Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  The day had grown too cold and windy for camping, and there wasn’t enough time to drive to the next town before dark. At the Xiakou school, teachers welcomed me warmly; they said that occasionally a visitor spent the night after seeing the local ruins of the Great Wall. The teachers pulled out a cot, and I slept in the fourth-grade classroom. Like most rural Chinese schools, it was neat but sparsely decorated, and the bare surroundings made it feel like a traveler’s quarters. I was just passing through, and so were the students; eventually the new Silk Road would take almost all of them away. The walls were decorated with quotes from the former premier Zhou Enlai, Karl Marx, and the revolutionary general Zhu De—inspirational words for children destined to make their way to the factory towns of the south:

  STUDY HARD SO CHINA CAN RISE UP

  A MAN WITH KNOWLEDGE TURNS INTO

  THREE HEADS AND SIX ARMS

  MEN AND MACHINES ARE THE SAME:

  IF THEY KEEP MOVING, THEY DON’T RUST

  IN THIS PART OF Gansu, the Sinomaps bristled with military names: Dragon’s Head Fort, Old Soldiers’ Stockade, Plentiful Fort. West of Xiakou, a string of places had been named after horses: Horseshoe Temple, Big Horse Camp, Military Horse Camp One, Military Horse Camp Two, Military Horse Camp Three. All of them were located within striking range of the Great Wall, on the nearby slope of the Tibetan Plateau, and I decided to detour in that direction.

  Xiakou was dry and dusty, like most places that lay on the eastern edge of the Hexi Corridor. That was the desert side, but as I drove west the landscape changed. I started at an elevation of seven thousand feet, in near-barren scrubland, and in the span of an hour I climbed to a lush plateau that was almost two miles high. These regions benefited from snowmelt; in the distance I could see the white-capped peaks of the Himalayas. And all at once the desert drabness gave way to brilliant color: the hard blue of the springtime sky, the deep green of the grasslands. Animals grazed in open pastures, and streams ran fast beside the fields. It was ranchland—as wide and welcoming as the high plains of Montana.

  At Military Horse Camp One, cowboys were herding hundreds of animals into a pen. The horses were low-shouldered and stocky, with powerful legs; their hooves thundered as they charged in front of the men. The cowboys wore Chinese military uniforms: short-brimmed caps, camouflaged jackets, fatigues, big military boots. When I got out of the City Special, one man on horseback trotted over, dismounted smartly, and introduced himself with an army title—Squad Leader Wang Jiayi.

  “This breed is known as the Shandan horse,” he said, when I asked about it. “They aren’t tall or fast, but they’re known for endurance. They’re good at pulling things.”

  Shandan is a nearby town, and Squad Leader Wang said that locals first started raising horses for the Chinese military during the Han dynasty, over two thousand years ago. Back then, the empire’s main adversary was the Xiongnu, a nomadic people who terrorized the Chinese for generations. The only way to effectively fight this enemy was on horseback, and the empire set up breeding grounds in this part of the Hexi Corridor. In the old days, they called the region the Imperial Horse Camp, and over the centuries this tradition had survived. The Communists renamed the camps, giving each of them a number, but they still bred the Shandan horse, and the animal remained useful in the rugged lands of the west. Out in Xinjiang, China’s remote national borders are still patrolled on horseback. Locals told me that during the 1980s, when the Chinese aided the Taliban in their war against the Soviet Union, they sent large numbers of Shandan horses to Afghanistan.

  But even a remote place like this wasn’t immune to the changes of the Reform period. The name remained Military Horse Camp Number One, and they still cared for over two thousand animals, but Squad Leader Wang told me they were in the process of privatizing. “We’re not technically under the army anymore,” he said. “The military stopped requesting horses from us a couple of years ago; they have enough for the time being. We sell to other companies now, especially ones that do tourism. And some of our leaders say that we’re going to start doing tourism, too.”

  That seemed the most likely future for Military Horse Camp Number One—someday it would be a dude ranch for urban Chinese. In the meantime, the place still had a military feel; everybody wore uniforms and there was little sign of civilian life. When I stopped at the headquarters, the director became extremely nervous and asked to see my passport and journalist accreditation. But he didn’t seem to know what to do after that, and he let me drive away in the City Special.

  In recent weeks, as I approached the far west, I had sensed that local authorities were becoming more alert about foreigners. At one tollbooth I had been stopped by a cop, who inspected the City Special thoroughly—he even opened the hood and jotted down the serial number. He never said why he was concerned, but I knew that there were some military installations in the region. And ethnic tensions could have been a factor, as Gansu is home to large Tibetan communities.

  I knew it was best to keep moving, and after visiting Military Horse Camp Number One, I decided to get out of the county, in case the police had been alerted. I drove north until almost midnight, when I finally arrived at a small place called Gaotai. The settlement had sprung up along Highway 312, a strip of auto repair shops, cheap restaurants, and truckers’ dorms. At one of the low-end places I found a bed for two dollars a night. They didn’t have the police registration forms; all I had to do was hand over the cash. The room contained four beds, a window that overlooked the highway, and a poster of a Dutch windmill.

  A pair of Sichuanese truckers already occupied two other beds. The men came from Neijiang, a town I knew from my days in the Peace Corps, and their Liberation truck carried a load of children’s clothes to be exported to Kazakhstan. They had stopped to make repairs on their vehicle—another All-Powerful King humbled in Gansu Province. The truckers became excited when I showed up.

  “Did you come to see the other foreigner?” one of them said.

  “What other foreigner?”

  “The Russian woman.”

  “I don’t know any Russians,” I said. “I’m American.”

  “Oh, I thought you knew her. She works upstairs.”

  “What does she do upstairs?”

  His companion laughed and said, “She’s a prostitute!”

  Oh God, I said to myself. If there was anything more depressing than a four-bed room in a Gansu truckers’ dorm, it was the knowledge that a Russian woman was turning tricks upstairs.

  “Do you want to go see her?” the man said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m tired. I just drove for five hours without stopping.”

  “Come on, let’s go! She’s a foreigner, too. You guys can talk!”

  I’m sure she had a story—probably some terrifying post-Soviet version of Sister Carrie that began in Vladivostok and ended in the Hexi Corridor. But I couldn’t bring myself to hear it, or gawk at the woman; and finally the Sichuanese truckers gave up. Sometimes all you want from a two-dollar bed is a little sleep.

  I RAN OUT OF Gatorade in Gansu Province. I had finished the last Dove bar in Ningxia, and all my Coke was long gone; in these small towns you couldn’t find such foreign products. I restocked my soda supply with syrupy Feichang Cola, whose slogan—“China’s Own Cola!”—was both boast and warning. For weeks I had buzzed westward on a cloud of sugar and caffeine, but here in the Hexi Corridor the fatigue brought me back to earth. Mornings were ragged; at night I fought to keep my eyes open. I was filthy—even the most thorough hair washing didn’t seem to take anymore. The City Special’s starter had been replaced; the interior was full of sand; there was a huge stain on the carpet from the All-Powerful King’s oil pump. I couldn’t blame hitchers for keeping their backs off the seat—the car was becoming a wreck.

  The Great Wall was still there, right outside the window, and it still looked stunning. The farther I drove, the more the structures impressed me, as much for their beauty as for their persistence. They had a remarkable chame
leon quality—the walls always followed the lines of the landscape, clinging atop ridges, and they even acquired the earth’s color, because of age and the use of local building materials. In Hebei the structures had been steep and jagged, like local mountains, and sometimes on a hill you could hardly distinguish between native rock and Ming brick. On the loess plateau, where mountains fell away into terraced gullies, the Great Wall forts were as angular as the rest of the broken landscape. On the edge of the Ordos the barriers looked like piled sand. Here in the Hexi Corridor the Ming wall sprawled pale in the sunshine like a springtime snake. If its construction had originally damaged the environment, the passage of centuries had blunted that edge, until now it looked almost natural. It was amazing that people once believed the Great Wall was visible from the moon—I had never seen another man-made object that fit so subtly within its natural surroundings. There were places where you could stand atop the thing and not even know it.

  The Great Wall’s meaning is also chameleon-like, and interpretations have a way of shifting across time and perspective. Early in the twentieth century, the revolutionary and nationalist Sun Yat-sen celebrated it as the greatest engineering feat in Chinese history. Mao portrayed it as a forerunner of modern national defense. For Lu Xun, the great author of the 1920s and 1930s, the wall represented everything bad about Chinese culture. He described it as “a wonder and a curse,” writing, “I have always felt hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall; that wall of ancient bricks which is constantly being reinforced. The old and the new conspire to confine us all.” When the Japanese occupied the north during World War II, the invaders photographed their soldiers beside the wall, in an attempt to gain credibility for their territorial claim. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about the Great Wall, as did Franz Kafka. To foreign writers, it usually represents xenophobia, whereas Chinese see it as evidence of cultural greatness. The government-run journal China Today even portrayed it as a symbol of multiethnic unity—“more like a river than a barrier.” The significance of the Great Wall is so fluid that it can mean virtually anything, even cooperation between Chinese and Mongols.

  In academia, historians have generally described the structure as a defensive failure. The American scholar Arthur Waldron studied certain periods of Ming construction, and in his book he concludes that it was “useless militarily even when it was first built.” But his research was limited to specific periods and wall locations, and no other university scholar has pursued the history in real depth. Nowadays the most significant research on the Great Wall is being conducted by people outside of academia. Their backgrounds range widely, from village historians like Old Chen, the farmer I met in Shanxi, to foreigners with graduate degrees, but often they share certain characteristics. Usually they are male, and they tend to be athletic. Traditionally that’s a rare quality among the Chinese intelligentsia, but it’s necessary for anybody planning to explore wall regions. The Great Wall also attracts obsessives. Independent researchers have to be tenacious hikers, and they also must be resourceful enough to support their own study. In that sense, it’s the perfect historical topic for the new economy. Ignored by the government and neglected by academia, the field of Great Wall studies depends entirely on private individuals: history as free market.

  Nearly all of them eventually find their way to Beijing. In 1984, a utility line worker named Dong Yaohui quit his job and, along with two companions, spent sixteen months doggedly following wall sections on foot all the way across China. After writing a book about the experience, he moved to the capital, where he enrolled in courses in classical Chinese. Eventually he helped found the Great Wall Society of China, which now publishes two journals and advocates preservation. Another self-made expert is Cheng Dalin, who was originally educated at a sports academy. After graduating, he became a photographer, and his news agency frequently sent him to the wall because he was strong enough to climb the structure. On his own, he studied Ming history, finally publishing eight books that combine photographs and research. William Lindesay, a British geologist and marathoner, came to China on a whim in 1986 and spent nine months running and hiking along the walls all the way from Gansu to the ocean. He eventually settled in Beijing, published four wall-related books, and founded International Friends of the Great Wall, an organization that focuses on conservation.

  At Peking University, China’s most famous institution, the top Great Wall researcher is a cop named Hong Feng. As a child, Hong also attended a sports school—he was a sprinter and a long jumper—but he always enjoyed reading history. After barely missing the cutoff for college admission, he became a policeman, eventually getting assigned to the unit at Peking University. In his spare time he studies Ming texts in the library and hikes to remote wall sections. He publishes articles on a Web site devoted to wall enthusiasts, and he’s made some significant discoveries. (For example, Hong found Ming texts that explained how ideas about feng shui influenced wall construction outside of Beijing.) When I met Hong, he told me that despite working at Peking University, he had never discussed his research with a professor. “Scholars in the archaeology and history departments just aren’t interested in the Great Wall,” he said.

  The most thorough researcher of all is David Spindler. Like the others, he’s athletic—at Dartmouth he rowed varsity crew and was on the cross-country ski team. In 1990, he came to China in order to study for a master’s degree in history at Peking University, where he wrote a thesis in Chinese about a philosopher in the Western Han dynasty. Afterward, Spindler decided against pursuing a career in academia; he attended Harvard Law School and became a China-based consultant. For years he hiked the Great Wall as a hobby, and soon after leaving his job, he decided to devote himself to full-time research. His goals are ambitious: he plans to hike every section of Ming wall in the Beijing region, and to read everything about the defenseworks that was published during that dynasty. He funds his research entirely on his own, through lectures and guided tours of the wall.

  Unlike other foreign scholars, Spindler has found evidence that the Ming Great Wall actually worked as a defensive structure. One such incident occurred in 1555, when thousands of Mongols attacked at Shuitou, a village northwest of Beijing. The Ming had recently improved the Shuitou walls, which held firm, turning back the raiders. Throughout the years, there were many other such instances of successful defense. In one account from the late sixteenth century, a Chinese officer describes the aftermath of a victory:

  On the day when we stuck the severed heads of the barbarians on poles, there was a soldier named Zhan Yu who cut off a piece of barbarian flesh, walked over to his comrades, and said, “Anyone who raids us deserves this fate.” There was another soldier named Zhao Pian who cut off two pieces of flesh from the neck of a dead raider and ate them raw, telling his comrades, “I hate anyone who harasses our civilians and causes trouble for us soldiers and will eat their flesh!” As their commander, I was pleased to have such brave and loyal soldiers.

  Nobody in the world knows the Ming Great Wall as thoroughly as Spindler, and once I asked him what the structures say about China. “When I give lectures, people always ask me that,” he said. “What does this say about China, that China built these walls? My answer is basically: Nothing. It’s very disappointing to them. But it’s just one manifestation of what China has done. It’s just a way they defended themselves.”

  Spindler hates any symbolic use of the Great Wall. In his view, it’s become such an easy metaphor that people are more inclined to interpret than they are to research. And he believes that it’s unfair to take such a specific structure and use it to explain something as complex as Chinese civilization. “The way I look at it, this was a boundary that was often attacked,” he said. “They had to have some kind of border-defense system. And it was combined with diplomacy, with trade, with raids into Mongol territory.”

  For the Ming, walls were simply one part of a complex, multipronged strategy, but nowadays it’s easy to take the fortifications out of context.
They are still impressive, and any tourist can take a walk along the ramparts, whereas the Ming archives, and their details about other aspects of foreign policy, are much more difficult to access and understand.

  Spindler continued: “People say, Was it worth it? But I don’t think that’s how they thought at the time. You don’t get a nation-state saying, ‘We’re going to give up this terrain’ or ‘We’re going to sacrifice x number of citizens and soldiers.’ That’s not a calculus they used. An empire is always going to try to protect itself.”

  I FOLLOWED THE MING walls northwest to Jiayuguan, the fort at the end of the Hexi Corridor, and then I drove to Dunhuang. The town is famous for the Buddhist art of its caves, and for the massive sand dunes that stand nearby. But I kept driving—after so much time on the road I couldn’t bear to linger at tourist sites. I was heading to a place called Subei when the police stopped me at a checkpoint. The roadblock had been set up at a desolate intersection, not far from the border of Qinghai Province.

  “License,” an officer said sternly, and then he looked inside. “Waah! Where did you come from?”

  “Beijing,” I said.

  “You’re not from Beijing!”

  “I’m American, but I live in Beijing.”

  “Look at this!” he called to the other officers, grinning. “This guy’s a foreigner!”

  Three of them huddled around the City Special. They seemed barely more than children—skinny guys in their twenties dressed in oversize uniforms. The first cop studied my document and exclaimed, “It looks just like a Chinese license!”