From Somersault Cloud to High-Speed Rail: How Speed Reshapes Thought — Epoche B2
Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West — and the argument it makes about speed Reading a hundred-chapter Ming novel on a train that covers 1,318 kilometres in four and a half hours is not the neutral experience it sounds. Journey to the West , printed in 1592, is built around a walk: the monk Xuanzang travels overland from the Tang capital of Chang'an to India to fetch Buddhist scriptures, and the novel follows him for a hundred chapters. What makes it strange, and what makes it worth reading on the Beijing–Shanghai line, is that one of his companions could have finished the errand before breakfast. A note on the authorship before going further, because I have named an author on the cover and the name is not secure. The attribution to Wu Cheng'en rests on a thin thread: a local gazetteer of Huai'an prefecture, compiled in 1625, lists among the writings of a townsman of that name a work called Journey to the West , with nothing to indicate that it was this novel rather than a travel account, and no Ming edition of the novel carries his name at all. Scholars in the 1920s made the identification and it stuck. Andrew Plaks's study of the four great Ming novels is properly sceptical about it, and I shall say 'the novel' rather than 'Wu Cheng'en' where the distinction matters. 108,000 li: what the number is, and what it is not Sun Wukong — the monkey of the title, a figure of enormous power and no patience — travels by a technique the book calls the somersault cloud (筋斗雲), which carries him 108,000 li in a single leap. That number is not decoration, and it repays a moment's arithmetic, because two separate things are going on in it. The first is structural. It is the same figure the novel gives for the distance between the Land of the East and the Buddha's paradise in the West. The two quantities are deliberately equal, so the monkey can in principle cross the entire pilgrimage in one jump — and the book spends ninety-odd chapters explaining why this is not allowed. The second is that the figure is not a measurement of anything. A li is a traditional Chinese unit of the order of half a kilometre, so the leap comes to roughly $$108{,}000 \times 0.5\ \mathrm{km} = 54{,}000\ \mathrm{km},$$ which is about 1.35 times the circumference of the Earth at the equator, some $40{,}075\ \mathrm{km}$. No terrestrial journey can be that long. What the number is doing instead is invoking a standard Buddhist enumeration: 108 is the conventional count of the defilements of mind, the number of beads on a rosary and of strokes on a temple bell at the new year. The distance is cosmological rather than geographical, and the novel knows it. In chapter seven Wukong wagers the Buddha that he can somersault clear of his palm, travels what he takes to be the edge of the world, and discovers on landing that he has never left the hand. The walk the number is measured against Behind the fiction stands a real journey, and the contrast between the two distances is the essay's hinge. The historical Xuanzang left Chang'an in 629 in defiance of a standing imperial prohibition on leaving the country, and returned in 645 with 657 Sanskrit texts. He wrote up what he had seen, at the emperor's request, as the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions , completed in 646 — a book that remains a working source for the archaeology of Central Asia and northern India, because he recorded distances, rulers and monastery populations along the way. His straight-line distance was modest. Chang'an, the modern Xi'an, to Nalanda in Bihar is roughly 2,500 kilometres as the crow flies. His actual route was several times that, because the Taklamakan desert cannot be crossed and must be skirted, so he went north-west through the oases of the Tarim, over the Tian Shan into what is now Kyrgyzstan, down through Samarkand and Bactria, and over the Hindu Kush before turning south-east. Sixteen years, then, for a journey the somersault cloud would have overshot by a factor of twenty. The novel sets those two magnitudes side by side on purpose. 1,318 kilometres, and the middle that disappears This is where the novel becomes uncomfortably current, and here the numbers are contemporary. The Beijing–Shanghai high-speed line opened in 2011 and runs 1,318 kilometres. It was designed for 350 km/h, ran at a reduced 300 km/h for several years, and returned to 350 km/h in 2017 with the introduction of the Fuxing trainsets. The two figures in my opening sentence are consistent with each other, though they look as if they should not be: a journey time of four and a half hours over 1,318 km implies a mean speed of $$\frac{1{,}318\ \mathrm{km}}{4.5\ \mathrm{h}} \approx 293\ \mathrm{km\,h^{-1}},$$ which is about 84 per cent of the maximum. The missing sixth is spent accelerating, braking and standing at intermediate stations. Those trains have done to that corridor roughly what the somersault cloud does to the pilgrimage: they have made the middle disappear. I boarded at Beijing South, worked through the Yellow River and the whole of Shandong without looking up, and arrived with the vague sense that Nanjing had been a notification on a screen. The intermediate space is not experienced; it is merely priced into the ticket. Whether it is also economically hollowed out is a real and open question, and the World Bank's survey of the Chinese network by Martin Lawrence, Richard Bullock and Ziming Liu takes it seriously. The distinction the report works with is between generation and redistribution: a new line may create activity in the places it passes, or it may simply move activity that already existed towards the two ends, since a market town four hours from Shanghai by road and fifty minutes by train becomes a place from which one commutes rather than a place in which one builds. The report assembles the evidence on which of these dominates; the honest summary is that it varies with what the intermediate city already had, and that no one should assume a station is a benefit by