Country Driving [54]
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.”
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.