Harmony Express

by Thomas Bird

Thomas Bird found himself in southern China free from any serious commitments. His rock band had just split up, he’d left his job as the Shenzhen editor of a lifestyle magazine and his girlfriend disappeared from his life. Seeking the tonic of travel, Bird hit the railroad with a plan… to explore The People’s Republic of China by train. The country was in the midst of a railway building boom the likes of which the world has never seen, and Bird was poised to make China Railways his muse. One year morphed into several as Bird whizzed from high-tech Shenzhen to colonial Xiamen at high-speed; “flew” into Shanghai aboard a Maglev; chugged through rural Sichuan Province aboard an old steam locomotive. Putting the people he meets front and center, Bird delivers a portrait of an era, as he grapples to comprehend an inscrutable land undergoing breakneck change.Expertly weaving Chinese history into his travelogue, Bird makes the story of China’s long journey to modernity analogues with the development of the national railway network. He investigates the impact of “railway imperialism” a century ago when China’s railways lagged sorely behind the rest of the world and considers Beijing’s obsession with “catching-up” as represented by its stealthy new fleet of Harmony trains plying the world’s longest high-speed network. Through his travels, Bird comes to view Chinese trains as “time-machines” bridging the impoverished countryside, tumbledown third-tier towns and gilded megacities.Replete with wry personal anecdotes and sharp-witted observations, Harmony Express is a book for the ages, and a must-read for anyone interested in China’s twenty-first century, high-speed transformation.

Genres: China

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 30, 2023

Reviews

[David Frazier · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really wonderful piece of travel writing on today’s, which is to say Xi Jinping-era, China. Though author Thomas Bird often rides the rails in the shadow of earlier generation travel writers Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, and, to a lesser extent, Peter Fleming—inspirations he readily admits—the book very much continues their project in its railbound but otherwise free-from roaming through the Middle Kingdom. Remember, the possibility of modern tourism in China only began in 1978, and now getting close to half a century later, Bird has taken this vantage, China’s era of high speed rail networks, to look back and evaluate the legacies of his heroes, the first to describe the experience of traveling China during the post-Mao years. There is much to update. Although the approach is not necessarily new, unlike Theroux or Chatwin, Bird, who speaks Chinese and has decades in China under his belt, is able to give us a local feel in addition to a traveler’s feel. He doesn’t dive as deep as Peter Hessler—this is still classic travel writing—but he covers quite a lot of track.

Bird displays China in all of its vast and glorious weirdness through writing that is evocative, playfully ironic, and full of amusing encounters. He discusses politics honestly and without hesitation, but, as befitting a traveler, he’s not preoccupied by them. All told, he dishes up the stuff that really makes one want to hit the road.

The book will likely suffer for a couple reasons not of the author’s own making. Unlike Theroux and Chatwin, who published in the 1980s and benefited from a surge of interest in a newly opened China, Xi Jinping’s China doesn’t sit in the same kind of geopolitical sweet spot, especially for Anglo readers, ie Americans and Brits, who require expensive visas if they want to stay for longer than a 10-day transit. Second, the book comes out through a small publisher, Shanghai-based Earnshaw, notorious for its lack of promotion. Neither of these detract from its intrinsic quality. All told, it’s a great debut. You definitely don’t need to be a trainspotter to enjoy this. If you’ve ever traveled in China or are simply interested in traveling there, you’ll find it a highly enjoyable read.

Here’s one quote from the author, standing in Shanghai near the mouth of the Yangtze River:

“I privately wondered if the poop I had taken in Tiger Leaping Gorge had made it this far”—thereby adding to the expanding landmass of the river delta—“my small contribution to the building of China.”