The slow train to Shanghai South

In which I channel my inner Paul Theroux, and recall other train journeys in China

The slow train to Shanghai South is snaking through fields of stubble and small-town suburbs on this grey Saturday morning. I’m in the hard seat carriage — crowded, but no more than usual — on my way in to the metropolis to meet a friend for lunch, and then perhaps take in an art gallery and a bougie cafe or two before heading back to Canal Town in the evening.

Shanghai isn’t far away, but I can count on one hand the number of visits I’ve made there since moving to Canal Town. That’s mostly due to the travel restrictions of the Covid years. Even when there wasn’t a lockdown, we needed permission from the university to leave the province. And even then, the fear of losing one’s green health code, by accidentally crossing paths with someone who later turned out to be a close contact of a Covid patient, was enough to put us off travel. Losing the green code would mean not being able to get back on campus or enter public places until enough PCR tests showed you were not infected. Worse, it might mean being carted off to a quarantine facility. Now, though, a year since the floodgates opened and most of the country caught Covid in the space of a month, the restrictions are gone and the fear is gone, and I’m on a day trip to Shanghai.

Boarding the train in Canal Town, 2023

This train has come all the way from Shenzhen, just across from Hong Kong. It’s a lü pí huŏchē (绿皮火车), one of the classic “green-skinned” trains, named for their distinctive forest-green paintwork, that are slowly fading out as the high-speed network expands. This is the T212: the T stands for tè kuài (特快), “extra fast”, but the days when it was faster than other trains are long since gone. Nonetheless, these slow trains are still well used. The high-speed bullet trains aren’t always the most convenient, as the new stations built for them are often further out of town and they often don’t service smaller places along the way. The high-speed trains are also much more expensive. And so this hard-seat carriage is full. Some passengers are, like me, hopping on and off for short journeys. The long-distance passengers can be spotted by their exhausted look. Some of them will have been scrunched in here since Shenzhen, a total of over eighteen hours, perhaps getting a chance to stretch out and get a little sleep in the quieter stages of the journey. There are plenty of sleeper carriages on these trains, but for migrant labourers or factory workers even these can be expensive.

At this point in the train’s journey, the carriage stinks of stale cigarette smoke and instant noodles. A catering trolley is pushing its way up and down the narrow aisle, serving breakfast. Another attendant is stridently selling Henan Speciality Roast Chicken, vacuum-packed. “The ideal gift to take home!” she tries to persuade a middle-aged man by the window. “Good for the elderly and for children too!” He waves her off. I’ve no idea why they’re selling this particular delicacy on this train; its route has taken it nowhere near Henan, far to the north.

The middle-aged man is staring out the window at the flat watery fields. The rice has been harvested. The stretches of pale gold stubble are broken by broad pale pools of muddy water which mirror the morning sky, the colour of herons. Almost everyone else is on their phones or snoozing. Across the aisle to my left are three teenage lads in black, squeezed into two seats, playing video games and chatting loudly. Across from them are two smartly-dressed middle-aged ladies who got on at the last stop. Opposite me, almost in knee-touching distance, are two fashionable young women in very short tartan skirts and huge sparkly fake nails. Next to me is an older lady with jet-black hair lacquered flat to her head in parabolic waves. At the crest of each wavelet is a crescent of purple rhinestones. I surreptitiously examine them in mild fascination, wishing I could take a photo, indulging my inner Paul Theroux. China has changed an awful lot since he wrote Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), but train travel remains a great way to see a cross-section of society, and to see some of the in-between places along the way.

I’ve taken a lot of train journeys in this country over the last fifteen years, ranging from the memorable to the uncomfortable to the plain tedious. There was the time when the slow train from Beijing to Chengde, the summer retreat of the Qing emperors, became the stopped train when a landslide in the mountains blocked the line for a while. There were the overnight sleeper trains between Beijing and Xi’an, when the grey dawn used to filter through the grubby windows around the time the train entered the loess plateau of Shaanxi province, and I would sip my instant coffee while watching the gullies and ridges of yellow earth flicker past, sharp and crumbling like Wensleydale cheese. There was the first time I saw the Yangtze River, crossing at night on the way to Guangzhou. There was the first time I tried a hard seat carriage overnight, going to a friend’s wedding in Hebei during a national holiday when the sleeper tickets were sold out, an experience I have no wish to repeat.

The green train to the far north-east, 2012

I think my favourite, though, was the journey I took with friends into the north-east, where China borders Russia and North Korea. We fell asleep in the dreary plains of Hebei. In a kind of magic, we woke up to cool forested hillsides. We picnicked on bread and Harbin sausage and read and played cards and looked out at the trees and the heathery hills that somehow reminded me of Scotland, the train emptying out the further north it went. That train also stands out for the charcoal brazier at the end of the carriage, where there was a giant kettle of boiling water. All Chinese trains have boilers with a ready supply of water, for tea and instant noodles, but in general they are electric affairs with convenient taps. On that train to Changbaishan, the attendant found me trying to fill our flask from that giant kettle on its chain, and scolded me for trying to do it myself. It felt like something displaced from time, adrift from an earlier era.

The journey from Canal Town to Shanghai, on the other hand, is not China’ most scenic. As we approach the city, the track snarls through tangles of overhead roads and high-speed track, and the concrete bones of more high-speed track still under construction. And although the journey is only an hour and a half, I’m more than ready to get off and stretch my legs at the end.

It’s only when I’m on my way back in the evening that something hits me. I’m looking at the coarse blue curtains on the carriage windows, the same material they have on every non-high-speed train. I look around the crowded carriage. I see those blue curtains, and the little metal rubbish trays they have on the too-small tables, and I see a migrant labourer hauling the bundles he’s slung from a bamboo pole over his shoulder, and the carriage attendant trying to sell Shanghai Special Face Cream, and I realise that all this feels as normal and familiar as an old pair of jeans. And I realise that someday it’ll become foreign to me again, and that’s an odd thought. I’m going to miss the mundane adventures of train travel in China.

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