From the window of the train Beijing-Taiyuan

Rem Sapozhnikov / April 2014

Though my photo story begins with Taiyuan, but in China, I arrived in Beijing. And from there I have taken the train to Taiyuan. Here are the photographs of the train trip, and along with a few shots of my transfer Taiyuan-Pingyao.

To my journey to China I took with me a book about Hugo Chavez.

Boarding at the Beijing West Railway Station on the high-speed train G607 Beijing-Taiyuan (505 km, travel time 2h 45min).

2nd class car. Tickets cost 174.5 yuan (1030 roubles or 28 USD).
A Chinese man offered me to change my comfortable window seat at the side with two seats to his middle seat on the side with 3 seats so that he could travel next to his friend. Of course, the exchange has never taken place.

At high speed of 300 km/h, the train runs for a long time among endless greenhouses that go into the distance to where the smog allows you to see.

Just a few kilometers the train flies along the Central canal through which the water for more than a thousand kilometers runs from the south from the Danjiangkou reservoir, towards the northern regions of China up to the Beijing.

I am approaching the city of Shijiazhuang, the administrative center of Hebei province.

Chinese people should be proud of their magnificent network of high-speed railways.

I look at hundreds of kilometers of Chinese overpasses for high-speed trains and wonder why we do not have such in Russia. At least from Moscow to the nearest regional centers: to Vologda, Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov, Voronezh, Kursk, Smolensk (better to Minsk at once).

Suddenly the plain abruptly ends, the smog becomes thicker, there appear hills and mountains.
The train immediately moves from one tunnel to another. The speed is reduced to 200 km/h.
I'm in the Shanxi province, driving through the Taihang Mountains.

In Shanxi there are many Christian temples.
During all my railway travels along the province, I constantly saw towering crosses.

The first Catholic church appeared in Taiyuan in 1635. It was built by a Belgian Jesuit priest Michel Trigault. I must say, the fate of missionaries in China, in the Shanxi Province, was very tragic. Here is an excerpt from the book of Vasily Sidihmenov "Manchu rulers of China", 1985.

"... Yuxian (毓賢 - Yùxián) is also considered the most active proponent of anti-foreign movement, was the inspiration and organizer of Yihetuan Movement (Boxer Rebellion), opponent to the spread of Christianity in China.

... In December 1899, he was appointed a governor of Shanxi Province. There was a strong influence of British and American missionaries, and Yuxian in 1900 staged a mass slaughter of foreigners. He gave orders to bring to him all the missionaries who lived in the main provincial town of Taiyuan. When they were brought, they were ordered to prostrate themselves before the governor. First, he beheaded two Catholic priests and three missionaries, and then - the rest of men, women and children."

And this is a quotation from Wikipedia: "In total, during the reign of Yuxian in Shanxi 191 Western missionaries, more than 10,000 Chinese Christians were killed, 225 churches were burnt and destroyed."

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