RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER:
By Train through China
Paul Theroux
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1988
477 PP., $21.95
In 1986, Paul Theroux went to China for a year. Theroux, of course, is a great aficionado of rail travel, and more than 31,000 miles of track beckoned in China. He would go by train all the way from London and then "stay for a while--in China, on the ground, going all over the place." Altogether, the project must have promised another book like Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), which established him as a literary traveler in the tradition of Graham Greene.
Theroux began his journey in London one rainy Saturday in April. The train from Victoria Station took him to the Channel. From Boulogne he traveled to Paris, then to Berlin and on to Warsaw and Moscow. Finally, the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian expresses took him to China, where he rode every kind of train--nearly forty in all. He visited the great cities of the coast via the Shanghai Express and the fast train to Canton; traveled through the northeast in the dead of winter on what were once the Japanese-owned South Manchurian and the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern railways; went as far as permitted on the French-built narrow-gauge line that snakes along the hillsides from Kunming in the southwest toward the Vietnamese border; rode the local to Xining in land-locked Qinghai (a province famous chiefly for its many labor camps); and even made his way to Tibet overland--by car from the railhead at Golmud.
All along and everywhere, he was endlessly curious. In his opening paragraph, he mentions the Chinese proverb "you can always fool a foreigner," and explains that he took it as a personal challenge. He pried into everything, struck up conversations with everybody in his limited but workable Chinese, and filled notebook after notebook with thoughts and reflections.
The result is Riding the Iron Rooster, nearly five hundred pages of interesting and often amusing reportage. The title is taken from a Chinese proverb: A stingy person will not give away a feather, nor will an iron roster--hence the nickname for the Spartan and threadbare train run from Lanzhou along the famous "Silk Road" to Urumchi. The book has something to say about nearly every part of China, and in that, it is unique among highly readable books by China travelers. It is full of amusing vignettes of the Chinese, and some of its descriptions are strikingly good.
Tourists
Although Theroux is an experienced traveler if ever there was one, he inexplicably chooses to begin his journey on a package tour with a group. So first we must meet his fellow tourists. It is not unlike meeting the characters at the beginning of a comedy of manners. We cross Europe and Asia with this crew, and Theroux cringes endlessly at their solecisms and ignorance. In Paris, at the Jeu de Paume, "in a room full of Sisleys," one of them says "'I don't like any of these.'"
Theroux doesn't even like it when they are happy to get to China. The landscape has been growing more and more desolate until the train
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