Bagou – a Town Turned Back to Nature

by Ernie Diaz

On any other track, the Chinese term for train, huo che, fire cart, would be a misnomer. But in a sleepy corner of southwestern Sichuan, coal still fires the steam engine of the only train on the lonely Bashi line. Boarding requires a journey in its own right; Chengdu down to Leshan, then Highway 213 to Shazui, then a ferry ride across the Ming River to Shixi town, the head of the Bashi line and the biggest of its nine stops.

The eighth stop is Bagou, but the ninth, Huangcun, is little more than an abandoned mine shaft. Bagou is essentially the end of the line, a town built to plunder the Sichuan hills which have since reclaimed it.

The Jiayang mining company built Bagou and the Bashi Line back in the 1930s, to exploit the rich seam of coal running under the ancient Emei mountain range and take it to the river, where it could power more developed regions. The end of the coal didn’t mean the end of the town, just an eighty percent drop in its boom-time population of ten thousand. Today, devoid of blacktop, Bagou is still tethered to the outside world only by the Bashi line and the functioning museum piece that chuffs up and down it twice a day.

Maybe that’s all it needs. Bagou is no destitute hillbilly hamlet. The children have shoes and full bellies, and the old folks have warm homes in the winter. What Bagou doesn’t have is any trace of the coal industry which bore it: no stripped hillsides, no sooty air or befouled water, no ugly haunted factory buildings (the bricks were all hauled away for home improvement). No big shopping centers with big cars beeping pedestrians out of the way, either. Darn. Bagou is a post-industrial eco-village, where green leaf has avenged itself on black soot, returning to the soft low-mountain stillness that breeds peaceful, jolly Sichuanese.

Even resort towns like Nice turn ugly at the train yard, low-rent walls naked save for graffiti. Those peering out the train windows at Bagou station see flowers under their noses and stands of shade trees hard by, screening the modest homes of busy bodies who choose to live near the ‘action’. The town center is an acre of concrete, built by Jiayang company in its infinite clemency for employees without the benefit of mine exercise to take part in group calisthenics to the squawks of a tinny PA system. Today it’s hard to see any concrete for all the corn, turnips, and other vegetables laid out for sale on such a perfectly flat square.

Otherwise, Bagou is a place of inclines, so that most of its houses’ sides are unequal, tucked into the lees of hills on winding paths. Built before the People’s Republic, they are quaint but functional precursors to the social realism that blots so much Chinese landscape, stacked slate shingle roofs but an accent amongst all the subtropical verdure.

Hale and hearty residents not pressed for time find walking along the Bashi tracks easily as agreeable as the ride. Others set up the equivalent of roadside stands to flog simple crafts and refreshments. As far along the line as Bagou stretches lie rail-side wooden benches where resident and traveler alike can take their leisure, spinning out long afternoons in the Sichuan tradition of tale-trading and gossip-mongering.

Ten kilometers out from Shixi, the track runs through a long tunnel. Passing through that tunnel from the Bagou side means leaving behind its hidden, hard-won peace for real rural China: asphalt strips with tractors rumbling along and farmers on motorcycles whizzing by, dense farming settlements where the aura of peasant will-to-prosper puts the surrounding hills and forest squarely out of focus.

Such is the fate of all arable plain. But up in China’s highlands, it still takes sustained ambition to mar Mother Nature’s handiwork. And Bagou is proof that she can clean up after we’ve made a mess.

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