NB2: It has come to my attention that some kind things have been said about DftNC on the 2016 Yenching scholars page - so welcome to any incoming Yenching Scholars, I hope you guys find this blog useful or fun, and if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments or find me on Facebook!
We left Beijing West Station the day before on our first sleeper of the trip. To my slight chagrin, we rolled South out of the station, and so turned over the North China Plain instead of cutting straight through the mountains towards Inner Mongolia. And so, our first several hours took us through what I consider the most incredibly boring landscape the entire country has to offer - still-rising suburban developments outside of Beijing gave way to unending acres of flat, nondescript farmland quickly fading into the smog that seems to permanently hang over the fields of southern Hebei province. Nevertheless, we were in good spirits. We were heading West, following the paths of literary figures and silk road traders alike, traveling over 3,000km by train along almost the entire East-West axis of one of the largest countries in the world. Our traveling packs were stowed above our sleeper berths, and we were comfortably hanging around, enjoying the hum of activity on the train - the ubiquitous passing of conductors peddling everything from the always necessary fangbiangmian (instant noodles) to little toy robots, the radio playing Chinese pop (and, strangely, a Danish soft rock band called Michael Learns to Rock that sings in English and is primarily known in East Asia), the patter of steel wheels on unwelded track.
I retired to my middle bunk a bit early. I may have used some diplomacy to switch from the top bunk written on my ticket, but given that my continuing jet lag (I just came back from a brief trip to the US) makes it likely that I'm the first one up, I didn't feel that bad - the middle bunk allows the best view lying down in hard sleeper compartments. Under me, friends were watching the Fellowship of the Ring for another few hours as I drifted off to sleep.
On waking up, I rolled over to look outside, and my first glance could've as well been on the moon. In the early twilight (we'd be at least one time zone over already if China had time zones), ghostly mountains and hills faded into view, dotted with a bare minimum in vegetation, separated by dirt valleys with dry streams carved into them by the last rains. A few villages blended into the mountains, dark and unlit, the same color as the surrounding terrain. This was the same Loess Plateau that covers much of Ningxia and Shaanxi, and whose caves provided refuge to the Red Army in Yan’an during the Long March.
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| Early morning on the Loess (apologies for the quality) |
6:20, and the train is waking up. A benefit of slight jet lag is making it to the sinks before the morning rush. At 6:30 on the dot, the radio comes back on, with morning greetings from China railways (”女生们先生们，早上好！”) and morning music (some inoffensive pop rock song with choruses such as "heeeey 早上好" repeated over and over, one that we would grow to, um, ‘resent’, by the third time we’d hear it on this trip).
We arrived in Lanzhou, the gate to the Northwest, at the mouth of the Hexi Corridor, straddling both sides of the (very) Yellow River. Very urban, very dense, Lanzhou at ground level makes a good case for being much larger than it actually is. While ‘only’ having 2 million inhabitants in its built-up/urban area, the steep sides of the Yellow River valley forces the city into a long, thin, but tall ribbon on both sides of the river.
The first thing that stood out to me as we began making our way into the city was the high visibility and large number of mosques. It’s frustratingly difficult to find statistics on local demographics, but some numbers suggest around 1 million Muslims in Gansu Province as a whole (total population around 30 million), with a bit under 3,000 mosques. Living in Beijing, it’s not all that easy to imagine many prominently placed religious institutions (barring Daoist and Buddhist temples mainly maintained as touristic and cultural destinations) - not that they don’t exist, but it’s hard to accidentally turn a corner and be faced with a giant mosque or church facade. Lanzhou has no such qualms, and fifteen minutes by bus from the train station, we turn onto a road split by the Lanzhou Xiguan Mosque (西关清真寺) confidently placed in a square in its middle. We got off the bus and were able to get a glimpse inside at a mosque with pretty modern-looking architecture and facilities (the current iteration is from 1990 - a mosque has been at this location since the Ming Dynasty), with kids playing out in the back, and a beautiful old tree in the courtyard.
Our first destination was the Gansu Provincial Museum. Every Chinese province and region has one of these in its capital - they’re usually free, and are often a decent first look at a new province. The Gansu provincial museum is actually the home of some pretty famous Silk Road relics, including the “Galloping Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow” (马踏飞燕 Mǎtà fēiyàn), a 1900-year-old Han Dynasty sculpture that’s become the symbol of the city of Lanzhou (the traditional sculpture on the square outside the main train station is a large replica of this statue). But, it was not to be, the Silk Road collection was closed for refurbishment. We instead saw an exhibition on the Ancient Tea Horse Road (commonly 茶马古道), another influential trade route, passing from Yunnan’s tea-producing regions to Burma in the West and Sichuan (and Lanzhou?) in the North.
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| Beautifully carved artifact in the Gansu Provincial Museum |
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| Spot the Ted Cruz lookalike |
More curious, at least to the non-Chinese observer, was the “Red Gansu” (红色甘肃) exhibit. Given the important role the area around Gansu province played in the Chinese Civil War and the history of the Communist Party, the motivation for the exhibit seems pretty clear, both in the context of local pride and to help out local propaganda efforts (The Provincial Museum was a “Patriotic Education Center”, after all). Rows of grainy photographical portraits of local and transient military leaders lined the walls (including that a certain Xi Zhongxun 习仲勋, Xi Jingping’s father and a prominent member of the first generation of PRC leadership until his multiple purgings later in his career). Dioramas of important military engagements (including a battle for the first Yellow River bridge in Lanzhou) decorated corners of the exhibition, accompanied by a soundtrack of soldiers yelling. We did find some interesting artifacts, like a surviving early party member card (one of its forms to be filled out asked for a ‘description of struggle’), and some old handwritten news bulletins.
Lunch was Lanzhou La Mian (拉面), or pulled noodles, a pretty common staple local dish, prepared by pulling dough out until thin enough to be considered noodles (watching the process is pretty fun; experienced makers can go from a lump of dough to a large bowlful of noodles in a few minutes just by stretching the noodles out in a midair dance). We got a bit of unwanted photographical attention from the patrons of the restaurant, including from the owner, immortalized as the ‘兰州老板’ (the Lanzhou Boss), who has been gracing Keshav with videos of random foreigners failing at eating noodles at his shop ever since he took one for the team and gave up his wechat ID in exchange for a group photo….
Our afternoon brought us down to the Yellow River, where we mainly whiled away the time until our next night train on its shores. Turns out a scenic(-ish) speedboat ride starts at 35RMB / person! Finally, a quick climb up to Lanzhou’s White Pagoda gave a good last look from above at this not unphotogenic city.
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| Lanzhou's skyline (PC: Keshav Kelkar) |
Because of our underestimating of the traffic (the subway system won’t open for a few years, and it shows), we had to sprint to get our luggage from the staffed lockers and were waved through the ticket barriers that had already emptied of travelers. We dropped off our stuff in our compartment, and a few of us made our way to the restaurant car to see the Western suburbs of Lanzhou slowly fade into rural scenes of the Loess Plateau over a good plate of 大盘鸡 (lit. ‘big plate of chicken’, a Western Chinese staple, and prepared in a pretty decent manner by the train chefs). Leg one was over, and our real adventure, towards the frontier and past the Chinese ‘core’, was about to begin.
