Country Driving [56]
“This breed is known as the Shandan horse,” he said, when I asked about it. “They aren’t tall or fast, but they’re known for endurance. They’re good at pulling things.”
Shandan is a nearby town, and Squad Leader Wang said that locals first started raising horses for the Chinese military during the Han dynasty, over two thousand years ago. Back then, the empire’s main adversary was the Xiongnu, a nomadic people who terrorized the Chinese for generations. The only way to effectively fight this enemy was on horseback, and the empire set up breeding grounds in this part of the Hexi Corridor. In the old days, they called the region the Imperial Horse Camp, and over the centuries this tradition had survived. The Communists renamed the camps, giving each of them a number, but they still bred the Shandan horse, and the animal remained useful in the rugged lands of the west. Out in Xinjiang, China’s remote national borders are still patrolled on horseback. Locals told me that during the 1980s, when the Chinese aided the Taliban in their war against the Soviet Union, they sent large numbers of Shandan horses to Afghanistan.
But even a remote place like this wasn’t immune to the changes of the Reform period. The name remained Military Horse Camp Number One, and they still cared for over two thousand animals, but Squad Leader Wang told me they were in the process of privatizing. “We’re not technically under the army anymore,” he said. “The military stopped requesting horses from us a couple of years ago; they have enough for the time being. We sell to other companies now, especially ones that do tourism. And some of our leaders say that we’re going to start doing tourism, too.”
That seemed the most likely future for Military Horse Camp Number One—someday it would be a dude ranch for urban Chinese. In the meantime, the place still had a military feel; everybody wore uniforms and there was little sign of civilian life. When I stopped at the headquarters, the director became extremely nervous and asked to see my passport and journalist accreditation. But he didn’t seem to know what to do after that, and he let me drive away in the City Special.
In recent weeks, as I approached the far west, I had sensed that local authorities were becoming more alert about foreigners. At one tollbooth I had been stopped by a cop, who inspected the City Special thoroughly—he even opened the hood and jotted down the serial number. He never said why he was concerned, but I knew that there were some military installations in the region. And ethnic tensions could have been a factor, as Gansu is home to large Tibetan communities.
I knew it was best to keep moving, and after visiting Military Horse Camp Number One, I decided to get out of the county, in case the police had been alerted. I drove north until almost midnight, when I finally arrived at a small place called Gaotai. The settlement had sprung up along Highway 312, a strip of auto repair shops, cheap restaurants, and truckers’ dorms. At one of the low-end places I found a bed for two dollars a night. They didn’t have the police registration forms; all I had to do was hand over the cash. The room contained four beds, a window that overlooked the highway, and a poster of a Dutch windmill.
A pair of Sichuanese truckers already occupied two other beds. The men came from Neijiang, a town I knew from my days in the Peace Corps, and their Liberation truck carried a load of children’s clothes to be exported to Kazakhstan. They had stopped to make repairs on their vehicle—another All-Powerful King humbled in Gansu Province. The truckers became excited when I showed up.
“Did you come to see the other foreigner?” one of them said.
“What other foreigner?”
“The Russian woman.”
“I don’t know any Russians,” I said. “I’m American.”
“Oh, I thought you knew her. She works