14/10

Whoosh — the maglev into town gets up to 430 kmh, which barely gives the Chinese time to hawk up a good phlegm before they have to detrain at Longyang Lu. It is quite exciting, particularly when it tilts alarmingly. Here is China in a nutshell: yesterday I bump around the backstreets of Xi’an in a bus that I thought would fall apart if it encountered an even moderately deep pothole; today I ride an ultramodern train, which does a journey six times as long in a twentieth of the time.

View from the maglev

The contrast is what has made China fascinating. The third world collides headlong with the futuristic. It is like someone threw a city of the future at Chennai and saw what stuck. Louis Vuitton is two doors down from a street kitchen that offers minced unmentionable in a steamed bun for a yuan; the huge new untenanted shopping plaza at the Terracotta Warriors is home to a stall selling dog furs and a pack of pomegranate sellers; you rise from Shanghai’s modern and efficient subway into a honking, shrieking world of enormous colour and vitality.

Fuzhou Lu