By Cecilie Gamst Berg

Travelling around China for two years is not as easy as it sounds. In January this year, for example, much of the country was paralysed by freezing winds, snow and ice – millions and millions of people stranded without transport as they desperately tried to get home for Chinese New Year; almost one million of them camped outside Guangzhou Railway Station alone.

Trucks and private cars were stuck on icy, gridlocked roads for days on end, their drivers and passengers forced to make the choice between freezing to death inside the vehicle or start walking and risk getting lost … and freezing to death. Trains, stuffed with so many passengers there wasn’t even standing room left, stood rooted on the tracks without electricity. Even journeys of 24 hours or less turned into four- and five-day nightmares without food or water, with the toilets the only place where passengers could draw fresh air.

Considering this took place in the most developed, populous provinces of China where people are used to everything running smoothly, one can imagine how getting around Tibet, Xinjiang or Inner Mongolia – where the distances are unfathomable and people and resources scarce – can be fraught with danger. The road from Lhasa to Kunming, for example, is called a “national highway” on the road map. It is actually a dirt track hardly able to accommodate the width of one car, let alone the buses and military trucks picking their way through rocks fallen from thousands of meters above, trying to avoid the sheer 2000-meter drops on either side.

And that’s under normal circumstances. Now imagine a snow storm, temperatures below minus 20 and equipment perhaps not up to standard, and travelling in China can seem quite daunting. But that didn’t stop American photographer Tom Carter from undertaking a full two-year stint of constant travel through the 33 provinces of China, taking thousands of photos along the way with his “ancient” digital camera.

Carter never thought it would be smooth sailing. With his limited Mandarin and even more limited budget, he was forced to take any means of transportation that came his way, frequently having to sit up for days on buses carrying peasants and their livestock.

One time he was taking a stroll on the frozen wastes of Changbai (‘Eternal Whiteness’) Mountain, on the border between Jilin province and North Korea, when he inexplicably found himself staring down the barrel of a North Korean machine gun, having wandered several kilometers into the territory of that forbidding nation.

Only the kindness, or perhaps the lack of experience in dealing with stray foreigners of the North Korean soldiers, saved him from getting into serious trouble – they sensibly solved the problem by chasing him back to the safety of the Chinese border.

Sitting up for days on the infamous hard seats of long-distance trains or roughing it with peasants on buses, catching lifts with truck drivers or friendly families with cars, Carter never lost sight of his goal: to chronicle the people of today’s China in their daily lives.

Criss-crossing the vast plains of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, being thrown about in four-wheel drives on the rock-strewn dirt tracks of Tibet or zipping down the mostly empty, brand new, ruler-straight six-lane motorways by which each province judges the standard of its infrastructure, Carter went everywhere and did everything in terms of transportation.

He sailed up the Yangtse and chronicled the result of the Three Gorges Dam project – total destruction of old culture and architecture, ecological disaster and untold human suffering. He slept on the floor of bus stations and in hotels which could be classified as minus three stars. Accompanied by his Chinese girlfriend Hong Mei during his second year of traveling across China, something of a buffer between him and the intransigent officials and obstacle-makers of various persuasions that travelers off the beaten track in China inevitably run into, he lived like ordinary Chinese, the Chinese way: with difficulty. 

The slowest means of transport ever has to be the one by which devout Tibetan Buddhists travel from all over Tibet to the Potala Palace in Lhasa: laying down flat on the road once for each step. Many of them spend up to three years getting around like this, living off alms and the kindness of others.

Any traveler in Tibet unfamiliar with this kind of pilgrimage will do a double-take the first time they see somebody moving along the road like a caterpillar: one step, kneel, full prostration, get up, one more step, kneel, lie down… But after seeing the tenth or so pilgrim, the western tourist will get used to it, perhaps just idly reflecting: “I could never do that…”  

Like many foreigners before him, Carter first came to China to teach English. Not satisfied with seeing a small corner of China from the inside of the classroom in Shandong province where he was working, he saved up his teaching salary so that he could eventually venture into the interior, photographing everything he saw.

He quickly came to realise how vast China is and how little of the ‘real’ China tourists who only travel to Beijing and the larger cities with a few terracotta warriors thrown in, can experience.

Each time he returned to teaching he felt the road beckoning, and after two years of exploration he came to realise his by then overwhelming wish: To travel to every corner of this huge, in many ways forbidding land, chronicling today’s China – warts and all – with his camera and turning the result into a book: CHINA: Portrait of a People.

Cecilie Gamst Berg

Are you interested in seeing more pictures or in purchasing CHINA: Portrait of a People? Please visit this website.