Summary of Peter Hessler's Country Driving

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I had lived in China for five years by 2001, and I had traveled passively by bus, plane, boat, and train. But when I got a Chinese driver’s license, I realized that nothing could be taken for granted.
#2 When I began planning my trip, a Beijing driver recommended The Chinese Automobile Driver’s Book of Maps. The book divided the nation into 158 separate diagrams, and there was even a road map of Taiwan, which is included in any mainland atlas for political reasons.
#3 The book made me want to go west. The charts of the east and south looked busy, but the north and west were still home to vast stretches of agricultural land. The maps of those regions had a sense of space that appealed to me.
#4 The Chinese had considered converting the Great Wall into a highway in the 1920s. In 1931, the Students’ Magazine proposed modernizing the structure, and it was supported by the government.

Sujets

• Atlas
• ATLAS experiment
• ATLAS (détecteur)
• China
• Asia
• East
• Travel

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 17 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822513211
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Peter Hessler's Country Driving
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I had lived in China for five years by 2001, and I had traveled passively by bus, plane, boat, and train. But when I got a Chinese driver’s license, I realized that nothing could be taken for granted.

#2

When I began planning my trip, a Beijing driver recommended The Chinese Automobile Driver’s Book of Maps. The book divided the nation into 158 separate diagrams, and there was even a road map of Taiwan, which is included in any mainland atlas for political reasons.

#3

The book made me want to go west. The charts of the east and south looked busy, but the north and west were still home to vast stretches of agricultural land. The maps of those regions had a sense of space that appealed to me.

#4

The Chinese had considered converting the Great Wall into a highway in the 1920s. In 1931, the Students’ Magazine proposed modernizing the structure, and it was supported by the government.

#5

In Shanhaiguan, I rented a car and drove west through Hebei Province. The harvest was mid-autumn, and everything except the corn had been cut down. I drove through villages with rugged names: Ox Heart Mountain, Double Peak Village, Mountain Spirit Temple.

#6

In Hebei, everything was a potential resource. People would rip up the Great Wall and use the bricks to build something else. In this part of China, even funerals have a bustling air.

#7

Feng shui, the Chinese practice of landscape design, has been around for thousands of years and is still practiced today. It is connected to business, as good feng shui means good fortune.

#8

The roads in China were completely unpredictable. They were built to deal with poverty or crisis, as it was hard to transport food to starving people in 1920s China.

#9

In 2001, the country had a population of over 1. 2 billion, but there were only ten million passenger vehicles. The ratio was 128 people for every vehicle. The country began to develop a car industry in 1998, and by 2001, there were fewer than ten million passenger vehicles.

#10

In China, I learned that people would return the car empty if they were charged extra to refill it. I decided to charge extra if people didn’t obey the rule, and they would learn to follow it.

#11

China has a long history of skirting regulations. For example, the Jeep I rented was strictly rear-wheel drive, and would be useless in rough terrain. But I decided to ignore this rule since the rental contract specifically forbade drivers from leaving the Beijing region.

#12

I visited villages that had ancient ruins, and asked locals if they knew the history. In Ninglu, a group of elderly people responded immediately. The town wall was built in the 22nd year of the Jiajing emperor, and encased in kiln-fired brick in the first year of the Wanli emperor.

#13

The Chinese have a difficult time defining the Great Wall, as there are hundreds of walls across the north. The most famous dynasty for wall building was the Qin, who built tamped-earth barriers during the reign of emperor Qin Shihuang in 221 BC.

#14

The Chinese have long been confused by the Great Wall, which they believe was built by the Qin Dynasty. In reality, the wall was built by the Han Dynasty.

#15

I drove to the village of Ninglu, which was named after the Chinese word for Pacify the Hu, referring to the nomadic tribes of the north. The village name was derogatory, and it referred to all outsiders as barbarians.

#16

I followed my own set of guidelines when I was driving. I waited until sunset to pitch my tent, and I left at first light. I never drove at night. Fatigue is such a factor on Chinese roads that it appears on the driver’s exam.

#17

Chinese driving is a physical endeavor, as the law states that drivers must be at least 155 centimeters tall. The driving law also states that drivers must have three normal fingers on each hand, and that their ears must be able to distinguish the sound of a tuning fork at a distance of fifty centimeters.

#18

In China, driving is an adventure. And trouble is inevitable in a place where most drivers are rookies. They rarely use turn signals, and they rely on automobile body language to communicate.

#19

The exam is taken directly from government-published study materials, and the Public Safety License Bureau provided me with a booklet that contained 429 multiple-choice questions and 256 true-false queries.

#20

The horn is a complex signal that is used in many different cultures. It is used to attract attention, signal irritation, indicate bad traffic, and panic.

#21

I picked up a hitchhiker on the way to Smash the Hu. She was traveling to see her grandmother in Hohhot, and she said that farming was difficult in the area because of the elevation and the dryness.

#22

The towns along this road were heavily fortified, and they were also emptying fast. Life here had never been easy, and the remote areas had been shaped by the demands of the outside world for centuries.

#23

The Chinese response to the nomads was also complex. They would attack the nomads, and their methods could be just as brutal as anything done by the barbarians. They would also trade with the Mongols and give them official titles and gifts.

#24

The Great Wall was not the main reason for the environmental degradation in north-central China, but it did contribute to it. It took resources to build the wall, and it destroyed the land to do so.

#25

The inscribed towers ended at a huge Ming fort atop a mountain. The view was stunning, and it overlooksed a half-dozen valleys. Each pit was two feet across and a few inches deep, and they had been carved into squares or crescents.

#26

The Chinese government is good at producing statistics, and they were proud of their World Bank project. They intended to plant 1,400 hectares of trees around the Ming fort, and they had successfully controlled erosion in 28 percent of their target region.

#27

In China, the first reason to drink was usually the fait accompli. You have to drink it now, people said, holding up a full glass. It’s already been poured. You can’t turn it down. The second reason was that I had come so far and must be tired. The third reason was that after the banquet, I could drive very slowly.

#28

I met with a group of farmers in central China who were complaining about the government's deforestation projects. They claimed that the mountains were high and the emperor far away, meaning that the country's leaders did not understand what was really going on.

#29

I followed the border between Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, and the wall remained the boundary. The regions were poor and the roads deteriorated quickly. I saw a peasant following a camel that had been hitched to a plow, and two young women hitchhiking.

#30

I would often pick up women who were on their way to becoming something else. They were well dressed, and their hair was dyed unsubtle shades of red. They usually worked in provincial cities or good-sized townships. They were curious about the City Special, since they couldn’t imagine why a single traveler would need such a big vehicle.

#31

In China, it’s not such a bad thing to get lost, because no one else knows where they’re going. In 1996, when I first arrived in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was immediately impressed by my own ignorance.

#32

Chinese driving is a physical endeavor. The country requires every Chinese driver to enroll in a certified course, at their own expense, for 58 hours of practice. In China, you can’t just go to a parking lot and learn how to drive.

#33

In China, instructors are traditionally respected without question, and Coach Tang had been kind enough to allow me to observe his class. The students had paid over three hundred dollars for the course, which was a lot of money in a city where the monthly minimum wage was roughly seventy-five dollars.

#34

The Chinese driving course is extremely difficult, and it has not changed much over the years. The details of the challenge shift from place to place, coach to coach.

#35

In Shanxi Province, sections of the Great Wall are alongside the Yellow River, and for nearly one hundred miles I followed the high loess banks. The driving here was easy, because the government infrastructure campaign had recently improved local roads.

#36

The Ordos Desert is one of the most important regions in the history of the Great Wall of China. The Ordos was once suitable for nomads, but in modern times it has been transformed into a desert due to lack of water.

#37

The Great Wall was being buried north of Yulin. People were trying to reform the barren landscape, but it was clear that Wushenqi’s efforts had been disastrous.

#38

In recent years, the local government has adopted a new strategy. Instead of planting rice or grain, they seed willow trees and use the leaves to feed sheep. They call it the pasture in the sky. But the groundwater is dropping, and the desert simply can’t support any more agriculture.

#39

I had planned to split my journey into two parts, to see the countryside in both autumn and spring. In Yulin, I intended to rest and decide how much farther to chase the wall. But the local government made the decision for me.

#40

I drove to Yan’an, the cradle of the Chinese Communist Revolution, where Mao and other leaders had built their base in the 1930s. I checked into a hotel without attracting attention. But the police appeared before I had even finished unpacking.