IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 293

For more than two and a half centuries the Tōkaidō was the busiest highway in Japan. Its name means 'the eastern sea road', and it ran for some five hundred kilometres along the Pacific coast between Edo, the city we now call Tokyo, and Kyoto, the old imperial capital. Along this route the Tokugawa shoguns moved officials and tax grain, merchants carried tea, salt and cotton, and pilgrims walked for weeks to reach the great shrine at Ise. No other road in the country carried so much traffic.

The road was the creation of the Tokugawa family, who took power in 1600 and governed Japan until 1868. To control the country they developed a network of five officially maintained routes radiating from Nihonbashi, the bridge at the centre of Edo from which all distances were measured. The Tōkaidō was the most important of the five, because it linked the shogun's capital with the court of the emperor, who retained a largely ceremonial role in Kyoto. Post stations were established at regular intervals, and by the early seventeenth century the route had taken the form it was to keep for two hundred years.

All travel on the road was organised around the post station, or shukuba. Between Shinagawa, just outside Edo, and Ōtsu, near Kyoto, there were fifty-three of them. Each station was required to keep horses and porters available for official travellers, and each offered two kinds of accommodation: the honjin, a house reserved for daimyo and senior officials, and the hatago, where everyone else could find food and a bed. Smaller settlements grew up between the stations, selling tea, tobacco, straw sandals and, according to many travellers' accounts, a good deal more besides.

The volume of traffic owed much to a single rule. From 1635 the shogunate required every daimyo, or regional lord, to spend alternate years in Edo and to leave his wife and children there permanently. This system, known as sankin kōtai, or alternate attendance, was designed to keep the lords loyal and to drain their finances. Its effect on the Tōkaidō was enormous. Each year processions of lords, retainers, servants and baggage moved in both directions, sometimes hundreds of people at a time, and the stations were obliged to supply them with horses and men. This duty was so demanding that many station communities found it ruinous.

The shogunate also controlled movement along the road through barrier stations, of which the most famous were at Hakone and Arai. Travellers had to show permits explaining who they were and why they were travelling. The barriers had a particular purpose, summed up in a phrase that historians often translate as 'guns in, women out': inspectors were ordered to stop firearms from entering Edo and to prevent the wives and daughters of daimyo from leaving it. The checkpoints also gave the authorities a means of watching anyone whose movements seemed suspicious.

Most people on the road went on foot, and many covered twenty-five or thirty kilometres in a day. Wealthier travellers rode in a kago, an open palanquin carried by two or four bearers, or in a norimono, a heavier enclosed litter used by lords and high-ranking families. Because Japan had few road bridges and many rivers, travellers were often carried across on the shoulders of ferrymen or, at the wider crossings, on horses. Printed guides listed the stations, the distances and the costs, and an elaborate tourist industry grew up to serve the crowds.

Not all of these travellers were merchants or officials. Large numbers were pilgrims, above all those making their way to the shrine at Ise, and in some years the roads filled with people who had simply left their homes and set off. The comic travelogue Shank's Mare, written by Jippensha Ikku in the early nineteenth century, followed two feckless travellers along the Tōkaidō and became one of the most popular books of the period.

Goods moved in enormous quantities. Salt from the coast, tea from the hills, cotton cloth, paper and sake from the brewing districts around Osaka travelled east to feed the shogun's capital, which by the eighteenth century was among the largest cities in the world. Historians often point out that the road carried ideas as well as cargo: fashions in clothing, printing and speech spread along it faster than anywhere else in Japan.

The road's most enduring memorial is a series of woodblock prints. In 1833 and 1834 the artist Utagawa Hiroshige published the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a set of fifty-five designs covering the journey from Nihonbashi to Kyoto. Hiroshige is generally said to have travelled the road himself in 1832, perhaps in the entourage of an official delegation, although the prints show a good deal of artistic invention alongside direct observation. The series was enormously successful and was followed by many imitations and by further sets from Hiroshige and other artists.

The old order ended quickly. The Tokugawa regime fell in 1868, the barriers were removed, and the new Meiji government looked to railways rather than roads. The line from Tokyo to Yokohama opened in 1872, and by 1889 trains were running from Tokyo as far as Kobe, along a route that followed much of the coast road. Coaching and carrying declined, the post stations lost their official functions, and many of the honjin became private houses, schools or museums. Modern Highway Route 1 now runs beside the old road for much of its length.

Before the railways, anyone in Britain who needed to travel any distance had little choice but to take a coach, and the coach depended absolutely on the inn. The vehicles themselves were not especially swift or comfortable. What made regular long-distance travel possible was a chain of inns along each route, each of which kept horses ready for the next stage of the journey. An inn that failed to provide sound animals on time could delay every coach on the road behind it, and a landlord who lost his reputation for good horses lost his trade. Coaching was a business of small margins and strict timing.

Roads were paid for by the people who used them. Turnpike trusts, local bodies created by Act of Parliament, took responsibility for maintaining a stretch of highway and were allowed to charge travellers at gates placed across it, using the money to repair and widen the surface. The first trust was set up in the seventeenth century, and by the 1830s there were more than a thousand of them. Their record was mixed. Some stretches were drained and resurfaced with layers of broken stone, following methods associated with the Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam; others were scarcely better than the mud tracks they had replaced.

The distance between inns varied, but on the busier routes a coach could expect to change horses every ten miles or so. At each stop the team was replaced within minutes by ostlers, who led the tired animals to the stable and brought out fresh ones. Feeding and housing several dozen horses was expensive, and it was the income from this trade, rather than from drink or beds, that made a coaching inn profitable. Landlords therefore competed to secure the contracts, and the arrival of a coach was the central event of the day in a small town.

The most famous of all coach services began with a complaint. In the 1780s a theatre proprietor from Bath named John Palmer argued that the Post Office's mail was travelling too slowly, and in 1784 his scheme was tried on the road between Bristol and London. Thereafter the mail went by coach, day and night, carrying a guard who was armed with a blunderbuss and instructed to defend the bags. Mail coaches were given priority at toll gates, and the guard used a horn to warn of their approach. Attempts to rob the mail were not unknown, and the guards were expected to use their weapons if they had to.

Inside the coach there was room for four, sometimes six, passengers, who sat in a confined space and paid the highest fare. Those who paid less rode on the roof, exposed to rain, soot and cold, and were expected to get down and walk when the coach climbed a steep hill. Contemporary letters complain constantly about overcrowding and about coachmen who took corners at reckless speed. Yet the improvement in journey times was real: a distance that had taken two or three days in the middle of the eighteenth century could be covered in a single long day by the 1830s.

The inn itself was a complex building. A wide archway allowed the coach to drive into a courtyard, where passengers could descend under cover; stables and a blacksmith's forge stood at the back, and the upper floors held bedrooms. Because the landlord usually brewed his own beer and kept a farm, the business was far more varied than that of a modern hotel. Many coaching inns still stand, and their wide first-floor windows, designed so that people inside could watch the road, are one of the few features that later alterations have generally spared.

Inns were more than places in which to change horses. Many also housed the local post office, and most were where newspapers were read aloud and travellers exchanged news. For people who seldom left their own parish, the arrival of a coach was often the first contact they had with the wider world.

The coaching era has left an unusually rich paper trail: road books and timetables, contracts for carrying the mail, and the ledgers in which innkeepers recorded every horse hired and every bed let. Advertised times, however, must be treated with caution, since they were printed to attract custom and did not allow for bad weather, breakdowns or the state of the road. Surviving buildings are evidence of another kind, though most have been altered, extended or converted to other uses. Together these sources allow historians to describe the system in detail, but they say much less about what the experience of travel actually felt like for most people.

The end came quickly. The first passenger railway opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, and within two decades the trunk routes had taken most long-distance traffic from the roads. Services shrank, inns lost their coaching custom, and many landlords turned to serving the new railway stations or gave up altogether. Historians disagree about what the coaching age had achieved. Some argue that the turnpike roads represented a genuine revolution in land transport; others contend that improvements were patchy, concentrated on a few major routes, and that the real break with the past came with the railway. What is not in dispute is that, for a few decades, the inn and the coach together made regular travel possible on a scale Britain had never seen.

History has never been the property of universities alone. In Britain, local historical societies, family historians and archaeological volunteers together outnumber professional historians many times over, and metal-detector users alone report thousands of finds each year. A great deal of what is discovered about the past is therefore found, recorded and discussed by people who have never been trained for it. The question is not whether amateurs should be involved, since they already are, but on what terms their work should be accepted.

The case for welcoming them is straightforward. Much of the most patient work of history — transcribing registers, indexing returns, cataloguing finds, measuring buildings — requires more time than money. Volunteers have completed tasks that would have occupied a small professional staff for decades. They have also made archives usable that were previously closed in all but name. The antiquarian tradition of the nineteenth century, out of which many university departments later grew, was itself largely an amateur enterprise.

Amateur discovery has also produced finds of national importance. The Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found in England, was unearthed in 2009 by a man searching a field with a metal detector. In England and Wales the Portable Antiquities Scheme now exists so that such finds can be recorded voluntarily rather than lost, and many archaeologists acknowledge that without the cooperation of finders a substantial proportion of the material recovered each year would pass into private collections and be lost to study.

Family historians form a category of their own. Millions of people now research their ancestors online, and their work has made some record sets far better indexed than they would otherwise be. It has also generated a good deal of unreliable genealogy, copied from one website to another without checks. Both facts are worth keeping in view.

The contributions amateurs make are of different kinds, and it is worth distinguishing them. Gathering and recording data is one thing; interpreting it is another. A volunteer who transcribes a shipping log, or who describes a button recovered from a field, is producing a resource that scholars can use. Whether the resulting pattern means anything — whether the button is Roman or Victorian, whether the log reveals an unusual storm — is a further question, and answering it depends on a body of knowledge that takes years to acquire.

Here the case against equality begins. Critics of amateur involvement point out that enthusiasm is not the same as competence. An object dug from the ground without a record of its position has lost much of its meaning, because context — what lay beside it, at what depth, in which layer of soil — is often more informative than the object itself. Unrecorded excavation destroys evidence that can never be recovered, and the damage is often done by people who genuinely believe they are doing no harm. Detector users who dig without permission are the most obvious example, but they are not the only one.

A second complaint concerns interpretation. The past is not a collection of facts waiting to be assembled; it is argued about, and the arguments depend on comparison, theory and familiarity with a large scholarly literature. This is not a question of intelligence but of training, and it explains why a plausible-sounding local claim can be entirely wrong. Historians who spend their lives on a period still make mistakes; those with a weekend's reading should not be surprised to make more.

Defenders of amateur history reply that this argument is sometimes a disguise for something else. Every profession defines who may speak with authority, and the border between expertise and elitism is not always drawn for purely intellectual reasons. The retired teacher who has read every surviving document about a town may know far more about it than a specialist who has visited twice. Academic historians, under pressure to publish and to win grants, also have interests of their own to protect.

My own view is that societies should welcome amateurs generously, but that they should be clear about the sense in which amateurs are equals. They are equals as members and as partners in a shared enterprise, and their knowledge of a locality may be unrivalled. They are not equals in evidence, because evidence does not care who collects it. A recording made carefully by a volunteer is worth as much as one made by a professor. A confident interpretation offered without evidence, by contrast, is worth nothing, whoever offers it.

The practical answer follows from this. Amateur contributions work best when tasks are well defined, standards are explicit and results are checked. Recording, transcription and surveying fit this description, and so does the reporting of finds to a scheme that will publish them. Societies that run training days, open their archives and treat local knowledge with respect get far more from their volunteers than those that keep the field to themselves. What is needed is not less expertise but more of it, spread more widely.

None of this supports a simple demand that amateurs be treated as equals in every respect. It supports something more useful: a partnership in which the amateur's time and local knowledge and the professional's training are each valued for what they can contribute, and in which the final test of any claim is not who makes it but what evidence stands behind it, and who is prepared to check it.