Country Driving [2]
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 were often paralleled and intersected by roads, usually of the capillary type; sometimes these small routes ran for miles alongside the ruins. And the crenallated symbol still inspired the same reaction I’d had as a child: Imagine following a wall across a whole country! It could guide me through small-town China; I could chase the Great Wall all the way to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. Once I had the idea, I couldn’t shake it, although friends cautioned me about taking a long car journey alone. But that was also covered on the written driver’s exam:
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