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The railway, and why the train beats the plane
China has built the largest high-speed rail network in the world, from nothing, inside about fifteen years. It now runs to more than forty thousand kilometres of dedicated high-speed line — comfortably more than the rest of the planet put together — and the effect on how people move around the country is hard to overstate. Beijing to Shanghai, some 1,300 kilometres, takes four and a half hours on the fastest service; a generation ago it was an overnight journey and before that two days. The service letters are worth learning because they are the first thing on your ticket. G is 高铁, the fastest, up to 350 km/h. D is 动车, high-speed but slower and often overnight. C is a short intercity hop. K and T are the older long-distance trains — slower, much cheaper, sometimes taking a day and a half, and still carrying enormous numbers of people. Classes on a high-speed train are 二等座 second class, 一等座 first, and 商务座 business, which is extravagant and genuinely comfortable. Three practical things. Tickets are bought through 12306, the national railway app and website, or at a station window, and they are tied to your identity document: you buy with a passport number as a foreigner, and you go through a manned lane rather than the automatic gates with a Chinese ID card. Arrive earlier than feels necessary — big-city stations are the size of airports, with 安检 at the door, and the 检票口 closes several minutes before departure, after which there is no negotiation. And seats are reserved and specific, so 对号入座 — sit in the number you were given — is the rule rather than a suggestion. Then there is 春运, the Spring Festival travel period, which is the largest annual human migration on earth: several billion passenger journeys over about forty days as people who work in the cities go home to their families and come back. Tickets are released on a fixed schedule and gone in minutes, stations are extraordinary to see, and the sensible advice for a visitor is not to travel at all in those weeks unless you have to. Why the train rather than the plane, for a journey of this length? It leaves from the middle of one city and arrives in the middle of another, it is punctual in a way Chinese domestic aviation often is not, there is no baggage nonsense, and you can watch the country go past — which, if you are learning the language, matters. A Chinese long-distance carriage is also one of the easiest places in the country to be spoken to by a stranger, because everybody is stuck there together for six hours with nothing to do, and the conversation always starts the same way: 你去哪儿？