Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (17 page)

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:

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 inter
pret 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!”

“It
is
a Chinese license,” I said. “I couldn’t drive here if I only had an American license.”

“Do you have your American license?”

I handed it over, and the cops passed it around—undoubtedly the first time that a Missouri driver’s license had ever been inspected in Gansu Province. “So why are you here?” one officer said.

“I’m just driving around. Tourism.”

“How did you learn Chinese?”

“I’ve lived here for years.”

“You must be a spy!” he said. The others picked up the refrain, laughing. “He’s a spy! He’s driving around, he speaks Chinese—he must be a spy! A spy! A spy!”

Shaking with laughter, the cop returned both my licenses. It took me a while to find my voice. “Is it OK if I continue?” I said.

“Of course!”

Driving away, looking through the rearview mirror, I could see them roughhousing on the side of the road. The cops punched each other and laughed, “A spy! A spy!”

IT TOOK MORE THAN
an hour to reach Subei. There was nothing along the way but white herdsman tents, home to Mongol and Kazakh nomads, and the town itself was a low line of buildings that ran across a dry valley. I stopped at a public toilet; when I exited, a man was waiting for me. He said one word: “Identification.”

He was short, dark-skinned, and wore a sparse mustache—ethnic Mongolian, I guessed. His request took me by surprise, and when I hesitated he flashed a badge: Public Security. He inspected my passport and put it in his pocket. “This district isn’t open to foreigners,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said. “Nobody told me that.”

“It doesn’t matter whether somebody tells you. It’s not open.”

“I’m just traveling,” I said. “I’ll be happy to leave right now. I don’t want to cause any problem.”

“You’ve already caused a problem,” he said. “We have to go to the station now.”

We left the City Special parked beside the road. I had a sinking feeling that the car would be impounded—I knew this had happened to other foreigners who had driven illegally into restricted areas. But there’s never any way to predict the outcome of a Chinese detention, which depends entirely on the place and the people you happen to be dealing with.

At the station a woman officer was waiting, and they seated me behind a desk. The male cop mentioned that recently they had detained another foreigner. “He came here on a bus,” he said.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He was punished according to law.”

“How was he punished?”

The cop ignored the question. The two of them rooted through file cabinets, pulling out papers; they moved efficiently, like this was a familiar routine. I decided to make one last play for leniency. “There were policemen at the highway turnoff,” I said. “They checked all my documents. They didn’t tell me Subei was closed, and they said it’s fine to come here.”

“Of course they did!” the Mongolian cop retorted. “What do those guys know about anything? They’re just road police! They’re worthless!”

It was hard to argue with that. The police began the interrogation: the Mongolian cop asked questions, and the woman wrote. Where did you come from today? Is this your correct passport? Residence card? Is this your current address in Beijing? How long have you lived there? What’s your education level? Do you have a receipt for renting the car? How much was it? Where is the rental company? Where did you stay last night? How much did it cost? Did you register? What’s the name of your work unit? Is this the correct way to write it? Do you have a doctorate?

For some reason they kept returning to my education level. It baffled me—what exactly was the link between degree status and wandering into a closed town on the edge of the Tibetan plateau? But then
it dawned on me that they were simply filling out forms. There were dozens of blanks, and many of them overlapped; sometimes I answered the same question three times. The queries were so specific and detailed that they essentially prevented effective interrogation. Neither officer seemed the least bit suspicious, and they never asked any open-ended questions, like where I planned to go or what I was doing so far from home. They didn’t so much as glance at the City Special. It was strictly a matter of paperwork, and afterward they sat back, looking relieved.

“You’ve broken our national law regarding aliens in China,” the female cop announced. She pulled out a rule book and pointed to number forty-six. “We have to punish you.”

“What’s the punishment?”

“You will be fined,” the male cop said, and both of them suddenly grinned. It was a certain Chinese smile that masks embarrassment, and I found myself grinning, too.

“By law, we can fine you five hundred,” she said. “But since this is your first time, we’ll only fine you one hundred.”

It was the equivalent of twelve dollars. “Thanks,” I said, and put the money on the table. The moment they saw the bill they became nervous, and neither would touch it. “I’m going to have to call our supervisor,” the female cop said, and she left the room. A few minutes later she returned: “We can’t take cash.”

“Why not?”

“Because of corruption. If it’s cash, there’s no proof of the amount. So you’re going to have to mail it.”

Periodically, anticorruption campaigns sweep through the Communist Party; invariably they fail to make much difference. But in this forgotten part of Gansu the cops were taking it seriously. The woman escorted me outside, and we crossed the street to the Agricultural Bank of China. It was Sunday, so she contacted a manager, who opened the place especially for us. I filled out a form with the address of the police station, wrote the woman’s name, and handed over the money. The bank manager said, “It’ll arrive by Tuesday.” He seemed pleased by the efficiency—it would take only two days for the money to reach the woman who stood immediately beside me. She was happy
too; on the street she shook my hand and wished me a good journey. I started the City Special, turned around, and drove back to the checkpoint. The road cops were still there, goofing around in their baggy uniforms, and they shouted happily when I cruised past.

FOR FORTY MILES I
followed a small road into the Gobi. This was the blankest Sinomap yet: only ten place-names marked the page. One was Yumenguan, the Jade Gate, a military structure that had been built by the Han dynasty, and that was where the pavement ended.

A rough dirt track continued farther into the desert. I was off the map now, in unmarked territory; the City Special bounced over low rocky hills. After ten miles the track terminated at the ruins of Hecangcheng. It’s an ancient fortified granary, built over two thousand years ago to serve the Han soldiers who were stationed here. In this part of the desert, on the western edge of the empire, the Chinese had constructed forts instead of a wall. The land is so flat and barren that I could see the next one in the distance, three miles away. I had reached the end of the line—the stream of continuous walls had given way to scattered forts, like final drops from a spigot that had been shut off.

There was nobody else at Hecangcheng. The government planned to build a paved road to the site, but the modern construction had yet to begin and the place remained isolated. The old granary was massive, more than two hundred feet long, with ten-foot walls that rose stark above the scrubland. There were pillars of tamped earth, and gaping holes that showed the sky; in the mud walls I could see the matted straw that had been used for construction. This part of Gansu is so dry that the straw still looked fresh; in truth it had been here for more than twenty centuries. This granary, like all the forts in the region, was surveyed in the early 1900s by Aurel Stein, the great Hungarian-British explorer and archaeologist. He made two trips here, spending months with camel trains in the desert. On his second journey he literally retraced his steps. At one point he stumbled upon two sets of tracks, the prints of a man accompanied by a dog, and he realized they were his own—seven years earlier he had wandered here with his faithful dog Dash II. He wrote,
“Time seems to have lost all power of destruction on this ever-dry ground which knows no drift sand nor erosion.”