It is an odd, out of touch feeling when one is so used to being able to find things out at any hour and then share them.
I’m sat on the train from Beijing to Shanghai as write this. It is a gradual progression from brown to green as we get warmer heading south.
There are many old graves in the fields, piles of earth mostly without a headstone, that the row crops in the fields neatly avoid.
There don’t appear to be the large mechanized farm fields of the west here. It is just a patchwork of fields mostly less than an acre and many much less than that.
I cannot figure out what any of the crops are yet. Most fields are empty – but even the green ones look strange.
That said, people are doing things that I can understand here. Making do, and mending their tired houses with materials that are to hand.
The occasional factory and city flashes by but so far it has been 600 miles of small scale agriculture.
China is big. The 180 mph train shrinks it. (As I wrote that the train just went by a model of the sphinx and a pyramid, next to the Globe theatre… WTF? But the town is empty, seemingly uninhabited)
Beijing looks like a post apocalyptic future when the neon flares off the smog and by comparison the countryside looks like quite inviting, and understandable. Yet of course everyone is leaving to go work in the city.
On my list of places to visit where people are feeding themselves, China never really featured – but clearly it should.
Just pulling in to Nanjing station. 1 more hour to go.
*update – just saw someone using an ox to pull a plough/harrow.