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4 rail journeys in modern-day China: a far cry from Riding the Iron Rooster

Chinese railways have developed at an extraordinary pace since the 1980s and some journeys have more to offer travellers than others

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Young train passengers travel through Sichuan province in 2021. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 1:00pm, 12 May 2025Updated: 2:38pm, 12 May 2025

When American travel writer Paul Theroux rolled around China researching seminal travelogue Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), the country was still a technological backwater.

“The Chinese are the last people in the world still manufacturing spittoons, chamber-pots, treadle sewing-machines, bed-warmers, claw-hammers, ‘quill’ pens (steel nibs, dunk-and-write), wooden yokes for oxen, iron ploughs, sit-up-and-beg bicycles,” he observed, “and steam engines.”

The marshalling yard at Harbin in northern China was filled with steam trains in the 1980s, when Paul Theroux wrote travelogue Riding the Iron Rooster. Photo: Getty Images

Theroux, of course, couldn’t have predicted how the following decades would unfold. There is, arguably, no image more allegoric of China’s dramatic economic rise than a pearly-white Hexie (Harmony) high-speed train racing across the landscape. This utterly modernised transport infrastructure regularly grabs the headlines.

The launch last year of high-speed evening sleeper services from Hong Kong’s West Kowloon station to Beijing and Shanghai, arriving in either city before 7am, meant people could finish work in Central on Friday and breakfast on the Bund the following morning without missing a night’s sleep or having to take a flight.

It was only in 2008 that China unveiled its first high-speed line, connecting the northern cities of Beijing and Tianjin, ahead of the summer Olympics. Since then, 45,000km of dedicated high-speed track has been laid, more than in all other countries of the world combined. This has been added to the 110,000km of conventional railway that is still used to convey passengers and freight across the mainland.

The Guangzhou-Guiyang high-speed railway, China’s most scenic high-speed rail line, passes through Guilin county. Photo: Wang Lu

With plans for an additional 25,000km of high-speed rail by 2035, part of a broader gambit to become carbon neutral by 2060, the network is still very much in expansion mode.