south of the city, I crossed the Yellow River and entered the Ordos Desert once more. The land became flat and desolate, with the washed-out color of a dead creekbed, and periodically a policeman statue loomed beside the road. There was something eerie about these figures: they were wind-swept and dust-covered, and the surrounding desert emphasized their pointlessness. But their posture remained ramrod straight, arms at attention, with a sort of Ozymandian grandeur—terracotta cops. After an hour of driving I came upon the aftermath of the most spectacular tollbooth accident I ever saw in China. A trucker obviously had been moving at a high rate of speed, and his angle also must have been perfect; he’d wedged his vehicle sideways into the tollbooth. It reminded me of those Chinese jade carvings in which a dragon curls within an egg, and you wonder: How did they ever do that?

  For most of the journey I had followed small roads, but now I picked up Highway 210 toward the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan. One of the mysteries of traveling through Inner Mongolia is that there are virtually no signs of the greatest empire to ever rule these steppes. There are walls everywhere, but all of them were built against the nomads; the Mongols themselves left virtually nothing. They were never great builders, and their origins could hardly have been more humble. In AD 1162, when Genghis Khan was born, Mongol society was illiterate, nomadic, and structured narrowly around ties to kin and tribe. The great leader rose to power by overcoming these weaknesses; he united tribes, and he created systems. In Genghis Khan’s military, squads were organized in units of ten, and officers gave orders in set rhymes and songs that were easily remembered by illiterate soldiers. The Mongols had no army, no columns, no defensive fortifications. There was no supply train. They were strictly cavalry: on the average, each soldier had five horses. When it came time to advance, they spread out across the steppes to ensure that animals could graze, and they milked their mares along the way. Mostly they moved fast: in the span of twenty-five years, the Mongols conquered more lands and people than the Romans did in four centuries.

  In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, the historian Jack Weatherford describes the Mongol strategies and their impact on other cultures. Some Mongol characteristics are surprising—for all their fearsome reputation, they were remarkably squeamish about the sight of blood. They despised hand-to-hand combat; bows and arrows were the preferred weapons. In battle, they liked to keep their distance, and they became so skilled at siege warfare that they essentially rendered walled cities obsolete. Diplomacy was another strong suit. Genghis Khan banned torture and looting, believing them to be counterproductive, and he established the concept of diplomatic immunity. He granted religious freedom to the lands he conquered. His genius was essentially one of recruitment: he was willing to accept anybody with skills to offer. Strategies of siege warfare were incorporated from the Chinese; knowledge of astronomy came from the Persians; a new Mongol alphabet was adopted from the script of the Uighurs. German miners came to work in China; Chinese doctors went to Persia. Genghis Khan’s court included Buddhists, Daoists, Muslims, and Nestorian Christians. By the time he died, in AD 1227, his empire was twice as large as that of any other individual in history. His grandson, Kublai Khan, completed the Mongol conquest of China, founding the Yuan dynasty in 1279. The Yuan became the first non-Han dynasty to rule all of China, with territory stretching all the way from northern Vietnam to Siberia.

  But it was also extremely short-lived. The Mongol rise had depended primarily on Genghis Khan’s vision, and they never again produced such a brilliant leader. Within a century, the Yuan was overthrown by the Chinese founders of the Ming, who drove the Mongols back to the north. Once they were gone, they didn’t leave much behind. Unlike other empires, the Mongols didn’t spread a dominant religion, or a form of writing, or a political system. They didn’t create technological innovations, and one of their few building specialties consisted of bridges, because they were always on the move. The sense of movement became their most lasting legacy—new trade and cultural exchanges that continued after the brief empire.

  The Mongols wrote little, and we don’t know much about how they viewed themselves. Most contemporary accounts come from the people they defeated—a rare instance in which history was written primarily by the conquered. After the Mongol empire collapsed, its descendants were tracked most closely by the Ming, who had to deal with the periodic attacks of nomadic raiders. Some Chinese military officers wrote about these encounters, including a man named Yin Geng, who served in a Ministry of Defense department that dealt with border issues. The historian David Spindler has translated Yin Geng’s words, which are as vivid and detailed as if he were still standing on the Great Wall today. Like most Chinese of the mid-1500s, he refers to the northerners as simply “barbarians.” “Barbarian women have buxom figures,” Yin Geng writes. “Because they eat meat and cheese and wear skins, their flesh is tender and white. They like to fornicate, paying little attention to whether it’s day or night or whether there’s anyone watching.” Mongol males, according to Yin Geng, have similar interests. (“Young barbarian men like to abduct women, carry them away on horseback, and copulate with them.”) He describes Mongols as smelling shan—“muttonlike”—and they possess other animal qualities. (“Every barbarian family brews alcohol, and all of them like to drink; the barbarians drink like cattle, not even stopping to breathe in the process.”) Lest the reader get the impression that Mongols are only interested in sex and alcohol, Yin Geng describes other pastimes. (“Barbarians like to spear babies for sport.”)

  By the time of Yin Geng, the Mongols had lost the unity of Genghis Khan’s reign, but they were still brilliant raiders. They traveled on horseback, usually in small groups, and they liked to come at night. They followed ridgelines, because they feared ambushes. They communicated through smoke signals. They developed a nomadic version of micro-credit—this system allowed a poor Mongol to borrow a horse from a wealthier person, embark on a raid, and pay the owner a percentage of spoils. Generally the Mongols did not linger in Chinese territory. They penetrated defenses, gathered booty, and returned home as quickly as possible. (The Great Wall around Beijing and other regions has crenellations and arrow holes on
both sides because soldiers sometimes attacked Mongols heading back north after a successful raid.) In China, the Mongols liked to steal livestock, household goods, and even Chinese people. They carried the Chinese men and women back to the steppes, where they forced them to form families. Then they turned the men, and sometimes the women, into spies—a Chinese could be sent south to gather military intelligence, with his or her family essentially held in Mongolia as hostages.

  Sometimes these captives adapted so well to life in the north that they seemed happy to stay there. It’s a type of pragmatism that’s still recognizable in modern times—Chinese who leave home learn to make the best of their new environment, whether they’ve gone south during the Reform years or north during the Ming dynasty. One text from the early sixteenth century, translated by David Spindler, describes an encounter between a group of nomads and some soldiers who were guarding the Great Wall. The nomads are accompanied by a Chinese man, originally from a town in Ningxia Province, and he makes no pretenses about his group’s desire to gather information. The Ming report reads:

  One morning, a party of five Mongols approached a signal tower and addressed the soldiers guarding it, saying, “I’ve been sent here by the Mongol leadership to find out the reason for all of the movement of oxen and carts on your side of the wall.” The soldier replied, “The Governor-General is using thousands of men to haul grain in preparation for an attack on you Mongols inside the bend of the Yellow River.” The Mongol: “There are lots of us in this area—you don’t want to attack us. I’m actually [a Chinese person] from Weizhou and I’ve come to trade a bow with you as a sign of my sincerity.” The soldier retorted, “Well, if you’re from Weizhou, why don’t you just surrender and come home?” The other man replied: “Things are bad in Weizhou and good out here on the grasslands. Why should I come back?” He handed the bow up to the soldier, but the soldier didn’t give him a bow in return. The “Mongol” then sped away on his horse.