How Long the Lonely Road

I pull out my dagger, I peer four ways in vain. I would cross the Yellow River, but ice chokes the ferry. I would climb the Taihang Mountains, but the sky is blind with snow. I would sit and poise a fishing pole, lazy by a brook— But I suddenly dream of riding a boat, sailing for the sun. Journeying is hard, Journeying is hard. There are many turnings—which am I to follow? I will mount a long wind some day and break the heavy waves And set my cloudy sail straight and bridge the deep, deep sea. —Li Bai, “The Hard Road” It was a poem by Tu Fu that drew me to Taishan. He wrote it over a millennia ago, during the Tang dynasty, when Greeks and Arabs were the dominant power in the western world, and he wrote it in a written language so far removed from my native tongue that, with the attempted translation before me, I cannot help but wonder how much more significant the verses once were to eyes that read their ancient characters. With what can I compare the Great Peak? Over the surrounding...

A thousand miles walked is worth a thousand books read. —Confucius Salman Rushdie wrote that if a man does not have men to follow him and a woman to adore him, then something within that man begins to die. Travel can often mean abstinence from both, and I find myself, in such periods of solitude within the foreign multitude, undertaken by all Ishmael’s loomings, so that “it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off.” I felt such a spleen, and neither heading to sea nor the pistol and ball could remedy it. So absurd and alone, this American in rural China, I sulked about like Raskolnikov, spurning all company when any local tried to talk to me. Sometimes they stared, a piteous and abject look, as if I were a phantom, and I stared right back. When some Chinaman looked at my hairy shins and sandaled feet I leered at his pant cuffs in an exaggerated way; when he laughed awkwardly I guffawed a...

With yesterday’s rain on the window sill I leave my home behind, All for the sake of anticipating a stranger. —A Poet From Chengde Autumn came south dragging the cold hem of her dress, and I rushed north to meet her. Old Hangzhou lay across the Yellow Mountains, in the fertile plain of the lower Yangtze, at the southern end of the Grand Canal that dug over a thousand miles to Beijing, and on the eastern shore of West Lake. All this geography brought to Hangzhou a worldly prosperity. When the Song Emperors ruled China, Hangzhou was a city of philosophers, poets, politicians, artists, and other men of worth, in palaces and towers, as well as two million soldiers, artisans, peasants, and slaves, scurrying across a thousand bridges and between a hundred thousand wooden buildings. Marco Polo of Venice traveled there in the thirteenth century, when Hangzhou was the largest city in the world, and its grandeur so impressed him that he called it a hundred miles wide and “beyond dispute the ...