Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler Read Free Book Online Page A

insurmountable.The Chinese were good at producing grain and goods, and they controlled the trade fairs; the Mongols didn’t have the administrative capabilities but they were brilliant raiders. Sooner or later, the conjunction of these two very different groups always resulted in violence.
    Nowadays, foreigners still wanted Chinese goods, but they didn’t have to go all the way to Slaughter the Hu to find them. And once again the demands of the outside world had changed this remote place. The Great Wall still ran through the middle of town, which had high garrison walls, and ruined towers rose throughout the valley. It was the most fortified part of the north that I had visited thus far, and it was also the quietest. The main street was little more than a truck stop—a sleepy row of cheap restaurants and auto repair shops that served people going somewhere else. That was all that remained of the local economy; the lure of southern factory jobs had defeated this place in a way the nomads never had. Slaughter the Hu was dying—I didn’t see a single young person out on its dusty streets.
     
    DRIVING SOUTH AND WEST , I followed a long line of signal towers that paralleled the Cangtou River. Ever since I had left Hebei, the land had been getting steadily poorer, and now I reached the highlands of north-central China. The people here live atop loess—thin, dry soil that was originally blown south from the Gobi and other deserts of the northwest. Over millennia, wind redeposited layers in this part of China, where the yellow earth can be as deep as six hundred feet. The soil is fragile but fertile, and at one time the region was forested, but centuries of overpopulation stripped it bare. After the trees were gone, people began carving the hills into terraces, until the landscape acquired the look of a desperate human construction: a layered cake of dust. Rainfall is rare—around ten inches annually—but even such small amounts of water can tear through the brittle soil. Creekbeds disappear into gullies; sometimes a tiny stream burrows its way hundreds of feet below the surrounding hillsides. Most peasants live in yaodong , simple cave homes that have been dug out of the loess. The caves are cool in summer, warm in winter, and disastrous in an earthquake. Ming dynastytexts report that a major tremor in 1556 killed hundreds of thousands of people.
    The Great Wall wasn’t a primary reason for the environmental degradation, but undoubtedly it contributed. Everywhere the wall went, it swallowed resources, and the Ming administrators documented the costs of construction. In recent years, an American historian named David Spindler has analyzed the figures for one wall-building project, estimating that for each brick that was fired and set in the wall, soldiers had to burn sixteen and a half pounds of wood. Even in areas where they built the structure out of tamped earth or unquarried stones, they needed wood for cooking fires, and garrison income depended heavily on logging. Spindler’s research shows that during the Ming, only 60 to 70 percent of the wall’s operating budget came from the state, and the rest was made up for by soldiers, often through logging. Some officials complained that this was counterproductive—by stripping the land bare, they only made it easier for horseback raiders.
    Four centuries later, the tamped-earth structures seem like the only permanent features on this fluid landscape. I drove past hillsides that had collapsed into ravines, and crop terraces that seemed likely to crumble away tomorrow—but the signal towers still looked ready for war. Their square forms were visible for miles, riding the tops of the terraced hills. Beside the road, one tower had been decorated with a single character:. The word was twenty feet tall, painted in white, and it means “Earth.” Not long after that, I saw another:, “Water.” If the signal towers were sending a message, I wasn’t getting it, so I parked the