China Witness

to Lanzhou city, a distance, we had been told, of more than seventy kilometres, which was likely to take us over an hour.

This motorway coiled its way in a long, unbroken line between the yellow-earth hills. All we could see in this expanse of unbroken wasteland was row upon row of small saplings struggling to survive. According to Mr Li, our driver, these few small trees had been planted seven or eight years previously by Party and government offices and the masses who were on organised unpaid 'voluntary' projects – an attempt to add some greenery to the scenery beside the road from the airport to the city. Looking at these little saplings which were still less than a metre and a half in height, I felt an inexpressible pressure within me. Somewhere between here and Xi'an was a place called Shouting Hill, which I had once visited on a reporting trip (and written about in The Good Women of China). The yellow-earth hills and cogon grass turned my mind back to the people in that place, and I saw again the desperate hopes those starving people pinned on this sparse, unpromising plant: on yellow-earth hills like these on the edge of the Gobi Desert, the roots of this cogon grass are the local people's one source of survival, cooking fuel and warmth. I could still remember how the men of Shouting Hill village would trudge long distances in search of this cogon grass. Due to increasing demand, cogon grass is becoming scarce, so people have to travel ever greater distances in order to find it, which takes up more and more of their time.

I hope the planting of forests along the airport expressway can bring some hope to this region of yellow earth. I also hope that this swathe of green will be a single spark that sets all the land aflame, reaching all the way to Shouting Hill.

The following day we were scheduled to take a minibus from Lanzhou to Hezheng county, where we were going to interview one of China's oil experts and his wife, the head of a female prospecting team. The results of the last few days' reporting had far exceeded my expectations. In those few days, the heaviness and depth behind the old stories, the memories that had never been opened or touched, had trickled their way, a little at a time, into my records.

I did not know how future generations would judge the fifty or seventy years' sacrifice of Double Gun Woman's family and the five thousand people of Huaying Mountain and the millions in the Xinjiang Construction Corps, but I knew that what I was doing now might be the most worthwhile act of my life. It was also a very painful experience, because as each of them was telling me the story of their past, there was suspicion in all their eyes, to a greater or lesser extent – could I understand these experiences? Nobody knew how many painful experiences I had lived through in the Cultural Revolution, nobody knew the humiliations I had suffered, nobody knew how much courage it had taken me to live on to today. I longed to reach the age when it would be permissible for me to tell, because I was afraid that my courage would not hold out to that day.

Again, Mr Li was our driver. From the way he stowed our baggage and his polite manner of giving way to other users of the road, I could see that he was a calm, conscientious person.

Chinese drivers in long-distance haulage and public transport have often been some of my best teachers when I am on a quest for knowledge, because they have seen so much – how this country has changed, the huge difference between west and east China, and gaps between cities and countryside, along the thousands of kilometres of highways they drive every day. I started with a question about the weather, the safest topic in any country to open a conversation with a stranger.

***

XINRAN: Do you know today's temperature?

LI: Today's report was thirty degrees, the last two days have been Autumn Tigers, very hot. It'd be nice to have some rain – Lanzhou's desperately short of rain.

XINRAN: What special products are there in your region?

LI: There's Lanzhou pulled-beef noodles. They're very famous, you can find them all over the country.

XINRAN: And apart from Lanzhou pulled beef noodles? Is yang-rou-pao-mo [stewed lamb with breadcrumbs] also a local thing? Do you think that Xi'an's yang-rou-pao-mo is more famous, or Lanzhou's?

LI: They're eaten in different ways, you can't compare the two. Lanzhou uses soft, leavened bread, clear soup, bean noodles and slices of meat, you soak them yourself in the soup, and crumble your own bread, it gets soft as soon as it's in the soup. Over in Xi'an you have to soak your own breadcrumbs too, but they're very hard to crumble, the bread's very tough, and once you're done crumbling them, you have to boil them as well, or they're inedible. In all the times I've been to Xi'an, I've never once eaten Xi'an yang-rou-pao-mo.

XINRAN: And is there anything else? Aren't there some Treasures of Lanzhou – or is that Gansu? [Gansu is one of the poorest provinces in China, but I always like to give people the chance to tell me what they are proud of locally. Their answers give valuable insights into how local people see themselves and why.]

LI: There's the Lanzhou lily, you might have heard of it, it takes three years to mature, it's a very good tonic that soothes coughs and moistens the lungs, a real, genuine Lanzhou speciality. Then there's Lanzhou's White Orchid melon, that's a Lanzhou speciality too, but that variety hasn't been doing very well the last couple of years, you don't see so many of them these days. And Anning in the Lanzhou area has a kind of peach called the White Phoenix peach, it's a kind of very, very sweet peach, all the Anning peaches are flown direct to Hong Kong. And then there's that magazine the Reader, do you know it?

XINRAN: Yes, I know it. It used to be called Reader's Digest, then there was a court case, and they changed it to the Reader.

LI: That's right, the Americans took them to court. Anyway, that's produced in Lanzhou as well. It's a big name all over the country, must be one of the top five, no question about it. There's a 'Reader Street' in Lanzhou, after the Reader magazine. And a bridge called the 'First Bridge over the Yellow River', the only bridge to span the Yellow River in this place. It was designed in America, and made in Germany – they guaranteed the bridge would last eighty years. Construction began in 1907, and in 1910 it opened to traffic. I've heard that half the total investment went into the building materials. They were shipped from Germany to Tianjin, then transported to Lanzhou in carts, because they couldn't be carried by water. It cost them 300,000 taels of silver. In the 1980s, a German bridge-building firm sent its people specially to inspect the bridge, and it's still here today, after ninety-seven years. Now the government has preserved it as a cultural artefact – it's been converted into a footbridge, and motor vehicles aren't allowed on.

XINRAN: Is there a historical museum in Lanzhou?

LI: I'm sorry to say that I've never been inside the history museum, or taken any customers there. But we have the Horse and Swallow motif, the one that's the emblem of China's tourist industry, which was unearthed in Gansu. The original Horse and Swallow is a bronze statue of a horse galloping on the back of a flying swallow. It was dug up in Leitai in Wuwei county, which is in Gansu province.

XINRAN: And what else is there? Carry on… I'll make sure you get proper tuition fees.

LI [laughs]: Well… China's Four Great Caves are the Longmen Caves in Luoyang, the Yungang Grottos in Shanxi, Dunhuang's Mogao Caves and the Maiji Grottos, both of them in Gansu. Half of them belong to us!

XINRAN: As a driver you must have felt the changes in Lanzhou more deeply than people in other professions…

LI: That's right! Look at all the 1980s buildings that used to line the street here, more than half of them have been pulled down already.

XINRAN: What do the inhabitants of Lanzhou think of the local government's policy these days?

LI: I couldn't say.

XINRAN: They aren't too deeply opposed to it?

LI: It's the corruption. Many government officials and civil servants are very greedy, they always think the people above them take more than they do, everybody thinks they take a bit less than the others. Don't get me started on that – as soon as they're mentioned I lose my temper!

XINRAN: All right, let's not talk about them. What are Lanzhou's latest population figures?

LI: The official figure is over 3 million, but that must be far short of the actual figure. There are so many outsiders doing temporary work here, the streets and lanes are full of them, nobody knows how many there really are. There's a lot of Zhejiang people in Lanzhou, they run a big shopping centre here, it's called the Yiwu Trade City, and it sells nothing but top-quality goods. Zhejiang people do a lot of business here, Lanzhou has a Zhejiang village in the eastern wholesale market, where practically everybody's from Zhejiang.