Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (16 page)

In ancient times this place had been a military outpost, and the administrative region is still called “Old Soldiers’ Township.” At one time it served to protect the caravans that passed this way. “Even when I was a boy, camel trains were still coming through,” an old man told me. “I can remember them. They were going to Xinjiang.” His companion nodded. “One trader would have ten or more camels, all of them loaded down,” the other man said. “There were Chinese and also Uighurs, although it was mostly Chinese. After Liberation the camels didn’t come through as much. They started using trucks about then.”

A half dozen men sat in the sunshine, smoking Golden City cigarettes at the foot of an ancient tower. At one time this building must have been beautiful: it stood two stories tall, and each level had a four-cornered roof and painted eaves. Graceful calligraphy spelled out a message along the top, “With Power Control the Heaven and the Earth.” It marked the town’s central intersection, where camel trains used to pass. Nowadays, when the weather was good, old folks liked to gather at the tower, but it had fallen into disrepair. The paint was cracked and holes had rotted in the wooden roof; bricks from the base had been cannibalized for local construction. The old men said that two massive iron lions once decorated the entrance, but they were melted down for scrap during a Mao Zedong campaign for increased industrial production. Iron bells had been salvaged during the Cultural Revolution. “The bells used to ring whenever the wind blew,” one man remembered. “There were eight of them. They hung on the corners—four on the first level, and four more on the second level.”

They talked about other buildings that had disappeared, remembering the names and the locations around Xiakou. Most were temples from the days when religion was still common, and they had been torn down during the anti-superstition campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. “People used to go the Temple of the Goddess of Fertility if they wanted to have children,” one man said. “Old people would go to the temple called the Three Highest Manifestations of the Dao. The God of Literature Temple was where scholars went before taking the imperial examinations. Farmers went to the Dragon King Temple if they wanted rain.”

Nowadays these places were nothing but remembered names. Even the crossroads at the ruined tower had become meaningless, because the modern Silk Road had shifted away from Xiakou. The new Highway 312 had been built two miles to the west, which represented the final blow for the town, because travelers no longer stopped here. The population had dwindled to four hundred, less than half of what it was at the beginning of the Reform period. Everybody said young people left as soon as they finished middle school. That was the last building in town that seemed to be well kept—when I asked where I could stay for the night, people immediately directed me to the school.

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 chameleon 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 twenti
eth 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.