Looking across this sea of anxious faces, it’s easy to forget this is a holiday. Knotted brows frame weary eyes in a crowd as deep as a football field, all of them waiting to catch a train out of Beijing.
The mass exodus from China’s cities is the roaring crescendo leading up to Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival as it’s known in the country. On paper the holiday can be equated to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s rolled into one, but on the ground the holiday unfolds on an entirely different scale.
A crowd lines up outside Beijing Railway Station on Sunday.
Spring Festival is a crater in the middle of China’s calendar, a multi-week event when factories, schools and offices are shut down, and the country’s 30-year urbanization drive is jolted into reverse. Tradition dictates that all Chinese return to their hometowns during Spring Festival, spurring the largest human migration on Earth. Chinese New Year is the chance for migrant workers who have been grinding out 60-hour weeks in the city to show off their earnings at home, and for grandparents still tilling the soil to size up their collegiate grandchildren.
On Monday alone, two days before New Year’s Eve, China saw roughly 80 million departures by train, bus, boat and plane. That’s equivalent to every single resident of California, New York and Florida skipping town on the same day.
Slow train to Xinjiang
For this crowd pressing up against Beijing’s ticket windows, those numbers are just an abstraction of the very real crush of humanity they will soon be inhabiting. Trains are swamped, with the unfortunate holders of standing-room-only tickets setting up shop in the aisles, stairwells and sinks.
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Even in the dead of night, fluorescent lights in the hard seat compartment never shut off. It’s a policy with a purpose — total darkness in a packed car would be an invitation to mayhem — but the unceasing illumination presents passengers waking at 4 a.m. with a Pompeii-esque tableau: hundreds of men, women and children slumped unconscious across the booths, sinks and stairwells.
At 5:30 a.m. one chipper passenger signals the start of the day by blasting local music out of a tinny radio. For most of the day ahead, the carriage exists in the throes of a collective hangover, never fully awake and nowhere close to comfortable.
Consolation comes in the form of a steady thinning out of the train. The western half of China’s landmass is home to just one-twentieth of the Chinese population, and by the time train T177 has entered the deserts of Ningxia province, empty seats begin to open up.
In the dining car, young couples snap selfies and tease each other as they prepare to meet the parents. Bringing a partner home during Spring Festival can be a nerve-wracking experience, with parental judgment often coming swift and harsh. But for now the train is spacious and the scenery is gorgeous. T177’s entrance to Gansu Province is marked by the appearance of camels set against snow-capped mountains.
Welcome to Urumqi
The final 16 hours of the train ride practically fly by. At each stop in the Gansu corridor passengers step out to breathe the crisp mountain air they’ve sorely missed in Beijing. As night falls for the second time, carriage 17 breaks into several games of the “Struggle the Landlord,” the official card game of long-distance train rides.
T177 crosses into Xinjiang Province around midnight, but it’s another six and a half hours to the provincial capital of Urumqi. For Zhao Xiaohui, an economics master’s student in Beijing, Urumqi isn’t even the final destination — he’s got another 12-hour train ride to the village where his parents grow peppers, wheat and the occasional batch of watermelons. He’ll stay there for seven days before making another 50-hour hard-seat journey back to Beijing.
But is it worth it?
“It’s all right,” Zhao shrugs. “When I was an undergrad I would ride this same train but I wouldn’t even have a seat. I’d just lie on the ground at night.”
The sky is a deep purple as T177 pulls into Urumqi station at 6:40 a.m. It’s been 39 hours since these passengers left Beijing Railway Station, and in another 41 hours they’ll ring in the year of the sheep. They grab the bundles, buckets and suitcases stocked for celebration and set off into the Urumqi dawn.
All photos by Matjaž Tančič.
