Country Driving

by Peter Hessler

  “There are thirty-three signal towers in this region,” Old Chen explained, pointing at the circles on the map. “Those are from the Ming. The Ming wall is along the Inner Mongolian border. But there are other walls also going through this region, from other dynasties.”

  He opened a second drawer and took out a gray shard of pottery. When he handed it over, the hardened clay felt cool in my palm. “What dynasty do you think this is from?” he asked.

  I told him that I had no idea, and Old Chen looked disappointed.

  “Well, if you ever come back here, maybe you can bring an archaeologist,” he said. “I know where a lot of this pottery can be found, but I don’t know which dynasty it is.” He told me that treasure seekers had found intact pottery and bronze artifacts in this area. “All of the good ones have been sold,” he said. “Nobody regulates it.”

  The research was his hobby—he was a farmer, and in the past he had also served as Party Secretary, the highest Communist Party position in the village. Now he was retired from local politics but he still worked two acres of land, where he grew potatoes. He owned five sheep. He told me that his annual income was around two hundred dollars, and he had only a sixth-grade education, but he had done his best to educate himself in history. Since retiring, he had made frequent trips to the government archives of Zuoyun County, fifteen miles away. He tracked down information about local fortifications, and he surveyed the region, trying to match ruins with historical descriptions. He had also interviewed Ninglu’s elderly residents, some of whom remembered the war against the Japanese, when bricks from the Ming garrison wall had been harvested to build houses. I asked why he had undertaken the research. “Because nobody else was doing it,” he said. “If nobody studies it, then nobody’s going to know the past.”

  In terms of academia, Old Chen was right: there isn’t a single scholar at any university in the world who specializes in the Great Wall. Chinese historians focus on textual research, and usually they study political institutions that can be traced through the records of a dynasty or a government. In the field, archaeologists tend to excavate ancient tombs. The Great Wall fits into neither tradition: it’s not underground, and it’s not strictly on the printed page; a researcher needs to combine both fieldwork and reading. Even if a scholar were interested, he’d have trouble defining his subject, because there are hundreds of walls across the north. In the past, this was the most problematic region for Chinese empires, which enjoyed natural boundaries in other directions: ocean to the east, jungle to the south, the Himalayas to the west. But the northern steppes are wide open, and in ancient times this landscape was populated by nomadic tribes who raided their more sedentary neighbors. In response, the Chinese often built walls—the earliest known historical reference to such defenseworks dates to 656 BC. Over the next two millennia, many dynasties constructed fortifications, but they did so in different ways and used different terms to describe their defenseworks. At least ten distinct words were used for what we now think of as “Great Wall.”

  Two dynasties became especially famous for wall building. In 221 BC, Qin Shihuang declared himself emperor, and during his reign he commanded the construction of three thousand miles of barriers of tamped earth and fieldstone. His dynasty, the Qin, became notorious for such forced labor projects, and popular songs and legends outlasted most of the earthen walls themselves, which gradually deteriorated over the centuries. Whereas the Qin walls survive primarily in the popular imagination, the Ming dynasty built structures that have lasted by virtue of their materials. The Ming came to power in 1368, and in the Beijing region they eventually constructed fortifications of quarried stone and brick. They were the only dynasty to build extensively with such durable materials—these are the impressive walls I’d seen in Hebei Province. But the Ming defenseworks are a network rather than a single structure, and some regions have as many as four distinct barriers.

  In the eighteenth century, Western explorers and missionaries began to visit China in greater numbers. They heard the Qin stories, and they saw the Ming walls; inevitably they connected the two in their minds. This imaginative line from the Qin to the Ming became what we now think of as the Great Wall: supposedly, a single structure of brick and stone, two thousand years old, that stretches across China as neatly as a marking on a map—. In 1793, an Englishman named Sir John Barrow visited the wall near Beijing, extrapolated from what he saw, and declared that the nationwide structure contained enough stone to build two smaller walls around the equator. (He didn’t realize that walls in the west are smaller and made of tamped earth.) In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they still can’t.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propaganda, recognizing the symbolic value of a unified barrier. In any case, it was hard to set the record straight in a country with no academic tradition of studying the ancient structures. Finally it was as if the Chinese threw up their hands and accepted the foreign notion: nowadays there’s even a single term, Changcheng, literally “long wall,” which has been adopted as the catchall equivalent of “Great Wall.”

  The only Chinese studying the Great Wall do so outside of academia. In Beijing, small communities of amateur historians try to combine fieldwork with textual research, and occasionally in the provinces there’s somebody like Old Chen. He told me that eventually he hoped to find a provincial publisher for his book. After he showed me his writings, and the artifacts that he had collected, he offered to take me out to see the local walls.

  We climbed into the City Special and drove north along a dirt road. A couple of miles outside the village, we stopped and Old Chen led me through a high valley of scrub grass. He walked slowly, with the thoughtful pose that’s common among men in the countryside: head down, hands clasped behind his back. He stopped at a distinct grass-covered ridge.

  “That’s from the Northern Wei,” he said, referring to a dynasty that ruled this region from AD 386 to 534. Over the centuries the structure had been worn down by wind and rain, until now it was nothing more than a two-foot-tall bump stretching northeast across the hills. It was intersected by another ridge so faint that I wouldn’t have seen it without his help. “That’s the Han wall,” he said. It was even older: the Han ruled from 206 BC to AD 220. High in the hills, a third wall dated to the Ming. The Ming fortifications were six feet tall and ran clear to both horizons, east and west. In this landscape of ancient barriers, the Ming wall was a relative newcomer—only four centuries old.

  “Over the years, I saw these things so many times, until I finally got curious,” Old Chen explained. “Where did they come from? What was the system behind it? That was my main reason for starting the research.”

  I drove him back to his home, where we had another cup of tea. He explained that the village name had been shortened from Ningxi Hulu, which means “Pacify the Hu.” In ancient times, hu was a term used by the Chinese to describe the nomadic peoples of the north. It wasn’t specific to a certain tribe or ethnicity, and it was derogatory—a slur that encompassed all outsiders. The final character, lu, was even blunter: “barbarians.”

  “Basically, the name of our village means ‘Kill the Foreigners,’” Old Chen said with a smile. “Look at this.” He opened my book of Sinomaps and pointed out another village ten miles to the east: Weilu, or “Overawe the Barbarians.” Nearby was the town of Pohu: “Smash the Hu.” Other villages were called “Overawe the Hu,” “Suppress the Barbarians,” and “Slaughter the Hu.” Modern maps use the character for hu that means “tiger”—a substitution first made during the Qing dynasty, whose Manchu rulers were sensitive to the portrayal of people from outside the walls. But the change was cosmetic, and the original meaning is still as obvious as the old forts t
hat tower over the village.

  I left Ninglu in late afternoon, when the sun began to fall low over the fields. Old Chen escorted me to the City Special, and a dozen locals followed out of curiosity. Many of the men wore military castoffs, and the collected uniforms—worn, dirty, ill-fitting—made me feel if I were being sent on some desperate mission. My next destination lay to the north, where hills loomed high along the borderlands, a line of dry peaks that seemed to have been bled of all color. Old Chen shook my hand and wished me good luck. “Next time you come,” he reminded me, “try to bring an archaeologist.”

  I drove past neat lines of poplars turning gold with the season, and then the road began to climb through the bare mountains. There weren’t any other cars. At an elevation of six thousand feet, the pavement pierced the Ming wall, which represented the Shanxi provincial boundary. The ancient structure had been broken to make room for the roadway, and a cement pillar marked the entrance to Inner Mongolia. This is the last region in north-central China, and it was the least populated place I had visited thus far.

  I continued driving until I reached a pass, where I found a dirt track branching off the main road. The track ran along the ridge for a few hundred yards, and then I pulled over. In the back of the Jeep, I carried a tent and sleeping bag. It was a perfect night for camping—the air was so clear that the stars seemed to pulse above the valley. In the tent, I fell asleep thinking about the border towns that I intended to visit the next day. Smash the Hu, Slaughter the Hu: just another quiet drive in the countryside.

  At midnight the tent was suddenly bathed in light. Startled, I awoke and sat bolt upright, thinking that it was the headlights of an approaching car. Fumbling with the tent flap, I looked outside and realized that the full moon had just broken the horizon. Everything else was normal: the empty dirt track, the parked City Special. Down below, the lights of Ninglu village had been extinguished, and the rising moon cast shadows across the steppe. For a moment I sat still, waiting for my fear to settle, hearing nothing but the wind and the pounding of my heart.

  IN THE EVENINGS I worried about visitors, especially the police. There wasn’t yet a tradition of cross-country driving in China, and rules were strict for foreigners. I wasn’t supposed to take the City Special outside of Beijing, and some parts of the west were closed completely to outsiders, because of poverty, ethnic tensions, or military installations. And a foreign journalist was technically required to apply to local authorities before traveling anywhere in the country. That was one reason I brought my tent—I hoped to avoid small-town hotels, which hand over their guest lists to the police.

  On the road I followed my own set of guidelines. I waited until sunset to pitch my tent, and I left at first light; I never started a campfire. If I needed to stay in a small town, I looked for a truckers’ dorm, where foreign guests are so rare that they usually don’t have police registration forms. I carried enough water to last for days. I generally drove under the influence of caffeine and sugar—the City Special was fully stocked with Coca-Cola, Gatorade, Oreo cookies, and candy bars. If I traveled for a few days without a shower, I stopped at a barbershop and paid somebody to wash my hair. Every small town in China has at least one barbershop, and a standard service is the wash and head massage, usually for about a dollar. At noon I often pulled off the road to take a nap. I never drove at night. Fatigue is such a factor on Chinese roads that it appears on the driver’s exam:

  133. If you drive for four hours, you must stop the car and take a mandatory rest of at least

  a) 10 minutes.

  b) 20 minutes.

  c) 15 minutes.

  The correct answer is B—if you rest for a quarter hour, you’re still five minutes short of legal. Chinese driving is a physical endeavor, or at least that’s how it’s portrayed in the rulebook. According to law, a truck driver must be at least 155 centimeters tall, whereas the driver of a passenger car has to be 150 (four feet eleven inches). In order to get a license, you need to have at least three normal fingers on each hand. Thumbs are nonnegotiable. Each ear must be capable of distinguishing the sound of a tuning fork at a distance of fifty centimeters. You can’t be red-green color-blind. You can’t suffer from epilepsy, congenital heart disease, vertigo, or Ménière’s syndrome. The law explicitly forbids any driver stricken by “hysteria.” If your legs happen to be of different lengths, and the difference exceeds five centimeters, you are legally banned from operating a standard transmission vehicle.

  The driving law spells out such physical requirements in detail, as if sound health and body are critical to road safety, which clearly is not the case. The issue isn’t traffic volume, either—in 2001, when I drove across the north, China had about one-fifth the number of cars and buses as the United States. But there were more than twice as many traffic fatalities, and the government reported a total of 750,000 road accidents. It was a nation of new drivers, most of them negotiating new cities, and the combination was lethal. People might have done better if surroundings had remained familiar—in Beijing, drivers tended to be brilliant in old parts of town. Traditionally, Beijing is composed of hutong neighborhoods, networks of narrow brick-walled alleyways that had originally been laid out in the thirteenth century. Every time I drove into a hutong, the walls pressed close and I broke out in a sweat, but everybody else seemed unfazed. They were patient and they were skilled: a Beijing hutong driver could dodge an oncoming Santana, cruise cleanly through a pack of schoolchildren, and park his car within inches of a Ming-dynasty brick wall. If the nation’s road system somehow could have channeled the hutong mentality, maybe all of us would have been fine.

  But people didn’t respond as well to the open space of a new road. Some of it was poor planning: by 2001, Beijing had suddenly become home to over one million vehicles, and the city’s infrastructure struggled to catch up. South of the hutong where I lived, old neighborhoods had been cleared out for bigger roads, but traffic rules were often bizarre. At one major intersection, some genius urban planner had located the left turn lane on the far right side of the road, which meant that anybody heading in that direction had to cut across five lanes of traffic. If he successfully made the turn and continued straight for another mile, he reached another intersection where the traffic signals had been mistimed so badly that lights were green in all directions for a good five seconds. Elsewhere in the city, entire districts were under construction. Roads were half built; signs were poorly planned; unmarked ramps led to mystery thoroughfares. Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher:

  Even today, when some of the road problems have been improved, city driving is an adventure. And trouble is inevitable in a place where most drivers are rookies. In China, the transition has been so abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life—people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he’s about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they’ll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluating options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant; it’s common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.

  In fact, the use of headlights was banned in Beijing until the late 1970s, when the nation’s leaders began going overseas in increasing numbers. During the early Reform years, these trips were encouraged by governments in Europe and the United States, who hoped that glimpses of demo
cracy would convince Chinese officials to rethink their policies. In 1983 Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing, made one such visit to New York. On the way to and from his meetings with Mayor Ed Koch and other dignitaries, Chen made a crucial road observation: Manhattan drivers turn on their lights at night. When Chen returned to China, he decreed that Beijing motorists do the same. It’s unclear what conclusions he drew from his encounters with American democracy (eventually he ended up in prison for corruption), but at least he did his part for traffic safety.

  Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven’t grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it’s pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions—in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don’t mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.

  For the most part, though, they’re unflappable, and it’s hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving so badly. On the open road it feels like everybody has just been unleashed from a hutong—there’s a sudden rush of speed and competition, and the greatest thrill comes from passing other motorists. People pass on hills; they pass on turns; they pass in tunnels. If they get passed themselves, they immediately try to pass the other vehicle back, as if it were a game. From what I can tell, that’s the only question on the written driver’s exam with three correct answers:

  77. When overtaking another car, a driver should pass

  a) on the left.