Harmony Express, Thomas Bird

Thomas Bird found himself in southern China free from any serious commitments. His rock band had just split up, he’d left his job as the Shenzhen editor of a lifestyle magazine and his girlfriend disappeared from his life. Seeking the tonic of travel, Bird hit the railroad with a plan… to explore The People’s Republic of China by train. The country was in the midst of a railway building boom the likes of which the world has never seen, and Bird was poised to make China Railways his muse. One year morphed into several as Bird whizzed from high-tech Shenzhen to colonial Xiamen at high-speed; “flew” into Shanghai aboard a Maglev; chugged through rural Sichuan Province aboard an old steam locomotive. Putting the people he meets front and center, Bird delivers a portrait of an era, as he grapples to comprehend an inscrutable land undergoing breakneck change.

Expertly weaving Chinese history into his travelogue, Bird makes the story of China’s long journey to modernity analogues with the development of the national railway network. He investigates the impact of “railway imperialism” a century ago when China’s railways lagged sorely behind the rest of the world and considers Beijing’s obsession with “catching-up” as represented by its stealthy new fleet of Harmony trains plying the world’s longest high-speed network. Through his travels, Bird comes to view Chinese trains as “time-machines” bridging the impoverished countryside, tumbledown third-tier towns and gilded megacities.

Replete with wry personal anecdotes and sharp-witted observations, Harmony Express is a book for the ages, and a must-read for anyone interested in China’s twenty-first century, high-speed transformation.