MARK LEONG/MATRIX FOR TIME Last gasp: Feeding the boiler of one of China's few remaining steam engines

Yang Shiku understands China's biggest endangered species better than just about anybody. As a kid he peered over Inner Mongolia's grassy horizon looking for signs of its telltale breathing. He listened at night for its rumbling migrations. In industrial school he studied its anatomy, and today Yang has reached the peak of his profession. The 29-year-old engineer drives Civilized Youth, one of the world's last active steam locomotives on the world's longest steam-driven main line run. Yet despite his lifelong obsession, Yang doesn't mourn that Civilized Youth will never see old age. Railway officials have ordered the country's final steam engines carved up for scrap, and Yang is already studying computers in hopes of realizing his new dream—piloting one of the high-speed trains he expects will zip above the landscape starting in the next decade. "I'll miss them," he says of the old workhorses, "but I'd rather drive a magnetic levitation line."

			C H I N A Photographs by LISE SARFATI

Ever pragmatic, Chinese just do not care that when their steam engines die, the steam era will die with it. Sure, you will still find steam engines ferrying Cuban sugarcane from plantations to mills, or toting steel across Eastern European foundries, or delighting kids on short tourist runs in Australia's Blue Mountains—but those are wheelbarrows with motors. "China is the last place in the world for big, mainline, fast-running, double-heading steam locomotives," says Chris Skow, founder of Trains Unlimited Tours. For 26 years Skow conducted freights between San Francisco and Salt Lake City and now runs steam-spotting tours to China—half as many as he used to, thanks to the critical shortage of steam engines.

Not that this bothers anybody here on the Inner Mongolian line, which Civilized Youth rides. The 950-kilometer track cutting through the grassland between the nothing cities of Jining and Tongliao still carries passengers under steam, and on a recent day, workers in a "hard seat" carriage, the lowest class, discussed the doomed engines. Where Americans see in steam the conquest of nature, the birth of a nation, and inspiration for a thousand songs, Gao Peixing sees "something from the old, weak days. Society is moving forward so there is little reason to keep these things around." He drove steam engines for 14 years. "If we want a metaphor for something long and strong," says another engineer, "we have the Great Wall."

			To Get Rich Is Always Glorious William T. Vollmann rides the Middle Kingdom's rails Sales Drive Pitching Consumerism in the new China Flameout The rise and coming demise of steam trains Making Tracks China's economic future may depend on its railways Brief Encounter Simon Winchester meets an exquisite stranger along the silk route Immigrant's Song On the Trans-Siberian express to a fresh life in a foreign land

At the head of the train, engineer Han Fumin gives a quick blast of the whistle and leans on the throttle. His blackened, greasy fireman begins shoveling coal from the tender—the fuel storage area—into the firebox and rarely stops. A third man keeps heaving at a metal bar that disappears into the floor. It dumps water into the boiler; neglect it and the front of the locomotive will blow 50 meters into the air. Everything runs off levers and knobs and pulleys; holds together with lug nuts and attaches to pipes that hiss and leak. Nothing beeps. When the engineer and his assistant jut their heads through open side windows to see the track ahead, coal cinders whip into their faces. Their bloodshot eyes tear. In tunnels, a lashing backwind fills the cab with soot. "My wife wants me to drive a diesel because I come home so crusty," Han shouts.

Han's locomotive, the QJ 6751, hauls a load of political history. It rolled out of the Datong Locomotive Works in 1984, four years before China stopped producing big steam engines. In the 1950s the Chinese modeled the first QJ off American designs obtained by the Russians. Back then, most locomotives were named Peace, but during the 1966-'76 Cultural Revolution, the railway ministry's thought police took the QJ series' counterrevolutionary lineage into account and renamed its engines Anti-Imperialism. The Russians came in for similar treatment. China changed the Russian model's name from Friendship to Anti-Revisionism after Khrushchev deviated from the party line and denounced Stalin. Since then the names have changed to Qian Jin and Jian She, meaning Progress and Reconstruction.

Xu Hongpei well remembers all those campaigns. As chief engineer of the Datong Locomotive Works for almost 40 years, he oversaw the construction of 5,571 steam engines. His favorite sits on a special track in the factory yard. Xu helped design the QJ 8001 to burn coal and its exhaust gas. His creation should have become the world's most efficient and powerful steam engine, but China produced exactly one before discontinuing all of them. Xu, who resigned as chief engineer the day his factory stopped making steam engines, stands in its cab and looks at the throttle that is rusted stuck. Xu is the rare Chinese who mourns the death of steam. "An electric train," he says, "is a maiden from the Yangtze basin, graceful and sweet. But a steam locomotive is a Shandong warrior." A warrior perhaps, but one that is dying a noble death.

Get the Magazine — Try 4 Issues Free!