Divine intervention: China’s Tiantishan giant Buddha and a lucky meeting with a monk with a van

I have had a long, beautiful and occasionally rocky love affair with China. It has taught me many things, contributed the zaniest anecdotes in my storybook and dished out some of the biggest lessons and heartbreaks.

I started out studying Mandarin at university, and then worked for an extended period in small-town Zhejiang province as – what else? – an English teacher. For many years, I was the China editor at Lonely Planet, responsible for commissioning, editing and overseeing all of the travel guidebooks and digital content on North and Central Asia.

Back in 2016, LP’s China guidebook was due for an update, so I took a month-long leave from my desk in London to put my boots on the ground researching the Gansu province chapter. This wasn’t my first time working as an LP author, but this trip was a special return. Eleven years earlier, I had backpacked from Xian to Urumqi, travelling overland up the Hexi Corridor through Gansu and into Xinjiang.

Shaped like a gourd resting on the chicken’s back of China, Gansu is a wild and dusty place, and it was particularly so in the summer of 2005, when there were no high-speed trains. Earlier that year, Zhang Chunxian, then the minister of transport, had set forth an ambitious plan to build 85,000km of expressways connecting all China’s major cities and provincial capitals. But back then the only way to get from Jiayuguan to Dunhuang was an 11-hour bus journey along a dirt track next to which was being constructed a much bigger road – presumably the G30.

A decade later, my 2016 return trip would be by still-has-that-new-car-smell HSR trains, which would zip me around Gansu effortlessly and in no time at all.