Finding connections on ancient shudao

On an ancient road in Sichuan province, Sandra Dorothy Carpenter presses her palm against a one-thousand-year-old cypress tree, the scent of cypress filling the air around her.

"It feels like touching history," she says. "We're on the road with the ancients. It feels like you can even feel the earth's heartbeat."

Carpenter, a former American educator, was one of nearly 40 scholars, business representatives and students from the United States and China who participated in an exchange program in Guangyuan, Sichuan province, from March 23 to 27.

The event traced the footsteps of Hope Justman, a US writer who has trekked the ancient shudao 25 times since 2001. Over the years, she has documented the road through books, websites and videos, introducing it to people far beyond China's borders.

Shudao, or the ancient road to Shu, Sichuan's former name, is a network of roads spanning more than 1,000 kilometers, connecting the Sichuan Basin to the Central Plains. Built over 2,300 years ago, it played a pivotal role in providing transportation arteries throughout ancient China.

Many Chinese know shudao from the works of Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet Li Bai, who once wrote: "the road to Shu (shudao) is harder than climbing to the blue heavens".

For many of the American participants, the journey was not merely a scenic hike but a profound encounter with Chinese civilization.

At the Cuiyun Corridor, a section of the ancient road in Jiange county, Guangyuan, which boasts one of the world's oldest, largest artificial cypress forests — over 7,000 ancient cypress trees, some as old as 2,300 years — Cayla Marie Ham, an American teacher, stood in awe.

"It's been so unreal," she says."There is so much history here. I'm just a small piece of the history that gets to be a part of this."

Ham adds that she was impressed by the beautiful job China has done to preserve the site, and that she would love to bring her family and friends here to show them more of China's cultural treasures.

Walking the streets of Zhaohua Ancient Town, one of the best-preserved towns featuring rich historical relics from the Three Kingdoms period (220-280), Steven Paul Carpenter, chairman of the Central China Executive Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, felt the stories he first read 18 years ago in Romance of the Three Kingdoms come to life.

Unlike the HBO series Game of Thrones, which also tells of power and territorial struggle, Steven Carpenter saw a fundamental difference.

"Chinese are like walnuts — very hard on the outside and very soft on the inside," he says, noting the bond and brotherhood between Liu Bei, the emperor of Shu, his generals, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and his strategist, Zhuge Liang. "Chinese friends will do anything for you. And you see that in the Three Kingdoms' stories."

James Weaver, former vice-president of JPMorgan Chase, was particularly moved by a small structure behind the county office in Zhaohua called the Retreat and Reflection Pavilion. According to local tradition, a county magistrate would sit there alone at the end of each day to reflect on his decisions.

"This ancient Chinese wisdom is truly fascinating," Weaver says, adding that he hopes today's leaders would do the same thing.

At the Thousand Buddha Cliff, home to more than 7,000 Buddhist statues carved into a riverside cliff face, David James Moser, a professor at Capital Normal University, carefully examined the niches and statues along the path.

Just across the river, cars sped along the expressway, and bullet trains rushed past on the Xi'an (in Shaanxi province) — Chengdu high-speed railway.

"Standing here has been really enlightening," Moser says. "The culture we're seeing is very ancient, but at the same time, we see modern China. The old and modern come together here. It's really amazing. "

That sense of temporal convergence was even more striking at Mingyue Gorge, a section of the shudao that has been called a "museum of Chinese transportation history". There, six forms of roads — a cliffside path, a plank path, a towpath, a waterway, a highway, and a railway — coexist within a single canyon.

Peter Ditmanson, a history professor at the Yuelu Academy of Hunan University, marveled at the technological sophistication of the ancient road, which predates the Roman Appian Way.

"Part of what we study in Chinese history is how China remained united for the most part," Ditmanson says."And part of the answer lies in the technology and knowledge behind these kinds of road systems like shudao."

Qiu Tingting, the Chinese translator of Justman's The Great Roads of China — Guide to Hiking China's Old Road to Shu, notes that Justman originally wrote the book simply to share her hiking experiences. But after her book gained attention on social media, more Western travelers began walking the ancient road each year.

"This reminds us that the most effective cross-cultural communication is often not a one-way broadcast, but an open gateway — allowing people to experience it with their own steps and discover with it their own eyes," Qiu says.

"The shudao is a living testament to dialogue, inviting us to connect with history and with each other," she says, adding that she hopes more young people will use ancient roads like it to build empathy and illuminate understanding between cultures.

Contact the writers at pengchao@chinadaily.com.cn