Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

Author/Guide: Peter Hessler

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Would you be brave enough to live in China, learn the language and learn to drive there?

ISBN: 978-1847674371
Genre: Travelogue

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What you need to know before your trail

After living in China for five years, and learning the language, Peter Hessler decided he needed an even tougher challenge: to gain his Chinese driving licence. One he accomplished – and when he did, it enabled him to embark on an epic journey driving across this most enigmatic of countries. Over seven years, he travelled to places rarely explored by tourists, into the factories exporting their goods to the world and into the homes of their workers

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Travel Guide

China and the Great Wall

For many people, the Great Wall is what symbolizes China. It is about the heritage and culture a well as the history of the country – after all it was completed during the Ming Dynasty.
Has anyone ever tried to drive the length of it before? It’s an ancient wall but sometimes in china. it’s little more than a mud wall where people live in and even drive on. Indeed there is a scene in the book where a local man guides the author to a place to park, only for the author to find out that he’s actually parked on the wall itself. The guide seems nonplussed whilst the author is horrified.
“At one point the Chinese had even considered converting the Great Wall into a highway”

From his base in the village of Sancha, the author drives along the road and finds out a wealth of information about geography, people and history.

The Great wall runs from Shanhaiguan to Yumenguan: it’s continuous for thousands of li, and it;s a straight line. To convert it into a road would link Bejing, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Gansu’ it would make it easier to do business

“Nobody ever acted on this plan, undoubtedly because Great Wall regions are so rugged and remote.But seventy years later the general route appealed to me as a driver.”

Jiayu Pass

The Jiayu Pass, located in Gansu province, is the western terminus of the Ming Great Wall. From Jiayu Pass the wall travels discontinuously down the Hexi Corridor and into the deserts of Ningxia, where it enters the western edge of the Yellow River loop at Yinchuan.