Country Driving. Peter Hessler
ask directions, you should
a) not tell him.
b) reply patiently and accurately.
c) tell him the wrong way.
Thousands of nameless roads webbed the Sinomaps, and it was impossible to find one clear route across the west. But another symbol was less confusing:
At one point the Chinese had even considered converting the Great Wall into a highway. During the 1920s, intellectuals in China began to look to the example of the United States, where the automobile was already transforming the landscape. Chinese urban planners, some of whom had been educated in the States, encouraged cities to demolish their ancient defensive walls and use the material to build loop roads suitable for cars. By 1931 more than two dozen places had adopted this strategy, including the southern city of Guangzhou, which tore down structures that were over eight hundred years old. Inevitably, modernizers turned their attention to the Great Wall itself. In 1923, the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao published an article titled “Using Waste Material to Build a Road on the Great Wall.” The author, Lei Sheng, supported a recent government proposal to modernize the structure; in Lei’s opinion it represented “a very good opportunity.” He wrote: “The Great Wall runs from Shanhaiguan to Yumenguan; it’s continuous for thousands of li, and it’s a straight line. To convert it into a road would link Beijing, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu; it would make it easier to do business… .” The proposal bounced around for a while—in 1931, the influential Students’ Magazine supported it. Their article explained that with all the stones in the wall, “not so much capital will be required, with the result being that we’ll fill a big gap in transportation infrastructure, going from the east to the west, from the ocean to the interior… .”
Nobody ever acted on this plan, undoubtedly because Great Wall regions are so rugged and remote. But seventy years later the general route appealed to me as a driver. East to west, from the ocean to the interior—I had always wanted to take such a road trip in China. In my Book of Maps, the
347. If another driver, with good intentions, warns you about something, you should
a) be open-minded and listen carefully.
b) not listen.
c) listen and then don’t pay attention to the advice.
IN BEIJING, I RENTED a car and headed to Shanhaiguan, a city on the coast where the Great Wall meets the Bohai Sea. From there I drove west through the harvest of Hebei Province. It was mid-autumn and most crops had already been cut down; only the corn still stood tall in the fields. Everything else lay out in the road—mottled lines of peanuts, scattered piles of sunflower seeds, bright swaths of red pepper. The farmers carefully arranged the vegetables on the side of the asphalt, because that was the best surface for drying and sorting. They tossed the chaff crops into the middle of the road itself, where vehicles would be sure to hit them. This was illegal—there’s no other act that so publicly violates both traffic safety and food hygiene. In rural China, though, it’s still widely tolerated, because threshing is easiest when somebody else’s tires do the work.
Initially I found it hard to drive over food. On the first day of my journey, I screeched to a halt before every pile, rolling down the window: “Is it OK for me to go through?” The farmers shouted back impatiently: “Go, go, go!” And so I went—millet, sorghum, and wheat cracking beneath me. By the second day I no longer asked; by the third day I learned to accelerate at the sight of grain. Approaching a pile, I’d hit the gas—crash! crunch!—and then in the rearview mirror I’d see people dart into the road, carrying rakes and brooms. That was my share of the autumn work—a drive-through harvest.
The Hebei hills are steep, marked by faces of open rock, and I drove through villages with rugged names: Ox Heart Mountain, Double Peak Village, Mountain Spirit Temple. The Great Wall shadowed these redtiled towns. Usually the fortifications followed the ridgeline, high above the fields, and I’d catch glimpses as I wound through the hills. The Ming dynasty built these structures, mostly during the sixteenth century, and they had done their work well—the stone foundation and gray brick walls still clung firmly to the ridge. Sometimes a wall dipped into a valley, and in these low places the structure had been harvested as clean as the fields. The brick facing was completely gone: all that remained was the foundation and the hard-tamped earth interior, pockmarked and crumbling from the elements. This naked wall crossed the valley floor and climbed once more into the hills, until finally, after it reached a certain elevation, the bricks reappeared. The line of destruction was level on opposite sides of the valley, as if marking the tide of some great torrent that had swept through Hebei. But this flood had been human, and the watermark was one of motivation. It measured exactly how high people were willing to climb for free bricks.
In the village of Yingfang, I stopped to examine one of these bare sections, and a farmer named Wang Guo’an joined me in the road. “It was in better shape when I was young,” he said. “A lot of it got torn down during the Cultural Revolution.”
He was referring to the political campaigns that lasted from 1966 to 1976, when Mao Zedong encouraged the Chinese to attack anything traditional and “feudal.” Some sections of the Great Wall were damaged during this period, and Wang could remember villagers in Yingfang tearing down their local fortifications and using the materials for other building projects.
He took me behind his home, where old bricks had been piled into neat four-foot-tall stacks. “Those are from the Great Wall,” he said. “You can tell from the mortar—that’s the kind they used in the old days. They came from a big tower in the village.”
I asked if people still ripped up the wall, and he shook his head. “The government around here won’t let you do it anymore,” he said. “These bricks were first taken forty years ago. People used them to build a house, which was recently demolished. Now we’ll use them to build something else.”
In these crowded landscapes, everything was a potential resource. Hebei is about the same size as the state of Washington, but the population is more than eleven times higher—sixty-eight million people total. Hills have been carved into crop terraces; roads serve to dry vegetables; passing cars double as threshers. If there’s wall within reach, it’s used, sometimes twice. Able-bodied people often lead double lives—they might farm for a while and then head to the cities. They serve on construction crews; they do roadwork; they spend time on factory assembly lines. The most jobs I saw listed on a single business card was twenty-seven. That was in Shanxi Province, just beyond the Hebei border, and I met the man at a funeral.
In this part of China, even funerals have a bustling air, and I stopped for processions all across the north. They took place in the road, as public as the threshing, and usually the participants invited