The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

organized into rows of banana, papaya, lettuce and beans inter- spersed with rice paddies and ponds full of snow-white ducks. Each sec- tion of farmland is meticulously tended, with the locals squatting and weeding their precious crops by hand. Further north, the Bei Jiang Val- ley and spectacular Ta Yuang Ling Mountains combine to create the most scenic portion of the journey: a mixed forest of bamboo and pine borders the track, while tea planta- tions ascend steeply from the shores of small lakes. Then, endless ter- raced rice paddies of light green with grazing water buffalo under towering peaks race past, broken only by the occasional bleak brick town. North of Shaoguan, the moun- tains and river form a natural barrier that put a halt to the northen progress of the line until 1929, when the Chinese Ministry of Railways built a substantial steel bridge across the perennially swollen river and started work high upon the steep banks of the North River Valley. This extremely rugged section of track was completed in 1933 as far as Lechang, but it would be another three years before the Canton-Hankow Railway, linking Hong Kong with the Wuhan (formerly known as Hankow) railhead and points north, was completed. The mostly flat northern section of track from Wuhan to Beijing was built by Belgian engineers in the early part of the last century. The international train follows modern track and passes through a number of tunnels (some several miles long) through the mountain- ous terrain north of Shaoguan. On the opposite bank, the original 1933 track, crumbling from disuse, snakes along sheer cliffs and spans narrow chasms over classic arched bridges. J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 63 North of the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), one is truly in another country: the stereotypical China of vast collective farms. Downtown Guangzhou.