On foot, by bike, by car

Getting around starts with walking, and to walk is 走 zǒu. Yet on ancient bronzes the character shows a man swinging his arms (夭) above a foot (止): he is running. That is what 走 means in classical Chinese, where you walked with 行 xíng, the drawing of a crossroads, and where 步 bù, two feet one in front of the other, was the step. When exactly the word slowed down, I could not say with any precision. But traces remain: in 走马观花 zǒu mǎ guān huā, the horse is not ambling, it is galloping, and all the rider sees of the flowers is a blur of colour ⟶ to skim over a subject. (The verb 走 itself is on the page Gestures and postures.)

To say you are going on foot, you say 走着去 zǒuzhe qù, “going there walking”, or 步行 bùxíng in writing. Beijingers have a version of their own, 腿着 tuǐzhe, “going there by legs”, which always raises a smile. The pedestrian is a 行人 xíngrén, “the man who goes”, and his great ordeal is to 过马路 guò mǎlù, cross the street. Chinese netizens have even coined 中国式过马路, “crossing Chinese-style”: 凑够一撮人就可以走了，和红绿灯无关, “once there are enough of you, off you go, the lights have nothing to do with it”. It is a joke, but not entirely (the lights and the zebra crossing are on the page The city and its neighbourhoods).

When you are lost, 迷路 mílù, you ask the way, 问路 wènlù, and expect to hear 往左拐 wǎng zuǒ guǎi or 往右拐 wǎng yòu guǎi, “turn left, turn right”. Be careful: in the North, and in Beijing above all, people will more readily answer 往东走 or 往北拐, “go east, turn north”. This is put down to the grid plan of the capital, laid out on the cardinal points. I do not know if that is the only reason, but the habit is very real, and baffling when you do not know where north is. Someone who gets lost everywhere is a 路痴 lùchī, “an idiot of the road”, in other words directionally challenged (sentence 21). 痴 means madness, but also passion: a 书痴 is someone mad about books.

Before 导航 dǎoháng, there were horses. The 韩非子 Hánfēizǐ tells how the army of Duke Huan of Qi, which had set out in spring against the kingdom of Guzhu, lost its way on the road home, in winter. The minister Guan Zhong had an old horse let loose, they followed the animal, and it found the road again (sentence 24). That is the origin of 老马识途 lǎo mǎ shí tú, “the old horse knows the way”, said of a man of experience. GPS has replaced the horse. The horse, for its part, never ran out of battery.

The bicycle is called 自行车 zìxíngchē, literally “the vehicle that goes by itself” ⟶ 自 oneself, 行 to go, 车 vehicle (you still have to pedal). I do not know who coined the word, but you can understand the astonishment at a machine that moves forward without a horse. And precisely: you do not drive it, you 骑 qí it, you ride it like a horse, and the character has 马 on the left. Anything you sit astride is 骑, the motorbike as well as the scooter. On the other hand, a car, a boat or a plane is 开 kāi, “opened”, in the sense of making a machine run: 开车 kāichē is to drive.

In the 1980s, China was “the kingdom of the bicycle”, 自行车王国. A 永久 “Forever” or 飞鸽 “Flying Pigeon” bike was among the things you dreamed of owning when you got married. Then cars took over everything, and the bicycle came back through the phone: around 2016 and 2017, 共享单车 gòngxiǎng dānchē, dockless shared bikes unlocked by scanning a code, multiplied so fast that some cities had to pile the surplus bikes on waste ground, the “bicycle graveyards”. The craze has died down. The bikes have stayed.

The real king of the street today is the 电动车 diàndòngchē, the electric two-wheeler, also called 电瓶车 diànpíngchē after its battery, 电瓶, “the electricity bottle”. There are several hundred million of them, and they have one flaw: you cannot hear them coming. In 2020 the police launched the 一盔一带 yì kuī yí dài campaign, “one helmet, one belt”: the 头盔 tóukuī for two-wheelers (sentence 17), the 安全带 ānquándài for cars (sentence 7).

The character 车 chē is a chariot seen from above: the body in the middle, the axle running through it and, on the ancient forms, the two wheels. The traditional 車 keeps the essentials. In Chinese chess, the piece bearing this character is read jū and moves like the rook. The car is a 汽车 qìchē, “steam chariot”. Be careful: in Japanese, the same 汽車 (kisha) means the train, the one with steam locomotives, and the car is called something else. One more false friend.

To drive, you need the 驾照 jiàzhào and have to go through the 驾校 jiàxiào. 驾 is 马 under 加 ⟶ harnessing the horse, and 驾驶 jiàshǐ has kept this sense of driving a team. The test is taken in four 科目, “subjects”; 科目二, the one with manoeuvres on a track, is notorious for its 倒车入库, “reversing into the garage”, which fails more than a few. Then you need a number plate: in Beijing it is drawn by lot, in Shanghai it is bought at auction, and in Beijing again, the car stays in the garage one day a week depending on the last digit of its 车牌 chēpái (sentence 20). Since 2011, finally, drink-driving has been a criminal offence. Hence the success of 代驾 dàijià, “driving in someone’s place”: after a well-lubricated dinner, you call a driver through an app, and he takes the car and its owner home. He arrives on a small folding scooter, which he stows in your boot (sentence 19).

Sayings, for their part, still travel by chariot. 南辕北辙 nán yuán běi zhé, “the shafts to the south, the ruts to the north”, comes from the 战国策: a man who wants to go to the kingdom of Chu, in the south, heads north while boasting of his horse, his money and his driver, without seeing that the better they are, the further away he gets. 前车之鉴 qián chē zhī jiàn is the chariot that overturned ahead of you and serves you as a lesson. Laozi reminds us that a journey of a thousand 里 begins with a single step (sentence 23, see the page Chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching), and Confucius tells a disciple who had become a prefect that 欲速则不达, “he who hurries does not get far” (sentence 25, see the page Chapter 13 of the Analects of Confucius). Good advice for the rush hour.

In everyday life, you 开夜车 kāi yèchē, “drive by night”, when you work or revise until morning without having touched a steering wheel; you 走弯路, “take the winding road”, when you go astray down a false trail; and someone who 开倒车, “drives in reverse”, wants to turn the clock back. Buses, the metro, trains, planes and taxis are waiting on the next page, “Public transport”. In the meantime, you will have to walk.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order appears stroke by stroke, with the arrow showing the direction of the line.