Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China

Noted travel writer Theroux traveled through China by train in the 1980s, after Mao's Cultural Revolution. Having been there during the Cultural Revolution, he was able to make comparisons. Much had changed. Yet he was still monitored, accompanied, followed, by government officials.

Travel was not particularly easy or comfortable on most of the trips. Accommodations were often sketchy. The Chinese disregard for the lives of other animals was prominently displayed - but he notes that the peasants most responsible for using animals any way they could were themselves in not much different circumstances. China's people embraced capitalism but did not call it that.

One of the more interesting parts of the book came near the end, when show more Theroux visited Tibet. Long under the thumb of the Chinese, the Tibetans were experienced in resistance, continuing to work and live as they always had regardless of pressure. The area is remote, cut off, difficult to visit, yet stunningly beautiful. Theroux endured a heart-stopping trek by car because there were no trains.

Insightful, thoughtful, intelligently written, even many years later this book is worth reading. show less

Theroux spent a massive amount of time in the 1980s travelling around the People's Republic, and the result is this enormously readable, entertaining, and informative book. I was worried that, after a few hundred pages, my appetite for his travelogue would begin to dim, but in fact the opposite happened. He is so insightfully critical that every page seemed to hold something new, and the fact that he was in-country when the Tiananmen Square protests were staged says much about the resoluteness of his character.

Paul Theroux' account of his train journeys across and around China during the the late 1980s is both entertaining and enlightening. His fascination with and desire for travel by train lies in the forced prolonged intimacy with his fellow travelers. He is a consummate leech. While furiously guarding his privacy (in a Rumpelstilzian "Nobody knows that I am Paul Theroux"), he eyes, listens and pokes into other people's lives. This decidedly American Puritan game of voyeurism and revulsion is most marked in his reporting about the sex life of his fellow passengers. His "suffering" is almost always self-inflicted: He could easily have upgraded to semi- or private quarters at little cost. In reality, he wants to creep in on other people's show more relationships and lives. Perhaps the larger anonymity and higher sophistication of big city inhabitants is one of the reasons why Theroux prefers the backwood country.

The two chapters about his miserable trip to waterless Tibet and freezing Harbin (in Northern China) are the highlights of this book, a testament to human endurance to live in harsh environment and also a reporter's grim determination to suffer for his story. The Roman soldiers guarding the Limes against Barbarian incursions had it easy compared to the poor Chinese protecting their Northern and Western borders against invaders. Reading Theroux, the numerous pleas of Chinese officials to return to the capital and civilization throughout history becomes easier to understand. No wonder too that, extracting industries apart, these regions hardly participate in the Chinese miracle. Theroux' account about Southern China is lacking both in depth and in sympathy. His main obsession is interviewing, even pestering, anybody about Mao and the Cultural Revolution. In can only hope that Theroux never travels to Israel to interrogate Holocaust survivors about their suffering. The Chinese stoicism and preservation of face certainly favors an obnoxious interviewer such as Theroux.

Personally, I travel and endure a journey to reach and visit a destination. Theroux is of the opposite school. Having reached a destination, he is quickly bored and seeks to leave for the next leg of his journey. He hardly describes the sights and history of his destinations at all. His focus are the quirks, manners and lives of his fellow travelers. The longer he is staying the better he begins to understand them, thus a reader's progress is matched by an increase of enjoyment. Recommended. show less

For the younger generation he is the father of Louis. For the oldies he is the best travel author in the world. Actually he is both. He is a typical loner who loves to travel his own way and doesn’t like advice or rules from others. That makes him sometimes cynical, but always honest and open. If something resembles a tourist trap, he will avoid it or just say it isn’t worth it.

Several of his books have found their way on my bookshelves, also some of his fiction. Not bad either, but I certainly prefer his travel books. This story starts on a group journey from London through Paris, Berlin and Moscow towards Mongolia, the author already could have written a whole book about his trip and his fellow passengers before he actually enters show more China on page 66.

Theroux takes time to get to know a destination. He is not there to write an article, to see some highlights; he is there to understand a place, to get a feel for the country. This to me is the essence of travelling. Theroux will never be a tourist; he is the ultimate traveller. He even seems to read a bit of the language. Language is an important part of communication, to me an inevitable part. This is also the main reason that I have not travelled a lot in Asia. I love to be able to talk to locals in their own lingo. I can’t do that in bad English.

Therefore I’m quite pleased that Theroux does travel there, giving me the opportunity as an armchair traveller to follow his expedition through a country that is not high on my to-do list. China is a world on its own; it is quite difficult to say anything that goes for the entire country. The differences between city and country, between north and south, between east and west are huge.

Often did I return to page 10/11 to have a quick glance on the map, to see where Theroux was at the time. I like him travelling by train, as it does give the book more depth, it tells me a lot more about the Chinese compared to taking flights within the country.

Even though it took me ages to read the nearly 500 pages of this book, the book doesn’t get boring. It does get confusing at times though, but that is mainly because of my lack of knowledge before reading this book. There are cities in China bigger than most big cities I know, yet even though a few million people live there, I had never heard of the place and, dare admitting it, have since forgotten the name again.

Theroux is cynical at times, especially as he encounters the lack of liberty he likes. He gets chaperoned and is incredibly annoyed by that. I can imagine as well. Not sure how these days travelling in China goes, though in the eighties when he wrote this volume, the world had a completely different look, the political climate was a bit different from what we know these days.

Yet, even given the troubles he encounters wherever he goes, he makes the most of it and manages to get to know big parts of the country. His eye for detail, a great memory, everything he notes must be jotted down soon afterwards, makes this book a great read. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it and hopefully will read many more travel book by Paul Theroux.

Quote: “Wanneer een land brulde dat het tot de laatste druppel bloed zou vechten, betekende dat meestal dat het op het punt stond zich over te geven; en in China kon je over het algemeen niets als waar beschouwen totdat het onkend was. Alles wat officieel ontkend werd, was waarschijnlijk waar.”

Quote: “When a country screams that it would fight until the last drop of blood, most of the time this means that it was at the point of surrender; in China nothing could be considered the truth until it had been denied. Everything that was officially denied was probably true.” (p. 136) show less

Reading Mr. Theroux' travelogue of Chnia made me realize I should know more of Chinese history than I do (which is practically nothing). School history textbooks in India focus mostly on local, state and national history. In higher grades you deal with European history, India's colonial past and some American history - for example, we learned of the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence. Of communism, our textbooks focused mostly on the USSR. However, besides the common knowledge that China had a communist government and India fought a war with the Chinese in 1962, our history textbooks were woefully inadequate in their coverage of contemporary Chinese history.

Mr. Theroux' twelve month journey through China takes place in show more 1986 and 1987, as the country is still dealing with the effects of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The author's journey, like many of his other great travel stories, begins in London as he heads to Mongolia by train. From Mongolia he takes a myriad of trains to explore the most far flung reaches of that immense country. From the freezing city of Harbin to the mostly inhospitable and deserted Tibetan Plateau. The book is funny, caustic and filled with the kind of absolute generalizations that Mr. Theroux excels at. He talks to fellow travellers, government orderlies, train conductors and hustlers in tourist towns. You get not just his perspective, but also of the people he meets and finds interesting. Unlike most of the author's other travels, he is forced to travel here with a Chinese "guide" who is there to ensure the author is not up to any kind of mischief. Mr. Theroux extracts his revenge by subjecting his handler to interminable train rides through the remotest parts of the Middle Kingdom. Because of the timing, the book also adds color to understanding the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. I learned a few things about the Cultural Revolution I was never aware of - my knowledge of that event is restricted to a few books and the Zhang Yimou movie, To Live. Some of the author's cultural observations are worth repeating - he ascribes a hidden meaning to they way the Chinese laugh, because they don't laugh with mirth but to convey something they'd rather not express verbally. The Chinese landscape is almost completely devoid of birds, trees and wild life - because the Chinese have cultivated and subjected all of the land to human use and eaten everything that can be masticated. And finally, the Chinese were enthusiastically adopting capitalism and the free market in the 1980s - it is not something that just happened.

The last section on driving to Lhasa from Golmud is the funniest - it is filled to the gills with ridiculous comedy. I've often asked myself while reading a Theroux book, why does he do this? In this instance he is in a near fatal car crash and then spends the night in a prison like hotel with stairs covered in human excrement and run by a crazed looking Tibetan man. Maybe that's why. Highly recommended. show less

This book about Paul Theroux's travels by train through China was written 20 years ago. Although this trip was before the Tiananmen Square massacre, Theroux did see and hear about some student and worker protests. China was definitely going through a process of change at this time. Deng Xiaoping had brought in many reforms and Theroux witnessed that almost everywhere he went. And he went into many corners of that vast land that North Americans rarely see. Two things from this book stand out for me: a) just how excessive the Cultural Revolution was during Mao's time and b) twenty years is just a blink of an eye in Chinese history.

Theroux ended his trip in Tibet. This is one of the last paragraphs in the book:

You have to see Tibet to show more understand China. And anyone apologetic or sentimental about Chinese reform has to reckon with Tibet as a reminder of how harsh, how tenacious and materialistic, how insensitive the Chinese can be. They actually believe this is progress.

Twenty years later China is still insensitive about Tibet as the world has seen by the reaction to Tibetan protests about the Olympics. I didn't watch any of the Beijing Olympics, primarily because we were on holiday for that time and had no access to TV. But I don't think even if I had been home that I would have watched because I objected to the Olympics going to China with no call for reforms.

I think this is only the second book of Theroux's that I have read. At least, I only recall reading The Mosquito Coast many years ago. I think I prefer Theroux as a nonfiction writer and I intend to read some of his other travel writing. show less

Among the first inventions of the Chinese were such things as toilet paper (they were enamored with paper and in fact invented a paper armor consisting of pleats which were impervious to arrows), the spinning wheel, seismograph, steam engine (as early as 600 A.D.) and parachute hang gliders in 550-559 B.C. which they tested by throwing prisoners off towers. This same country, according to Paul Theroux in Riding the Iron Rooster, is driving many animals to extinction. The Chinese like to eat strange foods and are superstitious about the medicinal value of exotic animals who achieve status not from individual beauty or from intrinsic qualities, but because they taste good.

Theroux, who has a passion for trains, wandering, and gossip, show more found many changes in China since his first visit of several years earlier. People were much freer and willing to talk. Theroux's writing is fascinating because he's so nosy. He's not afraid to ask anything. And he notices everything. It's his way of "getting the measure of a place." If he sees someone reading he makes note of the title, memorizes the contents of refrigerators, labels in clothes, compares prices, copies graffiti and slogans, and collects hotel rules. My favorite: "Guests may not perform urination in sink basin."

At one point he was forced to fly to catch a particular train and his description is particularly revolting; people standing in the aisles while landing, puking, the plane popping wheelies on the runway, the aircraft itself having wrinkled skin. The cultural revolution was uniformly hated by everyone he spoke with and the change in the people could be measured by the change in their slogans. Formerly when students were asked what they wanted to do with themselves they would reply, "to serve people." A book filled with interesting tidbits.

I should note, as an avid reader of Airways magazine that airlines in China have improved tremendously, have terrific equipment today, and service standards far exceeding United's. Theroux's book is quite dated in that respect. show less