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The Trans-Siberian’s
grand bazaar
Photos
by Frédéric Hermann, text by Michel Jan. Frédéric Hermann
is a French photographer. Michel Jan is a French writer specializing in China who
recently published Le Réveil des Tartares, en Mongolie sur les traces de
Guillaume de Rubrouck (Payot, 1998) and La Grande Muraille de Chine (Imprimerie
nationale Editions, 2000).
From
Moscow to Beijing, travellers have five days to indulge their nostalgia in a legendary
journey alongside adventurers and the odd bit of illegal trade |
It takes more than five
days to get from Beijing to Moscow through Mongolia—no trip for the impatient. But
I have always loved this journey. At one time the departure was a solemn occasion,
with deserted carriages pulling out of the station before a row of Red Guards waving
Mao’s little red book to the strains of The East is Red. Nowadays, it is a hectic
affair, with a myriad of goods overflowing in jam-packed corridors.
As the train pulls out of the station it seems to lurch in front of the corner tower
rising on the Tartar city’s southeastern edge, a rare vestige of the old ramparts,
as if hesitating for a last time. Some travellers let their eyes linger on the outlying
neighbourhoods of China’s capital, while others begin their adjustment to the small,
slow-moving cell they will call home for the next five days. During the journey’s
first few hours, the train clatters through the hilly northern Chinese countryside,
where the Great Wall—at first well-restored, later reduced to a state of pitiful
ruin—once marked the limits of the civilized world. Working through the landscape
of loess, ochre and gorges dotted by scrawny willow trees, the train slowly chugs
up to the Mongolian plateau.
“I
can tell any train by the noise of the wheels
European trains beat four four time,
in Asia it’s three five or three seven”
Blaise
Cendrars, Prosody of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeanne of France, 1913 (translated
by John Dos Passos)
Depending
on the season, the landscape rolling by is worn down by summer rain or frozen like
a rock in the dead of winter.
The train’s steady beat and the spectacle of this epic land, as fascinating as a
receding shoreline, inspires a mood of contemplation—that is until the passengers
are overcome by drowsiness caused by neither boredom nor weariness, but a combination
of daydreaming, reading, conversation, whispered secrets and treasured moments liberated
from time, which seems forgotten or at least less pressing. After Datong, further
north in Mongol country, the steppe stretches out monotonously to the horizon. A
horseman keeping a herd of camels and a yurt are signs of humanity in the endless
space, sparsely covered with grass in midsummer, a moonscape from November to spring.
As evening falls, darkness creeps through the train. The lights in the cars have
wiped out the outside world. In the heart of a desert that the passengers have forgotten,
a strange coziness fills the compartments. The outdated decor in first class—worn-out
velvet the colour of crushed raspberries, pink ribboned shades on table-lamps next
to the windows, bevelled mirrors, imitation mahogany veneer and faded green curtains—keeps
up the illusion of past luxury. A closed world, carried by the clickety-clack of
steel on steel, advances into the night. The sleeping-car bunks are stacked three
high. A weak light shines on languid bodies dappled in shadow. Skillfully tied-up
and stacked luggage fills the rest of the space.
Ulan Bator, the Selenga valley and the shores of Lake Baikal, Irkutsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk,
Sverlovsk (renamed Ekaterinenburg), the Urals. The days go by ticking off a litany
of names that turn like the train’s wheels. Changes are slow and the passengers have
settled into their habits. They return from the samovar at the end of the corridor
with faltering steps, following their daydreams, leaning their elbows against the
window; or weary of a journey that seems endless, they play cards and chess.
The dining car changes with each country. The food’s quality is uneven and offers
a crude gastronomic tour first of China, then Mongolia and finally Russia. But canteen
or greasy-spoon, it is part of the trip, attracting a steady flow of passengers and
adding its own touch of the exotic. The powerful smell of garlic, the steam of boiled
mutton and the bitter aroma of solyanka (cabbage soup) juxtapose the swaying and
creaking axles. At opening time it’s the liveliest place on the train, with a varied
clientele. A few Westerners, curious about the smallest detail, try to strike up
conversations with the natives in a common language, Chinese warily check out their
neighbours and, further away, Russians hunch over their borscht, disoriented by the
throng of foreigners.
“If
I was a painter I’d splash a great deal of red,
a great deal of yellow on the end of this journey
Because we must all of us have been more or less cracked
And an enormous delirium brought the blood
out on the drawn faces of my traveling companions.
As we drew nearer Mongolia
That roared like a burning building”
Blaise
Cendrars, Prosody of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeanne of France, 1913
Only a few diplomats from east Asia used to take the Trans-Siberian back to the USSR.
But in the past few years, the weekly train between Beijing and Moscow, which travels
by way of Mongolia or Manchuria, has been frequented by passengers travelling for
a host of different reasons. The most common is trade, a product of shortages on
the opposite side of a border, the resourcefulness of merchants and the flurry of
peoples who have now rediscovered bartering after years cut out of market activity.
There are also the “specialists” drawn to international express trains, on the lookout
for shady opportunities or even ready to commit a crime. Female adventurers looking
lost and would-be immigrants who withhold their names and dream of an elysian Europe
still roam the wagons.
The further the train reaches into Siberia, the livelier the corridors become. Train
employees and passengers, all of them Chinese, unwrap cargoes including sacks of
rice, bundles of clothes and plastic utensils. The stops are few and far between,
but when they do come, the platform suddenly turns into one giant bazaar. Rows of
Russian women offer the most unexpected items: berries from the neighbouring forests,
hot potatoes, tawdry lamps, shoes designed for discomfort. Men and women walk across
the tracks, wending their way between the cars as they carry sacks bulging with who-knows-what.
A teenager flees after snatching a pair of trousers offered for sale by a Chinese
man leaning out of a train window. Suddenly, the locomotive’s siren puts an end to
the buying and selling, and the passengers rush back on the train, already thinking
about the next stop.
And so on—until the Trans-Siberian reaches the area just outside Moscow, rolling
through villages dotted with white or gold church towers resembling the birch trees
that blanket the Russian countryside in autumn.
“After
Irkutsk the journey became very much slower
Much too slow,
We were in the first train that went around Lake Baikal”
Blaise
Cendrars, Prosody of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeanne of France, 1913
The
journey is a source of adventure and a muse. Isn’t Blaise Cendrars’ Prosody of the
Transsiberian one of modern poetry’s most beautiful verses? Travelling across Asia
to reach Europe still captures the imagination. It is as if the people roaming from
one continent to another, frozen in our memories, alone represent what is unchanging
in human destiny. |
The
will of the czars
The “real” Trans-Siberian travels 9,198 kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok. The
train only runs on Russian territory, on a line that was finished in 1916. It was
built to double a line completed in 1904 that the Russians considered too unsafe
after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 because it crossed Manchuria.
Today, two lines link Moscow and Beijing. At first, they follow the Trans-Siberian
route before forking southward, one through Manchuria, the other through Mongolia. |
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