As the plump red sun arcs towards brown grasslands, a conductor leads me to my bunk on train 2624 from Manzhouli to Harbin in China. I’m riding in “hard sleeper” class, named for the thinly padded berths, stacked three-high to the ceiling.
A single, window-lined aisle runs the length of the car. Compartments, each holding six berths, are filled with people cracking sunflower seeds, unscrewing bottles of sorghum wine and dealing cards. I wonder if hard sleeper really means “hard to sleep in”.
When I enter my compartment, five inquisitive Chinese faces stare at me. I answer their rapid-fire questions: American, 35, travelling the length of Manchuria.
“There is no such place as Manchuria,” says Mr Wang, whose plump, pink face is topped by a nest of frizzy black hair. “In Chinese, wesay dongbei, the north-east.”
He’s right. The name Manchuria, which was derived from the Manchu race that lives here, has been officially rejected because of its association with the Japanese puppet state that ruled this area from 1931 to 1945. But it lives on in travellers’ imaginations, and in the geography that scrolls past the windows as the train gathers speed.
Over the next week I plan to explore Manchuria – the area north of the Great Wall bordered by Mongolia, Russia and North Korea – by riding just under 2000km on two of the world’s great railways. The China Eastern runs across northern Manchuria, while the South Manchurian forms the region’s north-south spine.
I plan to stop in the region’s major cities to bear witness to the area’s fascinating mixture of history over the past century. It has changed hands from Russian to Chinese to Japanese and back to Chinese control. A period of heavy industrialisation under Mao was followed by the transition to a market-based economy that has seen the closure of many state-owned industries.
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