![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/motorcycle.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you doing way out here?\u201d<\/p>\n
The policeman isn\u2019t exactly glaring, but his look is filled with intent. We are beaten and weathered after a full day of driving through desert roads. We are outsiders, and though we have done nothing wrong, the fact that we are not\u00a0from here<\/em> is significant. For hundreds of years \u2014 though not so much lately \u2014 outsiders have passed through this part of northwestern China in both peace and war, seeking art and culture, spoils and commerce, immortality and blood.<\/p>\n We are mere miles from Dunhuang, home of the Buddhist grottoes and The Diamond Sutra<\/em>, an ancient meeting place of civilizations \u2014 but first, we have to give four cops an explanation.<\/p>\n The officer waits. His question is sound. In truth, we had not exactly chosen the best time \u2014 June 2020, the summer of COVID \u2014 for a motorbike adventure. Me, I can mostly get by in China without looking out of place, with my Asian face. My companion, on the other hand, is Danish \u2014 a maniacally-grinning one at that, with blond hair, blue eyes, and cheeks that have been carved by wind and sand.<\/p>\n What are you doing way out here?<\/em><\/p>\n My friend tilts his head back, as he\u2019s wont to do, ready to tell a story.<\/p>\n The journey from Xi\u2019an to Dunhuang isn\u2019t what it used to be, when marauders and bandits roamed the plains, mountains had to be scaled, and camels were summoned for desert crossings. But on motorbike, it is still possible to get a sense of the land. As Robert M. Pirsig writes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<\/em>, \u201cThrough that car window everything you see is just more TV\u2026On a cycle the frame is gone. You\u2019re completely in contact with it all.\u201d<\/p>\n And so, Mads Vesterager Nielsen and I decide we\u2019ll do this 2,000-kilometer (1,200-mile) trip on motorbike. It is mostly Mads\u2019s idea, told to me one winter evening in a bar in Beijing. He is a spiritual descendent of European swashbucklers such as Sven Hedin and Henning Haslund, full of zeal for adventure and roisterous mannerisms. To hear him tell a story, head cocked to one side and delivering sentences in the stilted, dramatic rhythm of raconteurs, is to imagine sitting in a royal court in the early 20th century being regaled by a just-returned explorer\u2019s tales of \u201cPeking,\u201d with \u201cits malignant gossip and political intrigues\u201d (as Haslund, Mads\u2019s countryman, described Beijing in his book Men and Gods in Mongolia<\/em>). Mads is a fanatic for the open road. In 2013, he motorbiked 1,500 miles from Guangxi to Beijing on a $300 tiddler, along the way being told something that he\u2019s never forgotten. Do you think we can make it all the way to Beijing on this motorbike?<\/em> he had asked a hostel owner, to which she replied, \u201cIf you are nice to people, then it\u2019s going to be all right.\u201d<\/p>\n We begin in Xi\u2019an, the city of the Terracotta Warriors and Muslim Quarter, where, in one pass, we consume lamb skewers, kebabs, roujiamo <\/em>(\u201cmeat in a steamed bun\u201d), hot-oil noodles, potatoes, ice cream, and beer. On an art market street, we encounter a man on a curb preaching as if he\u2019d found enlightenment in the hills: \u201cWesterners only see linear, they\u2019re Newtonian, point A to B to C\u201d \u2014 eyes charged, a head of silver hair shocked back as if by wind \u2014 \u201cunlike us Chinese, a people without creation myth; for us, things proceed along a circle.\u201d We walk by a bar where a Chinese singer croons a passable rendition of Radiohead\u2019s \u201cCreep\u201d to an attentive audience of five. And of course there is the ancient Xi\u2019an wall, a stately edifice that stands as a reminder of trade, worship, bloodshed, destruction, and renewal.<\/p>\n At a bar next to our hostel on the final night before our departure, we sit with the owner, Kang Yuan, an ex-professional-footballer-turned-musician, and talk about politics, virtual proxy networks, and Zhang Jiacheng, the one-handed basketball player whom Steph Curry praised. \u201cDeng was correct in his actions. When there were problems he couldn\u2019t solve in his day, he kicked them down the road for people after him,\u201d Kang Yuan says, meaning Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader known for saying, \u201cConceal your strength and bide your time.\u201d I want to critique the assumption that future generations will always be there to clean up messes, but then again, China\u2019s been around 5,000 years, and is still here. For us, things proceed in a circle. <\/em>The future is foretold in the past.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople just want to live well,\u201d Kang says, his legs straddling a drum. \u201cWhen I was young, I was very anti-Chinese Communist Party. I wanted to be a dissident. But my mom, who is retired and gets 4,000 RMB ($570) per month from the government, said to me, Be careful. Because the CCP raised you. It\u2019ll take care of you.\u201d<\/p>\n We drink Estrella and Glenfiddich and sing songs \u2014 Jimi Hendrix, Teresa Teng, the Eagles (\u201cWe are all just prisoners here of our own device,\u201d Mads belts) \u2014 until everything feels familiar, like we are in a place without geography, with friends without nationality. This can easily be a dive bar in Curry\u2019s Oakland or Thom Yorke\u2019s Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n There is a clich\u00e9 \u2014 among the many clich\u00e9s about China \u2014 that to know the real<\/em> China, you have to venture out into the countryside, as if its major cities were fake. I think what people mean is, you would be foolish to believe China is only<\/em> its pompous modernity, its skyscrapers and Western-educated office workers. But \u201creal\u201d isn\u2019t the right word. To know China\u2019s diversity, its breadth, you have to place yourself among the people, in<\/em> the landscape. Remove the frame, along with any preconceptions.<\/p>\n The city of Baoji, classified as a “third-tier” city, is the second largest city in Shaanxi province, population 3.7 million. We passed through on our way to Lanzhou.\u00a0<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n Some stops are planned, and some are unplannable. In a one-road village whose name I\u2019ll never know, we pull over to inspect a church which stands like a prop in a theatrical production. Walking through the iron gate into the courtyard feels like entering a dusty village in Europe, though the church itself is just a concrete building with a Catholic fa\u00e7ade bearing the words Una Sancta, Ecclesia Catholica, Apostolica<\/em>. Two old women kneel at a pew before a cross, reciting a prayer, musical in any language, to Santa Maria and god-knows how many other saints. We feel guilty for interrupting, but they don\u2019t seem to mind, smiling bashfully and rubbing rosaries between their fingers while answering our questions.<\/p>\n Mads asks what their dreams are.<\/p>\n \u201cTo get into heaven, of course,\u201d one replies.<\/p>\n We follow the Wei River on a two-lane national road, sometimes called \u201chighways\u201d \u2014 in contrast with the larger \u201cexpressways\u201d where motorbikes are forbidden \u2014 flanked by the Qinling Mountains to the south and an elevated plateau to the north. We go up mountain roads in drizzle and mist, pass small cemeteries, mud huts and village houses in the modern style, and front-yard gardens with Chinese toon, goosefoots, potatoes and tomatoes and corn. Every 800 meters or so, we pass a honey farm, where beekeepers or random old people scrutinize us, eyes squinched, before breaking into the widest toothless grins upon being waved at.<\/p>\n We arrive in Tianshui to see the Maijishan Grottoes, where there are more than 7,200 Buddhist sculptures carved into a rockface, with signs in English that boast of the celestials\u2019 \u201cplump skin and fluent drapery.\u201d We dine on wild veggies in a nearby hostel and write in notebooks about the streams and creeks, the elevated expressways and railroads we\u2019ve driven alongside, the many signs in the countryside that urge people to be wary of organized crime.<\/p>\n In the morning, we make a 350-kilometer sprint in eight hours to Lanzhou, the Gansu provincial capital, and pull straight into Rhino, a craft beer bar. The chef, who smokes with us on break, takes us to his friend\u2019s whisky bar later that night, a place that mimics sophistication but has yet to convince its patrons that it\u2019s gauche to order by the bottle.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople here drink a lot,\u201d the chef says \u2014 the first but not the last time I\u2019d hear about the regrettable binge habits of Gansu residents.<\/p>\n We\u2019re the last customers to leave. Mads, who raved incessantly on the road about dipping his face into the Yellow River, decides that now \u2014 amid the moonless dark \u2014 is as good a time as any. \u201cWe need to feel the waters of the river,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n We clamber down stones, hop a metal fence, and then we\u2019re there. Up close, the sound of the surging water becomes a kind of illumination. For centuries, when anyone arrived at a rivertown, they would first go to the riverbank, where they could commune with the soul of the place, feel its emphatic, sopping heart. But the Yellow River is sui generis, because here they would also pay it obeisance. The Yellow River is a totem, worshipped for the life it brings and feared for its temper, for the many times it has buried cities under mud and silt.<\/p>\n I know the water is yellow, but can\u2019t see color; I know it comprises the melted ice caps of the Himalayas, but feel no texture; the current sounds like a cavalry stampede, but with my hands submerged, I discern no shape. I see Mads scoop water onto his face. \u201cThe Mother River,\u201d he gasps.<\/p>\n We are compelled forward, downstream, where Tomorrow Club thumps, club-goers bouncing on a front stage while the DJ cranks trap, trance, techno. Plump skin and fluent drapery<\/em>, I remember from Maijishan. At closing time, kids stumble over sofas and plant themselves outside on the curb, eyes hollowed, open Champagne bottles and vomit between their legs.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n![\"Gansu](\"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/Gansu-open-road-photo-by-Mads-Vesterager-Nielsen.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a>