Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  It wasn’t surprising that rural people had little understanding of maps, but this was also true for educated Chinese. Even professional drivers with years of experience could be hopelessly confused by a simple atlas. Maps simply aren’t part of modern culture, despite the fact that the Chinese have an impressive ancient history of cartography. The earliest known maps date to the second century BC; these documents are printed on silk and were excavated from tombs in Hunan Province. They are contemporary with the maps of ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Chinese diagrams are technically quite advanced. They were developed for use by military and government, and they are abstract, viewing landscapes as if from above. The sense of scale is remarkably good. They use consistent symbols for key features, and they show rivers getting progressively wider downstream—a critical detail for any army commander who needed to stage a troop crossing. By the third century AD, an official named Pei Xiu outlined many principles of surveying and mapmaking, and the Chinese had a good technical foundation for cartography.

  These early Chinese maps were well drawn, but the fundamental approach was narrowly practical rather than scientific. In ancient Greece, cartography developed out of astronomy, as people applied principles from tracking the stars. This is how Western thinkers came up with the concepts of longitude and latitude, which were missing from ancient Chinese cartography. And over the centuries the Chinese began to ignore even Pei Xiu’s guidelines, until maps became less analytical and more descriptive. They relied heavily on words rather than symbols. Landscapes were warped to emphasize whatever happened to be of prime interest. On Ming maps of the Great Wall, for example, huge towers loom atop steep cartoonish peaks, whereas the surroundings lack detail or scale. These diagrams represent a step backward from what the Chinese had been doing sixteen centuries earlier.

  There are a number of reasons why cartography developed in this manner, and the most important factor was a lack of government interest in exploration and trade. Chinese emperors rarely encouraged expeditions, and officials traditionally disdained the merchant class. In contrast, the greatest advances in European and Arabic cartography were tied to trade. During the thirteenth century AD, the introduction of the compass—originally a Chinese invention—allowed merchants to create meticulously detailed charts of the Mediterranean. Two hundred years later, as the Portuguese tried to open southern trade routes, they mapped the coast of Africa with remarkable accuracy. This project depended on both government and private merchants—Portuguese princes coordinated the surveying efforts of traders, until finally they created a diagram of the African coastline.

  But there weren’t any equivalent breakthroughs in Chinese cartography, which developed out of very different motivations. In ancient China, maps served military needs, and the army had little incentive to create detailed diagrams of the interior and the coastline. Wars tended to be fought in the north and the west, in the regions of the Great Wall, where geography is vast and often featureless. For an army in such a landscape, specific points matter more than context, and Chinese maps usually focused on key passes or important forts. In the end, any map describes not only a region but also the key interests of the mapmakers themselves. During the same century that the Portuguese were trying to access the gold trade of East Africa, the Ming dynasty was protecting itself against northern nomads, and these very different goals created very different schematic views of the world.

  In China, where maps developed primarily as tools of the government and military, there isn’t a tradition of emphasizing their use by private individuals. Atlases play little role in Chinese education: open an elementary school geography textbook and you see mostly words. Students might be encouraged to write about their environment, but they never sketch it. Like many practical skills of the new economy, map reading hasn’t yet become part of the curriculum, and people can spend years in school without learning how to handle an atlas. Often the first time they wrestle with one is when they start to drive. Even if a Chinese person is interested in highly detailed maps, he has trouble finding them, because the government is wary about such diagrams. There’s still a tendency to associate any mapmaking with military interests, especially in the far west, where it’s impossible to find good atlases of places such as Tibet and Xinjiang. Even in nonsensitive parts of China, topographic maps are classified and unavailable on the market. For my driving trip, I didn’t bother to bring a GPS device. It would have been all but worthless without good maps, but my main concern was that such equipment might make me look like a foreigner engaged in surveying the remote west.

  And so I relied on the Sinomaps, which were still the best thing available on the market. The state-owned company was founded in 1954, not long after the Communists came to power, and for decades Sinomaps continued to follow the traditional goal of serving the government and military. Their headquarters are located in downtown Beijing, near Tiananmen Square, and once I stopped by for a visit. The place had the feel of an old-school danwei, or work unit: badly lit hallways, big meeting rooms, lots of people wandering around without much obvious purpose. They currently had 480 employees, which must have been enough, because workers played Ping-Pong in the hallway throughout my meeting with the deputy editor in chief. His name was Xu Gencai; he greeted me warmly and an assistant served us tea. We sat side by side, teacups between us, like Mao and Nixon. Out in the hallway we were apparently missing a great game—I could hear the pitter-patter of the ball interrupted occasionally by muffled cheers.

  Xu told me that China’s pace of change represented Sinomaps’ biggest challenge. They had to update Beijing city maps every three months, because of all the new construction, and the auto boom was creating a type of private market that had never existed. During the 1990s, Sinomaps published only five simple road maps for motorists; now they had more than twenty. Their target market was shifting away from government and military, but they still had an idiosyncratic notion of the private consumer. “We publish many maps of things that people need because of economic development,” Xu said. He meant this literally—the company was attempting to map the things that Chinese people buy. “We publish a Restaurant Map, which shows all the places where you can eat in Beijing,” Xu said. “And we make a Special Tourist Map, which shows not just the famous museums, but also places like Bar Street and Silk Alley.”

  I mentioned that the old Silk Alley, which had been a popular clothes market, had recently been demolished and moved to a new location.

  “See what I mean?” Xu said. “Now we have to change that one, too!”

  Proudly, he showed off other specialty maps. The Xiaodian Wuyu Amazing Shopping Map featured malls and stores. The School Map of Beijing identified every educational institution in the capital. The Chinese City Real Estate Map was designed for investors, and it listed estimated apartment prices in cities across the country. If you were looking for something that would go out of date quickly, the Chinese City Real Estate Map was a good bet. There was also a Medical Map of Beijing—a hypochondriac’s dream, marking the locations of hundreds of hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. It occurred to me that Sinomaps, which had spent so many years focused on government and military, still hadn’t quite grasped the concept of creating an open-ended tool for the private individual. In their eyes, people need direction; it’s not enough to give them the best possible Beijing atlas and let them figure out for themselves whether they want to find a restaurant, or a pharmacy, or a six-month-old real estate price. At the end of our conversation, after sitting side by side for an hour, Xu and I rose simultaneously and shook hands, as if marking the end of our diplomatic summit. He wished me good luck on my travels; he told me to come back any time. Out in the hallway, that Ping-Pong ball was still zinging when I left.

  FROM THE TENGGER DESERT I drove west into Gansu Province. The road was unnamed, too small to qualify as a national highway, but recently it had been paved as part of the government’s infrastructure project. Truckers were already using the route, and billboards lined
the way: “The Road Police Patrol Wishes You a Safe Journey” “The Silk Road’s New Face: The Road Patrol Protects Safety.” But there still weren’t any law officials to be seen, and it was just another version of the terra-cotta cop strategy—policework by allusion. Outside the village of Hongshui, a truck had broken down beside the road. Three men stood beside the vehicle, petting the invisible dog with an unusual degree of urgency. Cars and trucks flashed by, just like the question on the driving exam:

  344. If you see an accident and the people need help, you should

  a) continue driving.

  b) stop, do what you can to help, and contact the police.

  c) stop, see if the people offer a reward, and then help.

  I pulled over and the truckers told me that their oil pump had failed. It was a big Liberation truck, the model known as Ju Neng Wang: “The All-Powerful King.” They had been petting the dog for an hour and a half before I stopped. They asked if I could give one man a ride to Anyuan, the nearest town with a train station, and I agreed. They put the old oil pump in a burlap sack and dropped it in the back of the City Special.

  The trucker was named Li Changjie, and he was a southerner, a native of a village in Jiangsu Province. His wife still farmed, but he had left the land to do business. He was short, gaunt, and quick-eyed—he had the hungry look that you often saw among former peasants who had succeeded in the new economy. Li first started trucking in 1993, when he bought a secondhand vehicle with loans from relatives; over time he had steadily improved his rigs. Last year he had purchased the All-Powerful King for thirty-two thousand dollars. In China, that’s a huge amount of money, and Li was furious about the oil pump.

  “I checked and nobody has it stocked in this entire province,” he said. “I have to go all the way back to Xuzhou to get a replacement. I can’t find a reliable way to get one sent here fast, so I have to go myself. It’s a two-day train trip to Xuzhou, and then two days back. You’re a writer—you know what you should write about? You should write about Liberation trucks and how hard it is to get parts for them. It’s ridiculous. Something else you should write about is the low quality of Chinese products. Everything made in this country breaks.”

  I always liked talking to Chinese truckers, who are among the purest entrepreneurs in the country. They generally own their rigs, often in partnership; usually they travel in pairs, so one can drive while the other sleeps. Of all the professional drivers in China, they’re the most skilled. Cabbies are too aggressive, because stakes are low: city traffic moves slowly and nobody cares much about dents. And long-distance bus drivers are the worst. They never own the buses, and their pay depends on a percentage of ticket sales. This gives them incentive to speed, especially in a country where the highway patrol consists of signs and statues. Whenever I read about a terrible accident, it usually involves a long-distance bus.

  But truckers rarely make me nervous. Most are too overloaded to drive fast, and they don’t take risks, because they own their vehicles. They tend to follow set routes where they know the roads, and they’re smart about adjusting for bad weather. They’re interesting to talk to. I once spent a night at a truck stop in Shandong Province, on the east coast, asking drivers about what they carried. Two men had a truck full of bamboo whisk brooms; they had just dropped off a shipment of nonferrous metal. Another pair had unloaded color televisions and picked up processed wheat. Others had gone from chemical materials to radiators, from tennis shoes to dynamos. They were the alchemists of the new economy, at the center of every mysterious exchange that occurs along the Chinese road system. One truck had just dropped off computerized mah-jongg sets and picked up elementary school textbooks; somebody else had carried leather loafers one way and recycled plastic the other.

  During that same trip, on an expressway near the city of Tianjin, I drove in the wake of a truck that just had come unlatched. It carried foreign paper imported to China for recycling, and after the door opened the printed materials were strewn across the highway. Hundreds of pamphlets flapped low to the road like dying birds; I pulled over and caught one. It was in English: a fourteen-page mortgage application from a financial services company called Woolwich, which was located in Dartford, Kent. When I contacted Woolwich, they didn’t have the faintest idea how a flock of mortgage forms ended up on a Tianjin highway. But that’s true for almost any product you buy in the developed world: it’s probably already spent time on a Chinese road, and someday it may return there to be recycled.

  In Gansu Province, Driver Li’s All-Powerful King had failed while carrying raw cotton. His standard route ran from Xinjiang to Jiangsu, a distance of over two thousand miles. In the northwest he followed the route known as the Silk Road, passing through the Hexi Corridor of Gansu and the oasis towns of central Xinjiang. Usually he carried cotton east, dropped it off in a factory town, and picked up finished clothing—that was his particular alchemy. “They’re cheap clothes,” he said. “The kind that are exported to poor countries in Central Asia.” He earned more than six thousand dollars a year, an excellent income in China, and currently he traveled with two other drivers, one of whom was an apprentice. The others would spend the next four days sitting atop the All-Powerful King, waiting for Driver Li to return. Apart from police fines, theft is a trucker’s biggest concern. “People jump onto the back and steal whatever you’re carrying, sometimes even when you’re moving,” he said. “The worst place is Henan Province. In Henan if there’s a thief and you call the police, they won’t even bother to come. I hate driving through Henan.”

  At the Anyuan train station, I dropped off Driver Li and his fuel pump, which had leaked oil all over the floor of the City Special. He apologized profusely; I channeled Mr. Wang at Capital Motors and said, “Mei wenti!”—No problem! After that I continued into the Hexi Corridor. This narrow stretch of Gansu is bordered by harsh terrain: desert to the east, mountains to the west. But the heart of the corridor is fertile enough to be inhabited, because of the snowmelt of the western peaks, and in ancient times it represented a natural trade route. Caravans coursed throughout the region; some of the goods that passed this way eventually reached the Middle East and Europe. In the nineteenth century, Western geographers and historians began to refer to this series of trade routes as the Silk Road. In fact it consisted of dozens of braided routes, connecting many destinations and carrying many types of products, but the term stuck. It’s similar to the Great Wall: a foreign simplification that appeals to the imagination, like a branding of history. And in the same way that the Great Wall became Changcheng, the foreign notion of the Silk Road eventually returned to China, until now it’s a term that any Chinese recognizes: Sichouzhilu.

  In Gansu these two ideas intersect along Highway 312. The modern road follows the heart of the corridor, and driving northwest I began to see stretches of Ming wall off to the right. They were barriers of tamped earth, as tall as a man and running unbroken for miles; occasionally a village was nestled within the ramparts. At one point I turned off the highway and followed a dirt road for a couple of miles, until it ended at a place called Xiakou. The village had been built just within the wall, and locals still made good use of it. Rows of sheep pens lined one stretch of fortifications, the animals pawing at the Ming relic. On the outskirts of town, homes without running water had dug their outhouses straight into the barrier. So much for the glorious idea of the Great Wall: in Xiakou it smelled like shit.

  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.�
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  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.