Shanghai to Beijing – Smog and Concrete

The sleek Shanghai-Beijing high-speed train

'309kmh’, the LED screen above the toilet read as we shot out of a long tunnel somewhere between Shanghai and Nanjing. I rested my head on the double-thick, sound-insulated glass and watched concrete pylons flash past, cables dancing violently up and down as they looped between. The neighbouring tracks ran straight and smooth. Every ten minutes an oncoming train would blur past, the 600kph combined speed squashing it short and buffeting us sideways. Apart from that the train was rock still. Twin cooling towers straight out of The Simpsons belched grey steam into the drizzly sky. Near the cities – Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou – skinny, black and concrete apartment blocks, some half finished, rose and closed together until we slowed into a clean, glass station. At one city, I forget which, I glimpsed a copy of the Empire State Building flitting between the office buildings and blocky tenements. Away from the apartment towers, rows of factories – the biggest I had seen – sat empty with smashed windows. I couldn’t tell if they were being built or pulled down. Between them barges further greyed the sky as they belched and chugged mounds of lime up canals to cement plants. The lime was uncovered and piled so high that the rain eroded poisonous white rivulets into the water.

At Zhenjiang a man got on and stood beside me, looking at my seat number. I moved back to my allocated seat. Neither of us spoke or looked at the other. North of Nanjing, we crossed the Yangzhe river – half a kilometer wide and choked with barges and boats big and small. I counted 50 as we flashed across the bridge but there were many more half visible through the drizzle and smog.

The enormous waiting room at Shanghai's high-speed train station.

The entire journey between Shanghai and Beijing – 1200km, halfway up China’s east coast – I saw hardly any agriculture, a handful of trees, no animals and few people. Just factories, high-rise housing, highways and mud. And over it all an unbroken pall of brown smog. It was the ugliest place I had ever seen. I was glad it was a high-speed train. 

Mao and Friends.

In Beijing I caught the Metro to Tiennamin Square. The square is huge. On a bad smog day – and this was definitely a bad smog day – from Mao’s mausoleum, the gate leading to the forbidden city is just a brown shadow. As I neared the gate, the massive portrait of Mao himself became clearer – fat-faced with too-smooth skin he looked smug, his eyes focused far above and beyond the crowds of Chinese tourists posing for photos. The air was Chinese greybrown, as I had come to think of the colour and it was impossible to say where the sun was. I shouldered and photo-bombed through thousands of camera-toting tourists into the nearby hutongs, or alleyways, looking for a youth hostel I had heard about. For half an hour a rickshaw driver dogged my steps, “You, tour, cheap. You, tour, cheap.” He chirped as I ignored him. When he could, he parked his rickshaw across the footpath, front wheel hard against a wall, completely blocking my path. Eventually I found an alley too narrow for his three-wheeled machine and hid.

Chilling out on Tienanmen Square.

 When I found my hostel, down yet another twisting alleyway, it had been knocked down. All that remained was a faded sign on a pane of broken glass. I wandered for hours until I found a hostel a few miles east of Tiananmen. From a concrete terrace I watched the sun set while an old man exercised his pigeons. They flew in tight, fast loops around and through a twisted tree. The old man in his flat cap and blue suit stood in a courtyard of a cracked red brick house. Their wings beating overhead drowned out the traffic noise and the dying sun shone dimly on the leaves. The old man and I stood still, only our eyes followed the birds as they cut inside each other and swooped and soared. It was strange and beautiful.

Despite everything – the ugliness, the rudeness, the coldness, the inhuman scale of the place – I was falling just a little bit in love with China.