T108 to Beijing
A flight from Shenzhen to Beijing takes about three hours. As with all air travel, there’s an origin and a destination, and whatever lies between matters little. Just outside the Shenzhen Railway Station, though, long rows of convenience stores cater to passengers preparing to cover some real ground.
The train crosses the 1500-mile distance in just over 24 hours. It’s hard to look at that kind of journey as just a line between two points. You trace a course through Longchuan, Ji’an, Nanchang … Lumbering into each new station you’re left to wonder at what lies beyond the platform. You can’t shake the feeling that even the most ordinary looking towns might be hiding something spectacular — if you could just descend and take a closer look. Riding a train fills your mind with fanciful visions of discoveries to be made when, if ever, you pass this way again.
Stretched out between stations is a vast and varied terrain with mysteries of its own. Construction is everywhere — though outside the cities the tower cranes, heavy equipment and skeletal apartment high-rises are replaced by teams of dusty laborers with hand tools, developing the countryside brick by brick. Here, a three-wheeled vehicle with the nose of a motorcycle and tail of a pickup truck tows another just like it on a dirt track running alongside the railway. There, what looks like half a village’s population is packed into an alley, hunched over dinner bowls. Squat greenhouses with earthen walls shelter some unknown crop. Half a dozen slender smokestacks dominate a hazy skyline. A lone worker on a rooftop is silhouetted before a pastel Chinese twilight. Every few seconds, the view is erased and substituted for another abbreviated glimpse of a world I hope to understand better.
Life on board is decidedly communal. The compartments lack doors, and bunks are stacked three high against each wall, with the lowest generally accepted as most desirable (and priced accordingly). But that depends on your perspective; the bottom tier is more or less public property before 10 p.m. — a venue for card games and boisterous conversation. Smoking areas set aside at both ends of the coach guarantee a near-constant flow of foot traffic along the narrow aisle. Conductors roll through at regular intervals with carts full of this and that, delivering shrill sales pitches with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The merchandise ranges from the sensible (drinks, fruit, instant noodles) to the incomprehensible (eight by ten holographic photos of puppies and flowers).
The commotion eventually dies down. Lights in the coach go off, and one by one the passengers retire to their beds. I sit up for some time, watching through the glass a silent landscape washed in the pale light of a full moon. Mountains on the horizon rise like specters out of a blue-gray mist. Before them are spread the irregular polygons of packed earth walls that bound rice fields, whose flooded surfaces gleam with reflected moonlight. This eerie and beautiful scene fixes itself in my head as I fall asleep to the drone of the rails.
Mountain village
Terraced fields extend high up the slopes surrounding Cuandixia, but these days thickets of blue-gray scrub brush have reclaimed most of the former farmland. The industry in this 500-year-old Ming Dynasty hamlet is tourism now.
A road is made
Approached by rail, the landscape of Shidu reveals itself bit by bit in brief spaces between tunnels. The train emerges from the depths into a sudden blast of light, and the traveler — like a swimmer gasping for air — presses his face against the glass to glimpse a peak, a gorge, a terraced slope before plunging back into the hillside.