Seeking the Ancient Soul of Modern China

NANJING, China — It was raining when our convoy got lost on a jam-packed freeway outside of Wuxi, a city engulfed in high rises in the Yangtze River delta. Sitting next to me was Usama Tuqan, a Palestinian-born Londoner navigating his 1961 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II convertible aggressively through the lanes as he discoursed on Muslim identity, wealth inequality and the arguable virtues of Hugo Chavez.

It had been a long and ugly drive across the cityscapes west of Shanghai. Tuqan, venting his frustration, said that he and his wife Amir came to China hoping to find rice fields, farmers in hats and ancient temples, “but instead you look around and see complete urbanization.”

Tuqan is not exaggerating: China’s recent unrestrained growth is stunning. And the horizon — a yellowish-blue haze adorned with high-tension wires, massive cranes and literally thousands of skeletal, unfinished buildings encased in scaffolding and green cocoon-like netting — is giving these classic-car drivers the impression that an unspoiled version of the country no longer exists.

Not even when seen from the windows of a Rolls-Royce.

The second leg (read about the first leg here) of our 1,000-mile Shanghai-to-Beijing journey began in Hangzhou, the lush and picturesque former capital of the Song Dynasty that Marco Polo once called the world’s most beautiful and magnificent city. A leading center of Chinese trade and wealth since the Grand Canal was built here more than 1,000 years ago, linking the fertile central coastal region with the arid north, Hangzhou today serves as a symbol of China’s booming development: its real estate prices have soared, its outskirts are an uninviting tangle of buildings under construction, and its roadways see 250 new registered cars each day.

If that landscape became our view of modern China from the road, the sprawling clothing factory we visited en route to Wuxi gave us a first-hand glimpse of the nation’s blistering economy in action. A few years ago, immense enterprises like this one — where thousands of glum-faced assembly-line workers sit all day cutting, ironing and sewing women’s suits that will be sold to H&M and similar stores in the West — were known as sweat shops. That term, however, no longer fits — or at least it doesn’t apply to the factory we visited.

The workers I saw at Hempel International, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, had cell phones and some were listening to iPods as they worked. Earning $180 a month — just $20 less than the region’s average salary — the employees sleep four to a room in clean, modern dormitories with televisions. One woman I spoke with, 40-year-old Chen Jin, told me she is happy at the factory because the work’s not so hard, she can spend free time at local shopping centers, and she earns enough money to send some home to her family in southern Hunan province.

All right, so there’s no way our crew of Bentley and Rolls-Royce enthusiasts is going to be led by locals looking to impress us into China’s grimmest workshops, which perhaps still lurk in many cities. But as a model for what a more humane — and financially successful — Chinese labor force might look like in the future, the factory we saw demonstrated a surprisingly human face.

Tuqan eventually wheeled his Silver Cloud to a halt in the Wuxi Taihu Hotel’s crescent-shaped car park next to other classics that included Jim Darling’s silver-green 1953 Bentley R-Type Continental, Neil Hadfield’s ’53 sky-blue Jaguar XK120 convertible and a flashy and supremely funky machine which has been drawing crowds in China all week: Mark Brazier-Jones’ hand-built, ‘30s-gangster-style low rider, which he calls his “Model A DeVille.”

Like Brazier-Jones, a cowboy-attired furniture designer who proclaimed his love for sautéed jellyfish and duck tongue immediately after diving into the local cuisine, the characters on this two-week trip are true eccentrics with at least one thing in common to help them get along: they’re all crazy about cars.

But the trip’s success has relied on another factor as well, David Sulzberger, an American dealer of Islamic art based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, pointed out to me as we went barreling down the highway toward Nanjing the next morning in his black-and-silver ’47 Bentley MK6 Swiss Coach: “It says something about China that they’re confident and rich enough — and interested enough in us — to let a bunch of wealthy dilettante showoffs come have a good time,” he says.

And we’re not just talking about the string of banquet dinners to which local heads of government have invited us. On our arrival in Nanjing, city officials opened up the 600-year-old Ming city wall for us to enter — something they hadn’t done in 30 years. Drums beat, cymbals crashed and hundreds of Chinese waved and cheered as our procession crawled through the opening in the ancient, seven-meter-thick wall. Originally 20 miles in length, it is the longest city wall ever built.

Nanjing, a skyscraper-studded city of 7.3 million, is famously remembered as the capital of the Ming Dynasty from the 14th to 17th centuries — and infamously, as the site where Japanese soldiers slaughtered 300,000 in the 1937 Rape of Nanking (at the time, “Nanking” was the English spelling of “Nanjing”).

Today, its swarming commercial life on the banks of the Yangtze is testament to the city’s resurgence. And strange though it seemed, the bustling metropolis appeared to freeze while our 25 cars careened through. Long lines of faces crowded the avenue, gazing with thousands of intense eyes: grandpas on motor scooters, workers in hard hats, mothers carrying groceries, children on bicycles. They shouted, took pictures with mobile phones and surrounded us in their sea of smiles. It was the foreign, antiquated luster of our machines that fascinated the Chinese on the long, leafy boulevard crammed with commercial billboards, flashing lights and modern shops.

It was fitting, perhaps: We’d come looking for an “old traditional China,” as Usama Tuqan called it, yet it was their modern industrialized country that was finding something old in us.

Image credit: Robert Leslie