At the turn of the year in 2018, I found myself driving along the ancient Tea Road by Lake Baikal. （The Sino-Russian Tea Road, or "Wan Li Cha Dao" (Tea Road with 10,000 miles), was a 13,000-km-long 17th–20th century trade route connecting Wuyi Mountain in China’s Fujian province to Moscow/St. Petersburg via Mongolia. It served as a major commercial artery for exporting Chinese tea and other goods to Europe. ）In the depths of winter, at minus thirty degrees Celsius, the frozen world held a peculiar allure for someone like me from the south. In the distance stood lonely, resilient mountain ranges; deep blue lakes; faintly visible roads buried under snow; and aurora-tinted nights that felt almost hallucinatory.

My flight to Irkutsk transferred through Beijing. At 11:30 p.m., the air there was still thick with smog, and the airport looked much the same as it always had. Minus five degrees in Beijing was just enough for me to sense the cold piercing my skin. The airport at night was quieter than during the day, so quiet that every boarding announcement sounded unusually clear—detached, unpersuasive, as if making no attempt to hold anyone back. Different destinations briefly gathered people together, only to scatter them again moments later.

I imagined that soon I would be surrounded by all kinds of dialects and languages. Closing my eyes among strangers, I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to sleep—but it didn’t really matter. Those who choose to set out rarely worry about exhaustion. The cost of wanting to understand the world, beyond money, is paid with one’s own body. Train it enough, and it toughens up.

To reach Lake Baikal, one must first land in the nearest city—Irkutsk. The flight from Beijing departs at 5:30 a.m. and takes about three hours, with no time difference.

The Russian spoken by the airport taxi driver felt mysterious and impenetrable; we communicated through gestures and the meter. The car was a Honda, with a few Japanese flyers stuck to the rear window. There was a scar on the back of the driver’s hand, but his face was handsome and delicate. When we passed a museum, he raised that hand and insisted I photograph it. Wandering through this old city on the Sino-Russian Tea Road felt a bit like stepping into a Coen brothers’ Fargo: white snow, green, brown, and pale yellow wooden houses, tall desolate trees, and exhaust trails stretching long behind passing cars. Snow on the roads had been shoveled to the sides and piled high.

On Karl Marx Street, every few lampposts were fitted with small loudspeakers playing music with a distinctly socialist flavor from the 1990s. Old trams rolled by slowly. A group of young people skated at an outdoor rink—clear routes, steady speed, strong legs—quiet, at ease. On the streets, people had half their faces buried in fur coats and heavy overcoats. Only when women occasionally brushed back their hair or removed their gloves could you catch a glimpse of delicate, ornate gold jewelry. Their bright red lipstick and heavy perfume stayed with me. Their expressionless faces carried a kind of mechanical silence that felt strangely familiar.

By chance, I passed through a market where people were selling frozen seafood—different kinds of sea fish, stiff and enormous, laid bare in the open air. They looked like the people here themselves, tightly wrapped by history and cold.

The city is embraced by the Angara River. At its heart lies Kirov Square, where a giant Christmas tree stood. Children were playing on tall slides, some made entirely of ice. They shouted and ran, seemingly oblivious to the cold. This was a playground belonging only to northern children—one that children from the south could never have. Walking north from the square brings you to the Lenin Monument, and further north, several Orthodox churches in different styles.

The next day, I set off for Lake Baikal. The drive from Irkutsk to Olkhon Island takes about six hours. Olkhon lies at the center of the lake, and Khuzhir, its main village, is home to around 1,500 people. Along the way, we stopped twice. The first stop was at a rest area by the roadside, with only a few wooden houses and very little traffic. The two-lane road stretched straight ahead, seemingly without end.

Smoke rose from some of the houses, dancing wildly in the wind. A few homes glowed brighter than others. In the distance, an occasional bark of a dog broke the silence. Otherwise, the only sound in the world was the crunch of footsteps on snow—hard, brittle, crisp. Far away, hazy gray mountains loomed, and beneath them lay the lake.

Lake Baikal naturally divides the route into northern and southern passages, accessible only by car. Along the way there are no toilets, no restaurants. The southern mountains display a gentler variety of scenery, with patches of blue ice interspersed among them. By February, the blue ice becomes deeper, more intense in color. The northern landscapes are wilder and more vast, with large expanses of icicles, rime frost, and fierce, biting winds. Cars often climb and descend slopes at angles approaching ninety degrees.

At the coldest moment of this ancient terminus of the Shanxi merchants’ camel caravans, snow-covered vehicles have replaced the tea-bearing camels, yet the grandeur of nature remains unchanged. A thermos of tea, a bowl of firewood-cooked fish soup made by the driver himself, and a piece of hard bread awakened a strange sense of time—both distant and immediate at once.