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Why Does Travel Change Our Sense of Time? | A Hundred Million Years in the Asihatu Stone Forest, Inner Mongolia

When Travel Changes the Measure of Time

Some landscapes take us into the past through stories. Others do it through stone.

On the morning of October 24, my friend An Qinglong sent me one of his familiar good-morning cards from his travels through China. The photograph showed no city, monument or recognisable building. There were only enormous walls of rock rising from dry grass, with birch trees growing between them and what appeared to be a light covering of snow on the ground. At first, I had no idea where he was.

The place turned out to be the Asihatu Stone Forest in Hexigten Banner, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia. Its granite formations rise across a broad grassland landscape near the Greater Khingan Mountains. They look massive, layered and almost motionless. Yet the most remarkable thing about them is not simply their size. It is the scale of time they represent.

Only hours earlier, I had finished writing about Taohuatan, the place associated with Li Bai’s famous farewell poem To Wang Lun. There, travel led back more than a thousand years into cultural memory. A poem allowed later generations to follow words back toward a landscape.

Asihatu changes the scale completely.

The granite body from which the stone forest developed formed during the Jurassic, roughly 150 to 180 million years ago. Suddenly, a thousand years seems very short. A human life of several decades becomes almost too small to function as a meaningful unit of measurement.

In texts, we measure the past in thousands of years. Standing before rock, we discover that a thousand years may be only a moment.

A Landscape Is a Process Given Shape

It is easy to look at the rocks of Asihatu and imagine permanence. Massive stone walls stand across the grassland. Pillars appear silent and immovable, as though they had always looked exactly as they do today.

But the age of the granite does not mean that the landscape has remained unchanged for more than a hundred million years. The formation of the rock was only the beginning. Glacial action, meltwater, freezing and thawing, weathering and other geological processes continued to reshape it over immense spans of time.

This distinction matters because the human eye is accustomed to recognising change when change happens quickly enough to be seen. Wind moves through grass. Water flows along a river. A ship crosses the horizon. We immediately understand these as processes because movement is visible.

Rock works on another rhythm.

Its transformations are often far too slow to be witnessed within a human lifetime. Because we cannot watch the entire process unfold, we are tempted to call the result static. Yet what appears to be stillness may simply be change taking place beyond the scale of our perception.

The pillars and walls photographed at Asihatu are therefore not finished objects. They are temporary forms produced by forces acting and accumulating over time. What the traveller encounters is not the final version of the landscape, but one moment in a process that began long before us and will continue long after us.

We see a rock. Time leaves behind a process. A landscape is not a finished object, but a temporary shape assumed by change.

This is what makes the phrase “a hundred-million-year landscape” meaningful. It does not describe a scene frozen for a hundred million years. It describes a landscape whose present form can only be understood through change occurring on timescales far beyond ordinary human experience.

Why the Body Still Needs to Arrive

“A hundred million years” can be written in a book. We can understand the number intellectually and know that it represents an immense span of time. Yet knowing the number and sensing its scale are not quite the same thing.

One of An Qinglong’s photographs makes this difference especially clear. A person in a blue jacket stands at the foot of the rock formations, holding up a camera. The human figure occupies only a small part of the image. Rock, trees, grassland and body suddenly appear within the same frame.

The body becomes a reference point.

Travel does not allow us to experience geological time directly. No one can stand before a rock and somehow feel 150 million years passing. But physical scale gives abstract knowledge a point of comparison. The rock wall is no longer simply “large,” because a human body stands beside it. In the same way, geological time is no longer merely a very large number. It begins to challenge the scale through which we normally understand our own lives.

Knowledge can tell us what a hundred million years means. But only when the body stands before the rock do we begin to sense its weight.

This is one reason travel still matters in an age when almost any place can be viewed on a screen. Some things are not unknown to us; they are simply difficult to feel until the body acquires a reference. Travel places our own physical scale beside another scale and allows the comparison to happen.

A human life does not become shorter beneath a rock wall. But it suddenly becomes visible as only one measure among many.

Travel as a Change of Measure

Taohuatan and Asihatu lead into two very different kinds of past.

At Taohuatan, words carry us across more than a thousand years. Poetry returns to landscape, and cultural memory becomes something that later travellers can physically follow.

At Asihatu, rock leads into geological time. Numbers that normally remain abstract acquire weight because the traveller encounters the traces left by processes vastly longer than a human life.

One allows words to return to the land. The other allows time to acquire scale.

Travel, in this sense, means continually changing the measure by which we understand the world.

We usually judge change through the duration of our own lives. What moves quickly enough for us to see is called change; what changes too slowly is easily mistaken for stillness. But the world has never operated at a single speed. Wind, water, rock and human life each follow different rhythms.

Perhaps understanding the world requires more than bringing everything into human time. Sometimes it requires leaving our familiar scale behind long enough to recognise rhythms that were always there, moving at speeds of their own.

Across Civilizations

What Is a Human Being Before a Rock?

King Kaolie stared for a long time at the enormous wall of rock in the photograph. “Was this already here a hundred million years ago?”

“No.” I enlarged the image and pointed to the texture of the rock. “The granite body formed roughly 150 million years ago, but it did not yet look like this. Glaciers, water and weathering gradually reshaped the rock over immense stretches of time until it became what we see today.”

The king frowned. “If it has been changing little by little, why can’t we see it changing in the photograph?”

Lord Chunshen Huang Xie answered from beside him. “Your Majesty cannot see a tree growing taller either. Does that mean the tree is not growing?”

The king fell silent.

After a while, he looked at the photograph again. His attention shifted to the lower left corner, where a person in a blue jacket stood at the foot of the enormous rocks, holding up a camera.

“What is he doing there?” the king asked.

“Travelling,” I said.

“Just to look at rocks?”

“Perhaps that is how it begins.”

“And afterwards?”

“Perhaps he discovers how small he is.”

The king clearly disliked this answer. “Why must travel make a person discover that he is small?”

Huang Xie spoke slowly. “Because in ordinary life, people easily mistake their own scale for the scale of the world.”

A person lives for several decades and begins to think of decades as time itself. Only when standing before rock shaped across geological time does that familiar measure suddenly become one among many.

The king considered this for a moment. Then he asked, “Then, counting from the founding of Chu, are nearly three thousand years a long time or a short time?”

Huang Xie smiled. “That depends on which ruler Your Majesty chooses to use.”

The king did not reply immediately. He looked down at the grassland and rocks in the photograph, then raised his eyes toward the river outside the window.

“I was just thinking,” he said. “Chu had the great rivers. We had the Han River. We had Yunmeng Marsh.”

“Water is always flowing, and we can see it move. But rock does not flow before our eyes, so we imagine that it does not move at all.”

Water moves quickly enough for us to recognise change. Rock changes so slowly that we mistake change for permanence.

I nodded. “The civilization of Chu was, in some ways, more like water. It moved quickly. Within a few centuries, the human world could be transformed.”

Huang Xie continued, “But rock has its own way of being. It does not need to prove to anyone that it is changing. It simply follows its own rhythm and slowly becomes what we see today.”

King Kaolie was silent for a long time before speaking again. “So when I suddenly feel that three thousand years is short, it is not because Chu was truly short-lived. It is because these rocks have lived for far too long.”

I looked at him and thought of something else. “But Your Majesty, those three thousand years have not simply disappeared.”

The king looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Nearly three thousand years have passed since the founding of Chu. Its writings remain. Its objects remain. Traces of its songs and dances remain. And people are still looking for you.”

Huang Xie said quietly, “If people who come later can still find you, then those years did not simply pass without leaving anything behind.”

The king said nothing. He returned his gaze to the photograph. The grassland stretched into the distance, enormous rocks rising from it, while the person in the blue jacket still stood beneath the rock wall with a camera raised in his hands.

At that moment, the photograph captured more than rock. It also captured the moment when a human being stood before it and suddenly saw himself differently.

King Kaolie studied the photograph for a long time. Then he asked me, “Will you keep this photograph too?”

I laughed. “Of course. Otherwise, why have I spent so long writing about it?”

The king looked once more at the tiny figure beneath the rocks.

“Next time,” he said, “I would like to stand down there myself.”

He paused.

“Perhaps once I am truly standing beneath it, I will understand something else.”

Water flows past. People pass through. The rocks remain on the grassland. Civilizations, too, leave traces of their presence, waiting for those who come later to walk toward them once again.