Country Driving [50]
There were no other details on this odd monument. What factory? Which workers? Who wasn’t being forgotten? A few miles later I pulled off onto a dirt track, drove for a few minutes, and pitched my tent in the dunes. I enjoyed an Ordos dinner—Oreo cookies, Dove bars, and Gatorade. The sky was calm and I slept with the tent open, looking up at the Milky Way.
By that point in the journey I was accustomed to falling asleep without knowing where I was. In the morning I could usually figure it out, and I stocked plenty of water in case the City Special broke down. For the most part I had good cell phone coverage—the Chinese system consists of a handful of state-owned companies, and they’ve installed towers with amazing thoroughness. The government also controls the fuel industry, which means that even in remote areas you can find a gas station. I never came close to running out, and price controls kept gas cheap: in the spring of 2002, I paid the same amount all across China, the equivalent of $1.20 per gallon. There were no self-service stations. In over three thousand miles of driving across western China, from Inner Mongolia to the Tibetan plateau, the City Special’s fuel cap was hardly touched by a man. Pumping gas was women’s work, at least in the west, where stations were staffed by young girls who had recently left their home villages. Usually these migrants were in their teens, with brand-new uniforms, neat haircuts, and makeup—small-town sophisticates taking their first step on the road to success.
The gas-station girls were attentive, polite, and friendly, but they were hopeless when it came to directions. This was a common problem—I spent an enormous amount of time trying to find people who could give reliable information. Dialects were sometimes hard to understand, but the biggest problem was simply that few Chinese had traveled. Even fewer had driven. They knew little about roads, even around their homes, and they were terrible at explaining how to get someplace. It was best to structure any query as a yes/no proposition: “Is this the road to Zhongwei?” The absolute worst thing that a driver could do was open a map. It was like handing over a puzzle to a child—people’s faces went from confusion to fascination as they turned the map this way and that, tracing lines across the page. One of the first things I learned on the road was to keep the Sinomaps out of sight while asking directions.
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