The Middle Kingdom

Hello... anyone still there?

I had been meaning to update this page for some time. Three days, in fact. So imagine how proud I am to have completed it at such short notice. As I write, over a year has passed since I journeyed through the freezing provinces of northern China, and some memories have permanently ebbed away. It was at this time that I became rather lazy in regards to note-taking, and subsequently this post may not be as rich in detail as others. My method has been to study my old photos and write using the images and recollections provoked, of which there were many. I hope you enjoy it.

An Australian ex-pat I met in Beijing told me that it takes ten years to really get to know China. Ten days in and a thousand miles to the west, in Gansu province, I felt I had yet to scratch the surface of the place. But the dinner in Jiayuguan had demonstrated the warmth and hospitality of (slightly drunk) Chinese people, and it was an encouraging way to end the first part of my tour. That afternoon I had successfully bought my first Chinese train ticket, and I headed for the station with the warm glow of a jaded backpacker whose long-distance bus days were now behind him. The minibus to the station went around the houses, and, as it was dark, I decided to ask the driver for information. I had brought with me a language book titled Easy Peasy Chinese, accompanied by an audiobook full of basic Mandarin phrases. Scared of conversing in this new and unfamiliar tongue, I showed the driver a picture of a train with Chinese characters to signify my intent. He nodded his head and signalled for me to get off at the next stop, which transpired to be a good half a mile short of the train station. The driver had obviously no idea what I was on about, and, instead of communicating as such, chose to pretend that he knew exactly what I was asking him, and made a complete guess as to what that could be. (This is one of the ways that Chinese people subvert conventional logic in order to “save face” – an integral part of Asian culture. It takes many forms, some less obvious than others. By the completion of my journey I was familiar with most of them.)

 The train to Xi'an

Jiayuguan is situated on a single railway line that connects China’s north-western backwaters to the rest of the country. I was to take the overnight train to Lanzhou, the largest city in Gansu, slap bang in the middle of China. Though late in the evening, the station was heaving with passengers, some of them carrying enough luggage to merit a separate compartment each. Of around 500 people in the concourse I was the only non-Chinese. I fought my way through the crowd and somehow found a seat, where I began to wonder why everyone was trapped in the same room despite there being six different trains about to arrive. China’s solution to handling large numbers of people involves, unsurprisingly, a minimal amount of individual freedom – passengers are required to cram into waiting areas until around five minutes before departure, upon which they are released onto the platform. The effect is similar to opening a bottle of coke which you have just spent 30 minutes vigorously shaking.

The concourse had two floors, upstairs and downstairs, each containing a locked gate leading to the platforms. The more eager passengers hung around these areas like flies, variously glancing at the confusing electronic screen and firing impatient remarks at the station staff. When the time came to let people through, an immense crush formed as passengers of all shapes and sizes fought for prominence. Women and children were at a severe disadvantage due to the appalling rudeness of the men, who thought nothing of inadvertently battering old ladies around the head with their luggage in a mad scramble to secure a seat that was reserved anyway. The staff had decided that this bottleneck was the most appropriate place to check everyone’s ticket, forcing passengers to balance all their worldly possessions in one hand whilst shoving forth a small piece of paper in the other. Once through the gate, another frenzied dash was required across a bridge and down to the platform, where I found my carriage a further 200 yards along.

Xi'an

Chinese trains are divided into four sections: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper and soft sleeper. The relative degrees of comfort and cost are fairly obvious. I chose to travel in hard sleeper as it was around 100RMB (£10) cheaper than soft. My main dilemma was whether to book a lower, middle or upper bunk, all of which can prove disadvantageous to one’s sanity. Lower bunks are frequently invaded by fellow passengers looking for a place to sit or eat their lunch without the slightest invitation. Middle bunks have fewer direct annoyances but are a good deal more claustrophobic, owing to the lack of space above and below. Top bunkers sleep away from the tangle of bodies but lie directly underneath speakers that play music from 7am, and can barely lift their heads without colliding with the ceiling. Of greater importance is to find a compartment away from the end of the carriage, where passengers gather throughout the night to smoke, spit and shit. Luckily I was towards the centre and had chosen the middle bunk, which was difficult to get into but fairly comfortable once inside. There were no closed compartments like in European trains, but the mattresses were clean and I soon began to feel at home (despite the best efforts of the old man in the bunk opposite to continuously stare at me all evening.) I got a decent sleep and awoke refreshed as the morning light revealed a landscape greener than at any point in my trip since Bulgaria.

What three weeks on the Trans-Siberian Express with your girlfriend does to you

Lanzhou, situated at the heart of China, is famous for two reasons: 1) its signature noodle dish, popular all over China; 2) being famous for only one thing. Trapped between two mountains, it is one of the most polluted cities in China and by extension the world. Most travellers use Lanzhou as the gateway to Tibet, which is now connected by the world’s highest railway line, but I simply didn’t have the time for such an enormous excursion. Instead I booked a train ticket to Xi’an for the same day, and spent the afternoon poking around Lanzhou, a place with so little of interest that I struggled to even fill a few hours. Grey, smoggy and overcrowded, it was the archetype of a bog-standard Chinese city. Even with a population of 3.5 million people, I did not see a single foreigner all day. I took a trip across town to visit the Silk Road museum (which was shut) and on my return became stuck in one of urban China’s interminable traffic jams. The taxi driver next to us alleviated the boredom by rolling down his window and hacking up an enormous parcel of phlegm, which he deposited in the middle of the road. I had a few minutes to examine the mucus as we waited for the lights. It bore an uncanny resemblance to the outline of North America, including Florida and the Great Lakes. It was the aesthetic highlight of my day.

 The Terracotta Army

The Xi’an train took seven hours but felt longer, as I was crammed into the hard seat section. Fortunately I had a window seat, but this backfired when the two passengers to my right used the peg above my head to hang their coats, which dangled in my face for much of the journey. It wasn’t long before people started to take an interest in me, and I was offered all sorts of drinks and snacks, which I gladly accepted. I still found it very hard to be understood, but the woman opposite me spoke enough English to help me out. Everything I said was translated into Mandarin, prompting “wahh”s and giggles from fellow passengers. She tried to teach me how to draw Chinese characters, with very mixed results. The correct way to draw is from top-left to bottom-right, but I found it hard to stick to this technique, and my pencil was all over the place. Needless to say, my companions were deeply amused by my inability to draw a few basic pictures. Each character represents a syllable, so much of the language involves simply putting them together like dominoes. Basic literacy involves learning over 3,000 characters, which could explain why the Chinese use rote learning so religiously. I picked up the odd character:

human     人
one     一 
two     二  
three     三 
Lanzhou     兰州  

We arrived in Xi’an late in the evening, and my new friends offered to escort me to a hostel. After much navigation we found the Han Tang Inn, its front door guarded by two Terracotta soldiers. Xi’an is the home of Emperor Shi’s famous army, overwhelmingly the biggest tourist draw in central China. But it would have to wait, as the next morning I was invited to join a bicycle ride with some guests at the hostel. It was nice to be surrounded by young backpackers again, a culture I had not tasted since Istanbul two months prior. We climbed up to the ramparts of the old city walls, which enclose the old town in a sort of rectangular prison. Our route took us in a complete eight mile loop of the walls, wheels rattling on the cobbled floor, the elevation of which allowed us to view the city from many angles. The walls were first built in 194 BC and renovated in 1370, when Xi’an was the largest and wealthiest city in the world. It is considered the traditional terminus of the eastern Silk Road, and its historical significance to Asia is arguably greater than that of Beijing. Surprisingly few signs remain aside from the classic square-grid layout of the streets and buildings. The old ways of living seemed to cling to the areas directly beside the wall - temples, parks, old two-storey houses. Most of the old town had succumbed to the identikit clutter of shopping districts and office towers that epitomise China's economic boom. As always the smog was thick and pervasive, and our view across the city was greatly restricted  By the time we had swung back round to the Southern Gate an hour later my hands, back and arsecheeks were sore. I had not ridden a bicycle for six years.

The obligatory trip to the Terracotta Warriors was a highly instructive experience. I realised that in travel, the best days are the ones that surprise you and exceed your expectations. This was not one of them. The site is impressive – thousands of life-sized model warriors in formation beside their master's tomb, braced for any terrors the afterlife might bring. The main army is housed in an enormous hangar with a viewing platform at one end, and a path running along both sides. At no point can you get close enough to the soldiers to appreciate the detail. It is all about basking in the enormity of Emperor Shi's project. The most rewarding section was the museum, which houses perfectly preserved soldiers in glass cases. You can press your nose up against the windows and look your foe square in the eyes. Only here can you appreciate the craftsmanship and care put into each warrior. Originally the models were brightly pained in full uniform and coated with an anti-decaying substance to preserve colour. This technique was first used in the West around two thousand years later, on ships and submarines in the Second World War. Talk about innovation! The site remains a work in progress, and archaeologists have recently found terracotta horses, chariots, weaponry, and drums. But nothing here thrilled me in the same way as Jiaohe or Cappadocia – perhaps it was simply the sheer number of people jostling and fighting for photographs. Equally distasteful was the shanty town of souvenir stalls which visitors have to wade through to reach the entrance. One old woman even poked me with a bottle of water because I didn't acknowledge her collection of tat.

My final day-trip in Xi'an was to Hua Shan, one of China's five sacred mountains, undertaken with my friends in the hostel. At 7am we headed to the main bus station in the shadow of the Northern Gate. It was cold, and a few of our group went in search of some hot breakfast. Naturally they walked directly past the street food vendors and into a McDonalds. I bought a fried vegetable pancake from a decrepit old woman on the pavement, which I felt was a far better use of my money. The bus journey took over an hour, during which I stole some chips and swapped travel stories. My near-rape experience in Tashkent was well received; my near-death experiences on Chinese motorways less so. In our group was an English couple who had travelled the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Beijing, who told us how they were forced to drink vodka at half-hourly intervals for three days by their Mongolian cabin-mates. I thought back to my planning stage when I had given serious thought to the Moscow-Beijing train, but instead chose a longer, more culturally varied (and expensive) route on the Silk Road.

Hua Shan

The bus dropped us off at the entrance gate, where we were asked to buy a further three tickets – one to get through the gate (£14), one for a minibus to the mountain (£4) and one for a cable car up the mountain (£8). The first two were compulsory, and we all agreed to skip on the cable car and walk from the bottom. I saved a fair amount of money on tickets by producing my UNESCO International Youth Travel Card – a nonsense document I had obtained in London when buying my travel insurance. Happily the card gave me half-price fees on almost every tourist site in China. Inspired by my thriftiness, my companions showed the ticket lady their drivers’ licences, a trick she was evidently familiar with.

The entire peak was accessible via a network of winding stairs built into the side of the mountain. Rather than improving the climbing experience, it instead proved tiresome and monotonous. Thirty minutes in, having climbed a good few-hundred metres, we began to pass some construction workers on a cigarette break snaking up the mountain, each with a little step to himself. They looked at us pityingly with toothless smiles, wondering why on earth we were climbing the hard way instead of taking the cable car. At first it was not obvious that they were workers – none of them wore hard hats or suitable clothing. They appeared to be semi-employed migrants roped in for a quick day-job. As we climbed higher and higher, the queue of fag-smoking workers seemed endless. After passing at least 400 of them, a foreman with a loudspeaker began to shout at the men, who all stood and hoisted up a large yellow cable which ran beside them. It was clear from their postures that the cable was extremely heavy, and some of the men struggled to stand upright near the steep, unprotected drops a few feet away. The absence of basic safety measures was quite astounding. Every thirty seconds the foreman would shout his signal, which would be passed down the line. Upon this the men would heave the cable upwards by a few feet and drop it onto the floor in exhaustion. Goodness knows how long they spent there. There are relatively few labour laws in China, and for good reason. If someone had fallen to their death that day, the company in charge would find another man from China's vast workforce to replace him, and the incident would barely register. The cold reality is that the Average Joe in China is quite disposable. Stalin once said that the death of one man is a tragedy, one million a statistic. In China it is the other way round.

After two hours of climbing we reached the "base camp" where herds of tour groups piled out of the cable cars and up the main path. They seemed perplexed that we had declined the pricey lift up – aren't all Westerners wealthy and prone to spending money like Emperors? Our thrills are often derived from risk, adventure and unnecessary physical exertion – dangerous concepts to most Chinese. (I can confirm, for example, that there are no staircases on Ben Nevis.) Keen to avoid the crowds we sought an alternative path to the nearest of Hua Shan's five peaks, and climbed hastily. The main hazard was ice on the steps, which was commonplace in shaded areas and caught us out more than once. Despite the thousands of steps involved, children and old men were well represented at the top. The mountain is of great significance to Taoists and Buddhists, and climbing one is an experience to be cherished. Its peaks and ridges are shaped in that evocatively Chinese manner that leaves one stunned as to how they could have formed without the hand of a higher power.

On my last night in Xi'an I met an Italian named Alessandro who was travelling the world looking for a place to live. He had worked in London for four years as a bicycle courier, and had incorporated the words “rubbish” and “twat” into his vocabulary, which I liked. He spoke with passion about topics such as Chinese architecture and Berlusconi, using that Italian trait of constantly nudging me with the back of his hand to ensure that I was listening.  He was about to leave for Pingyao, the half-way point between Xi’an and Beijing, and I arranged to meet him there the next day. I had high hopes for Pingyao, an unrestored Ming era walled town famous for its courtyard guesthouses. The key word is unrestored – so many monuments and temples in China are tacky reconstructions. Local tourists tend not to care, or even know the difference. Perhaps they don’t like to think about it, lest it remind them of the horrors of Mao's Cultural Revolution, when countless monuments were desecrated in the name of “progress.” The upshot is that towns like Pingyao are few and far between.

Harmony Guesthouse

The overnight train pulled into Pingyao at 6am. I had to be up and ready beforehand, as Chinese trains give no warnings or messages before each stop. You are simply expected to know when and where to get off. Fortunately I had studied the timetable beforehand and knew the schedule. At the station I was approached by a man offering a rickshaw ride into town. I impolitely refused his offer and tried to outpace him, which proved difficult. Eventually it became clear that he worked for the guesthouse that I had booked to stay in, so I clambered aboard. Within minutes we were bouncing through the city gates and into the inner sanctum of the old town. The streets were narrow and the buildings faded, and I felt as if I had stepped forty years back in time, long before China’s great industrialization.

The classic non-threatening Chinese stare

Alessandro was staying in another guesthouse with a pool table, so I went to visit him. There I met an American, Joshua, who had also lived in London (albeit for one month) and was a Fulham fan. It was nice to chat about English football rather than the tired old traveller’s conversations that echo around most hostels. I had had my fair share of walled cities, with Khiva and Xi'an fresh in the memory, so Pingyao felt a little unspectacular. Still, it was nice to poke around the place for a couple of days on a bicycle. In truth I already had my heart set on my next stop – Beijing.