Week Three on the Road: Dodging Cyclists, Dogs and Dump Trucks

TIANJIN, China — Two days before Confucius' birthday, we wheeled our dust-covered vehicles into the sage's hometown of Qufu, 50 miles east of the Yellow River in Shandong province.

Moments before arriving, one of our Bentley drivers had hit and killed a dog. We'd spent the bulk of the afternoon dodging errant drivers, puttering tractors, weaving bicyclists and donkeys pulling wagons. And that doesn't include the hot, sweaty morning in which we sat in a village traffic jam caused by a dump truck that got upended in a ditch, stranding its driver in the air.

You could say we were in need of some soothing, Confucian wisdom to help us through that chaotic day on China's roads.

But as the Worcester, England-based architect Mark Humphries observed from the wheel of his silver 1961 Bentley S2 Continental, there is a passive — and in some ways enviable — quality to the non-confrontational, lane-drifting free-for-all that is Chinese driving.

"It's like putting water down a sink," Humphries said in Confucius-like brevity about the trucks and cars he saw meandering — and at times jostling uncomfortably close — around him. "It all gets down there in the end."

The mood among our Bentley and Rolls-Royce speedsters has improved since we broke out of China's urban grasp around Nanjing and started basking in a more traditional, unspoiled landscape. Heading north along backcountry roads toward Beijing, we are speeding past forests, fields, marshes and farms. Nearly all the land in China's central coastal region seems to be in use — if not agriculturally, then interspersed with towns and simple, one-street villages where the world appears to be out on foot and bicycle. Because it's harvest season, every available bit of concrete (which includes driveways, sidewalks, doorsteps and sometimes the highway itself) lays covered in golden carpets of corn, which the peasants are drying for storage. Even the dustiest towns bustle with business as roadside shops sell goods ranging from fresh-picked vegetables to used car parts to the latest home-appliance goods.

We had just come from a small, lively city named Xuzhou in northwestern Jiangsu province, home to an impressively deep and well-preserved Han dynasty tomb, as well as a 3,000-strong collection of miniature Terracotta Warriors (as distinguished from their more famous life-size counterparts in Xi'an). But more than that, it was the country children we saw tucked between their mothers and fathers on mopeds — as well as the villagers wearing broad-rimmed hats, the fishermen squatting with wooden poles beside ponds, and the rural trucks hauling sand, bricks, wood, fruit, animals and everything else under the sun — that caused Vera de Jong to exclaim as she stepped out of her and her husband Herman's 1935 Bentley Derby 3 1/2 in Qufu: "This is real China — the China we came to see!"

If Confucius (551-479 B.C.) had known that the sky over his remote town would one day become the gray, soupy haze of pollution it is now, he may not have taught with such hopes for humanity. The pug-nosed, buck-toothed sage spent 14 years traveling around China trying — and failing — to convince its regional dukes to stop fighting with one another. In the process he gathered some 3,000 students and 72 hardcore disciples who recorded his sayings, and who are remembered today in the more than 2,000 Confucian temples scattered throughout the country — though none stands as sprawling and beautiful as the one built (and since added to) some 2,500 years ago in Qufu. Divided into nine immense courtyards, the 466-room, 1-kilometer-long temple boasts aged cypress trees, a dozen prayer pavilions, finely painted worship halls and 800-year-old white jade statues representing mythical Chinese beasts.

Moving north after a fast visit to Tai'an and the holy, mist-enshrouded Tai Shan Mountain that looms above it, traffic hazards again posed problems for our group — like the afternoon when we entered Jinan, a 2,600-year-old city famous for its thermal springs, and Scotsman Roley Fraser smacked his royal blue 1926 Bentley VDP Tourer into a bicyclist (causing no injury, though Fraser paid the man 300 yuan, or about $40, to help him buy a new bike). I was riding at the time with British businessman Lawrence Cohen in his olive green 1962 TD21 Mark 2 Alvis convertible — and his how-to-drive-in-China advice suddenly had new relevance: "Son, it doesn't pay to look five cars in front," he told me in an East London drawl. "It pays to look one."

Once we reached Tianjin, the home stretch to Beijing felt palpable. Officials in China's third largest city (with 11 million people, Tianjin is the place China's first bicycle was produced) greeted our arrival with Communist pomp and fanfare. There were men in dancing dragon outfits, teenage girls posing in wedding dresses, and old women practicing Tai Chi (and strangely, playing hacky sack as well) while TV cameras and government speakers welcomed our entourage into a vast parking lot where the cars went on display. The city, which will host several Olympic events next summer in the brand new stadium where the Women's World Cup was played last month, used our presence as a formal kick-off for China's '08 sporting bonanza.

But there was something incongruous about driving through the ultra-modern streets of Tianjin with Chinese and Olympic flags fluttering from the hoods and windows of our hyper-luxurious Western cars; as though the barrier dividing East and West had suddenly — based on a single motoring trip through China's cities and its rural, traditional countryside — come down. While to some, like Mark Humphries, the differences between European and Chinese culture are still obvious, especially those differences as seen behind the wheel of a Bentley.

"I think we in Europe have a lot to learn about the Chinese [regarding their] passive way of driving," Humphries said. "We drive Porsches and fancy pickups and luxury cars, and we're aggressive on the road. Here, because cars are so new, they're just used for getting around. They haven't started using them as an expression of wealth." Given the catastrophic levels of air pollution here, let's hope the Chinese stick to driving things small.

And that they don't start taking luxury road trips en masse like this one anytime soon.

Image credit: Robert Leslie