A French-Chinese blogger’s dusty road home in China’s wild west
I hail from Lanzhou, the dusty capital of Gansu province in northwestern China. My family and I moved to France when I was 6 years old. Since then, Gansu has become the remote, enigmatic land of my ancestors, which I desperately want to explore. Even as I come back to visit every year, I still wonder how the people there live, what they eat, and if I can still be considered one of them.
On paper, China’s northwestern area, usually referred to as daxibei (大西北), is a vast region that is often perceived by outsiders as a distant, underdeveloped, and mysterious land, stretching across expansive deserts and rugged mountains. Lanzhou, nestled at 1,600 meters high in a narrow valley on the banks of the Yellow River, has turned from a poverty-stricken city in the 1950s into a regional heavy industry center today. However, the fast economic development came at a major environmental cost; in the 1990s, Lanzhou was ranked as one of the ten most polluted cities in the world. The air quality used to be so poor that the city could not be seen from satellites, and I can still recall the acute, sour sensation that attacked my young nostrils as a boy growing up there.
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