Historian Luo Xin Walked From Beijing to Inner Mongolia in 15 Days. We Asked Him About Courage, Truth, and Everything Else | Interviews ⑬

"What connection is there between the distant, hazy China I study and the China right in front of me that so often leaves me baffled?"

In 2016, Luo Xin, a professor of history at Peking University, was 53. That summer he spent 15 days walking from Beijing to Xilingol, in Inner Mongolia.

He begged off an archaeology conference he had planned to attend, settled the itinerary with his students, and set out. At 6:30 a.m. on June 24, 2016, Luo Xin left from under the Jiandemen Bridge in Beijing. By the time he had walked 450 kilometers and reached Mingde Gate at the Shangdu Ruins Park, it was 4 p.m. in mid-July.

The trip was harder than he had imagined. Before setting out, going by what he had read in other people's travel accounts, Luo Xin gave himself a plan: walk six hours a day, average five kilometers an hour, keep two hours before bed for notes and reading, then sleep. He almost never kept to it. He was too tired at night, so the writing kept sliding to the next morning. On the road he walked with the notebook hanging from one hand, and whenever a chance to rest came he opened it and wrote two pages. Looking at the notebook after the trip, he found it covered edge to edge with shorthand.

To Luo Xin, the two ends of this journey could also be called Dadu and Shangdu. Early in his career he studied under Tian Yuqing, an eminent historian of medieval China, and specialized in the Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties period and in ethnic history. Today he teaches two courses at Peking University, for undergraduates and graduate students.

Luo Xin had wanted to walk to Shangdu for 15 years. Back then he read the thirteenth poem in One Hundred Palace Poems of the Yuan (《元宫词百章》) — a poem about a Yuan emperor's travels — with the lines "The attendants often journey north; before Longhu Terrace the wheat is ripe." That was when he first grew curious about the so-called imperial carriage road.

Every year in early summer, when the wheat fields began to turn gold, the Yuan emperor would leave Dadu, where he lived the rest of the year, and go up to Kaiping (Shangdu) on the grasslands to escape the heat. In September the emperor came back south, and the court officials would greet the procession at a stopping place called Longhu Terrace (at the time called a nabo). Four roads ran between Shangdu and Dadu, two of them opened for the emperor alone — the "imperial carriage roads." The course of those roads, the eighteen nabo stops along them, even the pomp of the emperors' progress, are all recorded at length in Yuan poems and notebooks, but so many details remain unclear that research devoted to the carriage roads has long been mired in dispute.

In 2001, Luo Xin and the Yuan historian Zhang Fan were discussing Fu Leshu's annotated edition of One Hundred Palace Poems of the Yuan on an online forum, and the two of them came back around to the carriage road. Luo Xin thought suddenly: if he wanted to study the carriage road, why not walk it himself? He did not expect the idea would take 15 years to happen.

Luo Xin walked the eastern branch of the emperors' carriage road. On the day they went from Xiaochang Town in Zhangjiakou to Wuhua Meadow, he and his travel companion Wang Shu had planned to reach Guyuan by nightfall. Their strength gave out, and they decided on the spot to rest a day before going on. Once they had settled on resting, both of them relaxed. Luo Xin said to Wang Shu, "Let's find a car and go straight to Guyuan now, and come back tomorrow to make up this stretch."

"Making up" a stretch happened all through the trip. The journey was that complicated and that piecemeal, full of the advancing and doubling back you see in the pilgrimage film Paths of the Soul (《冈仁波齐》).

On the first day it took him nine hours to walk from Jiandemen on Beijing's North Third Ring Road to Shahe Town, after which he went back to his home in the city. On the second day he continued from Changping to Juyongguan. The third day took him from Juyongguan to Yanqing. On June 29 he went from Yanqing to the next stop, the Baihe Shuibao Reservoir. Along the way he brushed against nettles and came down with paronychia, and he spent so long in the sun that for a year after the trip he had to wear sunglasses whenever he went out. But "walking the whole route was a promise. Heaven and earth both know it."

A year later Luo Xin turned what he had seen into a book, From Dadu to Shangdu: Rediscovering China on an Ancient Road (《从大都到上都——在古道上重新发现中国》). In it he calls the 15-day trek "a journey to understand China."

In From Dadu to Shangdu, Luo Xin describes what happened as he passed through Juyongguan, Yanqing, Sezeling, Guyuan and the borderlands north of the passes, but not entirely in a travel writer's voice. A historian's interests take over: he uses what he saw on the road as a way into long passages on how people of the Yuan imagined Juyongguan, and on the accounts of Chinese and foreign travelers who came this way over the centuries, and he often brings in friends from his life and work.

More often, that historian's way of seeing merges with the present. On the first day, walking the west bank of the Xiaoyue River between Liudaokou and Shangqing Bridge, Luo Xin thought of Ant Tribe (《蚁族》), the well-known 2009 book that documented exactly this sort of "urban village" life near the Xiaoyue River. By 2017 the old gathering place for young migrants had been cleared out, and what Luo Xin saw as he walked through were broad clean roads and freshly planted street trees. He wrote: "In the past few years the dense shantytowns on the east bank of the Xiaoyue River have been torn down, and the Beijing drifters who once numbered as many as 100,000 have vanished almost without a trace. They have moved somewhere else, to another place we cannot see, do not understand, and do not want to know about."

"What connection is there between the distant, hazy China I study and the China right in front of me that so often leaves me baffled?" In the preface he turns over his reasons for the trip once again.

It sounds like a question "Old Leng" would ask. In 2010 Luo Xin published a similar collection of historical travel essays, The Murder Stone Conjecture (《杀人石猜想》); scroll through the reviews on Douban and many readers call the author "Old Leng."

That was Luo Xin's online handle. He was the founding moderator of the Guantian Chashe forum on Tianya and the founder of the Wangfu forum in Peking University's history department. In the early 2000s, contentious posts such as "The Last Debate of the Century: China's Liberal Left Versus the Liberal Right" and "The End-of-Century Debate on Ideas: What Are the New Left and Liberalism Fighting Over?" first appeared on Guantian Chashe.

Later "Old Leng" and several friends started the Wangfu forum, a space set up for researchers in literature, history and philosophy. Scholars came because of its reputation, and in its busiest years Wangfu had more than 10,000 registered users. Only after Weibo took off in 2009 did the BBS forums begin to fade. In 2014 Wangfu started migrating its data; today you can no longer log in.

Luo Xin is still an active presence on Weibo. He no longer uses the name "Old Leng," but he still works patiently to explain the difference between "political correctness" and "correctness of knowledge." In 2013 he published "We Are Not the 'Yellow Race'" in the Oriental Morning Post, tracing how Eurocentrism manufactured a "discourse of skin color" and questioning theories of race. In his work on Northern Dynasties epitaphs and steppe history he has also stressed, over and over and in all sorts of settings, the histories of the weak and the marginal that nationalist narratives bury — part of what he sees as the historian's job of "dismantling historical myths."

Luo Xin is a tall man. Sitting half back in a chair, he can stretch his legs a long way out. As in the photos on his Weibo, he is always smiling mildly. He does not speak loudly, but when the talk turns to historical research and real-world problems he leans in toward the table, clasps his hands and says gravely, "Telling the truth is always dangerous, but you have to do it anyway — that is the only way our spirits find any comfort."

In November 2017, Luo Xin reposted on his WeChat official account, "Nomadic Wanderer," a transcript of remarks by Peng Xiaoyu, a history professor at Peking University. It argued: "Scholars should not shy away from the concern with reality in historical research. What makes that concern legitimate is that historical scholarship must affirm sound morals and values, and become a voice for social justice."

Luo Xin says this is one of the reasons he goes looking for China.

Q: QDaily

Luo Xin: Historian

"I wanted to walk from Dadu to Shangdu"

Q: You said the point of the trip was to step out of the study and really get to know China. Did you reach that goal this time?

Luo Xin: I wouldn't dare say I did. Looking back, the first thing I found is that it was worth doing. The original direction wasn't wrong, it just can't be reached that easily — but doing it was worthwhile, and the direction is still worth sticking to. Writing this book and walking this road both count as a new push forward, and in the end I'll keep going that way, though not necessarily on foot. Any method leads toward the same place, as long as you hold the direction in your heart.

Q: Apart from walking, what other ways do you think could get you to a real understanding of China?

Luo Xin: In anything — say you care about someone who was driven out of their home in the middle of the night — caring is itself one way. And not just caring; you have to understand, too. Some people don't want to understand. When that kind of news comes up they don't even want to hear it. You see all sorts of disasters on the road and you don't want to look, the way you don't want to look at a dead body, at anything ugly. We refuse painful things; our inner lives refuse them. But if you realize that something has a great deal to do with you, you should care about it anyway, even if it hurts.

Q: So what was the biggest thing you came to understand about China in the process?

Luo Xin: The biggest thing, I think, was finding out that Chinese people are genuinely lovable. In daily life we feel goodwill and trust only toward the people we know; toward strangers, toward people far away, we feel nothing. If you forced me to name the feeling, it would be distrust, unfamiliarity. But once you're out there yourself, putting your own fate in other people's hands, you find those people are all so lovable. It doesn't matter what class someone belongs to — a person driven out onto the street to freeze, or a person high up above — people are all the same. People are people. That's the most important discovery of my life, study, research and work these past few years. It keeps reminding me to care about people, to understand people, to trust people. That's what matters most, and much of the time we forget it. I think this walk of mine brought me back to that.

Q: But people in different situations can turn out differently.

Luo Xin: It's exactly on that understanding — that people are all the same kind of people — that you can care about a person inside a given situation, and treat them according to that situation. You understand why they act as they do. You understand why, if they made a mistake, they made that particular one. Then you understand them, and you also know how to keep those things from happening.

Q: Your book doesn't read like orthodox historical research, and it doesn't read like an orthodox travel memoir either. Why write it this way?

Luo Xin: Right, you could call it a hybrid genre. As travel writing it's an experiment in form — to see whether a new genre is possible, and to encourage other people to write this way. Since I was trained as a historian, I couldn't just say "this is something ancient" and stop there. It should be able to show the thickness that different stretches of time leave in the same physical space.

Q: You later write, "What relieves worry? Only walking." What do you think "walking" means?

Luo Xin: By the time I wrote that, walking in my mind had already gone past walking on foot — it's a way of living. It doesn't have to be on foot; a car works, a plane works, it all counts as walking. Living in the society we live in now, there's still a great deal you can't say and things you can't do, and at those moments a person of learning should still get up and act. That's where the meaning of walking lies: not to escape, but to face things.

Q: Does walking mean going to where things are happening? What's the relationship between action and walking?

Luo Xin: I think walking is part of action — more forward-leaning, more active than shutting yourself in a study, hiding away in your own world. In the actual research, scholarship should stay scholarship, but I always feel that a scholar is also a person living in the real world, with plenty of real-world responsibilities, and so should take part in it.

Q: Passing through these places you sometimes ran into real-world difficulties, and it's an almost completely different world from the past. As a historian, did you feel out of joint at those moments?

Luo Xin: Historians are all used to being out of joint — the historical world you imagine can't be found in reality. What matters is whether you can use reality to imagine something. And yes, you still can.

For instance, this place used to have a lot of birds and now it has none; there should have been a large body of water here, and now it's gone. Of course that's sad, because it isn't a happy kind of change. But it's reality, so understanding that reality is also necessary. Because once we know how wide the gap is between reality and history, and that some of these gaps are unacceptable to us, that can help us do what needs doing about reality.

"It matters a great deal that every person says what they want to say"

Q: You founded Wangfu, and you often take part in public discussions on Weibo now. Do you miss that older kind of space for discussion?

Luo Xin: I think Weibo and WeChat are both fine now, Weibo especially has gotten better. The technical conditions have actually improved — if it weren't for the aggressive deleting. It lets more people take part, unlike the old BBS, where the number of participants was limited.

Q: But a lot of people feel that because more people take part on Weibo, discussions get pulled off in other directions instead. Does that worry you?

Luo Xin: It doesn't matter. A lot of people say the thing they hate most about writing is other people commenting — there are always random people talking nonsense — but I think that's actually important. They stand for certain kinds of people who exist in society. Of course that doesn't mean they stand for all of society, but it's good to look at all sorts of comments; there's no harm in getting to know them, and it's fine if you'd rather not read them either.

Q: Right, you're fairly measured when you speak up on Weibo.

Luo Xin: I don't see the point. Why get into a fight with someone? Because it matters a great deal that every person says what they want to say. If someone finds what you wrote disgusting and curses you out once, that's fine too, isn't it? Unless the abuse gets very personal, if they're only against your opinion, there's no problem.

Q: Do you think today's online environment has improved compared with the forum era?

Luo Xin: It has improved. Deleting is severe, but the technology has changed — including the technology for deleting posts, which has improved too. But isn't this interesting? Take a piece of reporting you've done: a lot of it gets deleted, and a lot of it also gets turned into images and keeps spreading everywhere, which is interesting, and it's preserved forever — plenty of people have saved the whole thing on their own computers. Isn't your goal for people to see it? It's already been preserved forever, so deleting it is meaningless.

Q: Facing your students at school, do you find that today's students are different from the ones you used to teach?

Luo Xin: I often hear people say the generation born in one decade isn't as good as the one before, and I don't believe it. I think they're all the same — students are the same kind of students, it's only the questions they care about that change from era to era. Today's students may not have grown up the way you and I did, so things burned into your memory they simply don't know about; you bring them up and they stare at you blankly. But you can't blame them. The times did this. This is an era that deliberately makes them forget. And if they really have forgotten, that's all right too, they'll come to know it, because I believe all those things will surface again overnight, sooner or later.

Q: So what do you think young people should do?

Luo Xin: Right, I think for young people it's about training yourself, about coming to know what's real. For older people it's about how you spread knowledge, how you let other people know these things — that's a responsibility we all share. You can't say, "I won't tell you, but you should know already." How could that possibly work? It's like a child: if you don't teach him, he knows nothing; teach him, and he knows. Young people are the same, so you can't blame them for not knowing, and you can't blame them for not studying. Blame yourself, for not doing the part that was yours to do.

"A historian's great responsibility is to dismantle historical myths"

Q: Do you treat historical research as a tool for observing the present?

Luo Xin: I don't think of it as a tool for observing the present, but it is an important way I understand the world. I've had no other rigorous training, so this is the one world I feel reasonably confident in — the world of history, the world of scholarship. But if you don't connect it to reality, I always feel it's incomplete.

Q: As a historian, how do you see the value of history? What is history for?

Luo Xin: The meaning of history goes without saying, because the defining feature of how every one of us thinks is historical thinking. Our spiritual life exists and holds together because we live inside time; our time is continuous, and we are always chasing that continuity within time. So what use is a historian? I think a historian's great responsibility is to dismantle historical myths and clarify historical fact. A lot of what people tell you as history is false. Why is it false? I'll prove it to you. As for clarifying fact, a great deal of history really is unclear, and I go and make it clear — my job is to sort it out. That's what historians do.

Q: Where does that false knowledge come from?

Luo Xin: Our existing history textbooks are really ideology, political textbooks, but they arrive in the form of historical knowledge. From secondary school on, education has everyone memorizing it, and what's interesting is that this knowledge then enters a person's historical thinking from that point on — they use it as a foundation. So one of our basic tasks is to sweep these myths away. If you want people to be healthy, to think in a healthy way, you have to break the myths — "primitive society," "slave society," all of these myths have to go.

Q: After that kind of standard education, the shock can be enormous when a person later finds that things aren't like that at all.

Luo Xin: Yes, every generation goes through it, and it isn't only China — I think it's an unavoidable pain of growing up, a stage your thinking has to pass through to become healthy. But some people were deceived so deeply that they never turn it around their whole lives, while others come round early.

Q: In public spaces, when someone engages you out of that deceived body of knowledge, what do you do?

Luo Xin: At that level dialogue is very hard. So as a professional historian you have a responsibility to tell other people how to study history. That's our responsibility. When you find that the people around you are starting from the wrong premises, you have to supply the right historical knowledge.

Q: So this work of yours carries a certain amount of danger?

Luo Xin: In a society run on lies, telling the truth is always dangerous, but you have to say it anyway — that's the only way our spirits find any comfort.

Q: But a lot of people have given up already.

Luo Xin: Right, some people give up, but there will always be plenty who don't. So on this point, as I said, I believe in people; the ones who have given up will one day stop giving up. I believe in people, and I also understand why some people give up. I understand why some people do the opposite of what's right. Even the people who help a tyrant do harm, I understand them too, but I still believe that plenty of people need what's real, and are willing to say what's true.

Q: You can even understand the people who help a tyrant do harm?

Luo Xin: Yes. Just as there is a lot of darkness and weakness in our own hearts, it's the same for them. Of course they will have to bear whatever legal and moral responsibility they should bear, but I'm actually quite opposed to that reflex of settling scores at every turn. I'm against it — you can't kill a man because he did something bad. I really am against that.

Q: So what value do you think this historical perspective can offer for what we do now?

Luo Xin: I don't know. People often ask whether studying history can help with the present. I don't know whether it can help directly, but what I'd say is that the most important thing of all is coming back to people: that each one of us should be a healthy person. That matters a great deal — a free mind, a healthy mind, being truthful with yourself and with others, telling the truth. I think that's extremely important. Slow down. There's no rush.

On "national studies" and "nationalist historiography"

Q: In person you're a very mild man, but on certain points you're quite firm. For instance, I saw you say on Weibo that so-called "national studies" is just a garbage can. Plenty of people will say "I oppose national studies," but very few come right out and call it a garbage can. What's your view?

Luo Xin: As Qian Mu put it, you should approach tradition with warmth and respect. I think that's fine, that's how tradition should be treated. But you also have to know that tradition contains everything. The reason to be full of respect for it is that tradition, like reality, holds good things and bad things both.

What I dislike may be this way of thinking called national studies. Both the proposal of the concept and its use are frightening. It picks out certain things and calls them "tradition," and pretends the bad parts don't exist. That's a very bad way to treat tradition: pretending only these few things exist, then using them as a standard to educate the next generation, forcing that generation to accept them whether or not you understand them yourself. So I don't think national studies is a field of scholarship. National studies is an attitude toward tradition and the application of that attitude, and that in itself is a pile of garbage, something that absolutely has to be thrown out.

Tradition should be studied with a scientific attitude, the way Hu Shi talked about "sorting out the national heritage" — scientific sorting. The good things we will inherit naturally; as for the bad things, even not inheriting them, it's hard to truly reject them, because deep down we have already inherited them naturally. So tradition will always be tied to us. What I really hate is that whole business of forcing people to inherit so-called classics — a certain group of people using the power in their hands to tell you which books you must read, and also which ones you may not read. That in itself is an unacceptable attitude.

For professional scholars, our job is simply to do research, and the methods and means of research should all be scientific, which is to say all modern scholarship. Scholarship doesn't divide by country, by region or by language. A great idea is the same wherever it arises, great scholarship is the same wherever it arises; there's no this country versus that country, this region versus that region. Back to the old subject: people are all the same.

Q: So you don't believe in "national character"?

Luo Xin: I don't, but I do believe different cultures have their own cultural character, their own cultural traits. And I'd also say that any cultural character is in flux, always changeable. If we couldn't believe in change, that would be far too hopeless.

Q: In your work on ethnic history you once mentioned "moving beyond nationalist historiography." Could you explain that briefly?

Luo Xin: Because a state-centered view of history is a new kind of historiography, particular to the era after nation-states were formed. It's interesting in its own way. What marks a state-centered view is that when it tells history it tells only that state's history. Every country tells its own story, making its own nation sound especially good, especially outstanding, better than everyone else. But I know that's impossible — people are all the same kind of people, and we must never forget it.

Winter is coming, and we have to be ready

Q: You mentioned that one reason you founded the forum was wanting a space for exchange. Did you feel lonely before that?

Luo Xin: I think that loneliness has probably been there for many years, but when I was young I was more anxious about it, and as I've gotten older I've gradually stopped being anxious. It's been so many years; I'll just keep going, and it won't stay this way forever.

Q: A lot of people actually get more anxious as they age, feeling there's no time left. Some also say everything is changing too slowly and they wish they could speed it up. Do you feel that urge?

Luo Xin: I don't. I believe the speed of this change doesn't depend on any one person; the factors are very complicated. And honestly, from a historical point of view, sometimes the change isn't something you can see. It's actually huge — you think there's none, but our society is changing enormously. Some people are trying desperately to block it, to push the change in another direction, but more people are still moving one way. A historian said a famous line: read enough history and you find that people always end up going where they didn't want to go. A person's life is the same — in the end you arrive somewhere you didn't want to go. But that's all right.

Q: But when progress is very slow, or even reversing, a lot of people feel completely hopeless.

Luo Xin: That depends on how much you expected to begin with. If you had already foreseen this, you'd find it perfectly normal. And besides, we haven't reached the end. Winter hasn't come yet.

Q: How do you get through winter?

Luo Xin: As the show Game of Thrones says, you have to get ready — prepare on every front, prepare for that era, because there will certainly be a reckoning. Prepare in your thinking, in your knowledge. In your concepts too. So I feel that as someone who works in history, my responsibility is to dismantle as many historical myths as I can, to do as much work on basic concepts as I can. Nation, ethnic group, person, society, language, so-called politics — all of it needs sorting out at the level of basic concepts, so that once it has been sorted there will be a chance for more people to learn it and be armed with it. When the time comes that we need books to read, we shouldn't be left with nothing to read.

Q: That's an enormous undertaking.

Luo Xin: So sometimes I actually worry it's coming too fast, honestly, because the work we should be doing hasn't been done — right now we have nothing, nothing at all. What I mean is that China has produced a huge social stratum it never had before, one that has certainly had a good education. Most people are good people, but what matters most is that they've been educated. They aren't people who can simply be fooled anymore, and they understand the world quite well. A group of people like this actually longs to be armed with knowledge. They want to read; they need real knowledge. They can already tell that what's on television is nonsense, but when they want to know the real history, all you can hand them is ivory-tower papers. That's where the trouble starts. So I think it's a responsibility we all share.

Q: So you need to translate it for more people?

Luo Xin: Maybe what we need is more advanced work. If it can be done, historians should be doing more advanced work, raising the level of the whole field, so that the next generation, the newly trained generation, will be in a position to produce better historical knowledge.

Q: Do you have any advice for young people today?

Luo Xin: I don't have advice, really. Live bravely. I don't think anything matters more than going on living bravely, thinking freely and surviving bravely. Thinking freely has become very hard now. Free expression is sometimes not entirely up to you, but thinking is yours to decide. Think for yourself, read for yourself, write for yourself, whether or not you can say it out loud.

The cover image and the photos in the body (except where noted) were provided by Luo Xin.