A New Oriental Sleeper Train Will Retrace Xu Xiake's Footsteps
A new overnight tourist train will leave Beijing in December, and its name is a small history lesson. The “New Oriental · Xiake” service is a joint project between the railway operator’s Beijing bureau and New Oriental Cultural Tourism, the travel arm of the education group. It is billed as the first comfort-class tourist train to depart from the capital, and the first that New Oriental has invested in and run itself.
The name comes from Xu Xiake, the Ming dynasty geographer and traveler who spent three decades walking across China in the 1600s and left behind a travel diary that is still read today. His famous line, roughly, is that a true man should see the blue sea in the morning and the grey hills by evening. Xu set out from his home near Jiangyin, in today’s Jiangsu province, at 22, and kept going for most of his life.
The train is not aimed at backpackers. Comfort-class tourist trains in China generally mean refurbished sleeper carriages with private compartments, a dining car and lounge space, sold as a package with stops along the route rather than as simple transport. Details of the itinerary and fares have not been announced, but the December launch places it squarely in the winter travel season.
For New Oriental, the move is another step away from its classroom business. The company has been building a travel division that runs study tours, cultural trips and packaged holidays, and an owned train gives it a product competitors cannot easily copy. For the railway side, themed trains are a way to sell seats and beds that would otherwise sit empty outside holiday peaks.
The timing is telling. Chinese travelers have spent the past two years gravitating toward slower, more curated trips — smaller cities, longer stays, and journeys where the transport is part of the experience. A sleeper train with a literary name fits that mood neatly: it sells the idea of the road as much as the destination.
Xu Xiake’s own journeys were mostly on foot and often miserable, through mountains and river gorges with poor maps and worse weather. The train version will be considerably softer. But the appeal is the same instinct — the sense that crossing a country slowly is worth something in itself.
What to watch is whether the model repeats. Tourist trains have proliferated in China in recent years, from panda-themed services in Sichuan to routes aimed at photographers chasing autumn leaves. If a Beijing-based luxury sleeper sells out its first winter season, expect more operators to pair a heritage name with a rolling hotel.