At just 19, Ying Xiaoyan has already attended four “funerals” — for buses.

The first was in May 2020, when a bus he’d taken for years was headed to the scrapyard in Hangzhou, eastern China. A driver mentioned it would be retired, and Ying boarded for one final ride, sitting in his usual seat up front.

Five years on, he still remembers the day. “It didn’t matter whether the bus was still in good shape,” he tells Sixth Tone. “I’d spent hours on it — chatting with the driver, tagging along different routes, riding just to ride. That’s what I remember.”

Another “funeral” ended in a dismantling yard on the outskirts of the city, where he stood and watched as his favorite vehicle was ripped apart.

“A clamp pins the body in place, then the hydraulic shears cut the A-pillars,” he says, gesturing with his hands to demonstrate. “The roof gets ripped open like a lid, and then the front is just torn off.”

Around him, discarded bumpers lay in piles. Ying picked out a rare one — a prototype made for a bus company’s bid, of which only a few were ever used — and took it home as a keepsake.

Many buses in China are retired with few noticing. A route is shortened, a model phased out, a vehicle quietly scrapped. But as new energy vehicle (NEV) fleets rapidly expand nationwide and older fossil fuel models are retired, often years ahead of schedule, a small but organized group of enthusiasts has begun documenting their disappearance.

They stay connected through internet forums, group chats, and social media threads, where they share route updates, model photos, and tips on upcoming retirements.

Simply known online as “bus fans,” they’ve developed a common set of rituals: joining final rides, organizing meetups, and recording the sound of an engine before it disappears — what some describe as the “heartbeat of an old friend.”

Echoes

Ying was drawn to buses early. Growing up in Hangzhou, he first learned to read Chinese characters by studying bus stop signs. In 2019, while taking a year off from school due to illness, he began riding farther into the countryside — buses bound for smaller towns and mountain roads.

As a teenager, he formed friendships with drivers that transcended age. Some invited him to play video games at rest stops. Once, when heavy snow stranded a route, a driver who lived nearby brought Ying home, gave him a meal, and waited with him until the weather cleared. Others invited him along for a bus’s final ride before retirement.

That’s why he almost always sat behind the driver, where conversations came easily: about schedules, mechanical issues, or how driver bonuses were calculated.

The noise of the city faded behind him. “Just the low hum of the engine,” he recalls, “mingled with barking dogs and crowing roosters in the countryside.”

Each model, each engine, even each maintenance schedule produced a slightly different sound. Some fans could tell them apart by ear.

“Buses are all going electric now, but to us, the roar of a diesel engine is pure romance,” says Ying. “It’s the sound many grew up with.” But today’s rides are nearly silent.

“No more engine noise,” he rues. “Just the da-da-da of the air conditioning.”

Backed by generous central government subsidies, pure electric buses began replacing traditional models across China in 2015. That year, the Ministry of Transport launched a five-year plan to bring public buses to every village. By 2018, Zhejiang — Ying’s home province — had already met the target ahead of schedule.

Despite working in a sales job entirely unrelated to transportation, Ying spent his free time photographing, tracking, and documenting retired buses. Online, he came across others doing the same — part of a loose network of self-described “bus fans” from all walks of life.

He connected with much older fans through forums and group chats, where they share route information, model photos, and even internal documents from bus companies. Occasionally, he joins them for meetups to ride a bus one last time.

One of them is 46-year-old Ye Ming, a graphic designer from the southwestern Sichuan province. His interest in trolleybuses dates back to childhood. Around age 10, on his first visit from a mountain town to the provincial capital of Chengdu, his father took him aboard a trolleybus.

“Why does this bus have two poles sticking out?” he asked.

“Because it’s different. It runs on electricity,” his father had said.

That ride stayed with Ye. And the trolleybus came to represent not just his first glimpse of the city, but also the beauty of order: overhead wires running in perfect parallel, crisscrossing at intersections like a grid drawn into the sky.

But in the 1990s, trolleybuses were being phased out across the country, dismissed as inflexible and visually messy. Chengdu decommissioned its fleet in 1996.

The following year, as Ye prepared to enter university, he chose to study in nearby Chongqing — one of the few cities where trolleybuses still ran. He brought a film camera to document them. And in 2004, Chongqing shut down its final line too.

“When they disappeared, it felt like all my emotional anchors were gone,” says Ye. “Everything I loved just ended abruptly.” For years afterward, he didn’t pick up his camera again.

“Buses are part of a city’s history,” says Wu Haoxiang, a software engineer in his 20s from Shanghai, who collects tickets and scale models of his favorite vehicles. “Remembering them is a way of holding on to the past.”

Both Wu and Ye explain that trolleybuses once played a key role in coal mining regions, transporting workers to and from remote sites. Wu visited six of the last remaining coalfield lines between 2015 and 2016. Today, only one remains.

On rare occasions, fans have managed to preserve buses as living systems. Wu grew up in Shanghai, home to the world’s longest continuously operating trolleybus network, launched in 1914.

By 2013, the city had gone six years without buying new trolleybuses, fueling speculation that the system would be retired. Still in high school, Wu and a group of fans launched a campaign to save them — compiling research, writing public appeals, and even contacting members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, China’s top political advisory body.

“We tried to emphasize the cultural value of trolleybuses,” says Wu. “They’re part of Shanghai’s visual identity. Think of the city, and you think of the trolleybus.”

“I don’t know how much of a difference we really made,” he adds, “but in the end, the system survived.”

To preserve what they can, fans have developed their own form of documentation: “portrait-style” photos of buses taken at a precise 45-degree angle, often with long lenses to reduce distortion. Wu has taken more than 12,000 such shots. Ying, too, has photographed hundreds.

Hard drive

In April, a post on lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, known globally as RedNote, brought unexpected attention to China’s bus fan community. 

It read: “Someone just got on (the bus) and went straight to the back row. No idea what they’re doing — does anyone know?” The photo showed a passenger pointing a small black device at the floor.

It was just a microphone.

“I’m a (bus) fan. I was recording the engine. This bus is in its final year. It’ll be scrapped soon,” one user replied, claiming to be the person in the photo. She said a friend had seen the post and sent it to her.

Her comment received more than 11,000 likes. One user wrote: “It’s like listening to the heartbeat of a 60-year-old… nothing more than poetic impulse.”

“If you think in terms of progress,” says Ye, “this is just part of history, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. One day, buses were still shaping history. Next, they became history themselves.”

But back in early 2017, a similar fate had begun to befall the fan community itself. That year, 52Bus, China’s largest online discussion platform for bus enthusiasts once boasting around 40,000 members, shut down.

So the following year, Wu started building something to replace it.

He launched Buspedia, a digital archive where users can upload bus portraits, track model retirements, and preserve route histories. The platform now has more than 10,000 registered users and over 2,000 active contributors.

In recent years, Ye too began building a personal archive. Using translation software to study the history of trolleybus systems in the former Soviet Union, Czech Republic, Hungary, and beyond, he compiled tens of thousands of words and hundreds of images into long-form posts.

Within the fan community, he became known as the “archive master.”

“If you send me a photo of a trolleybus, I can probably tell you the city it came from,” says Ye. “But the truth is, I’ve never even left the country. My passport is still blank.”

When one of Chongqing’s last trolleybus lines shut down, Ye and a few other fans watched tow trucks arrive to haul the vehicles away. The CNG (compressed natural gas) replacements were already parked nearby.

With the driver’s permission, they climbed into one of their favorite trolleybuses and rode with it to the graveyard — a fenced lot where decommissioned vehicles waited to be scrapped.

“There was sadness, a kind of quiet melancholy,” Ye said. “But mostly, it was that powerless feeling. In a fast-moving country like ours, you never know (when the next phase will arrive).”

Back in Hangzhou, Ying still recalls a farewell in 2023, when he joined more than 20 fans to say goodbye to a plug-in hybrid. The route had already been discontinued, but they printed out maps and called the ride a “return to birthplace.”

Nicknamed “Postal Green,” its deep green paint resembling that of China Post vehicles, the group decided to print a custom placard with a photo of the bus, its model, and the caption: “Special Service — Postal Green Plug-in Hybrid Bus.”

They posed for a group photo. Ying stood in the center, holding the sign. His friend filmed the last pass through familiar streets. Ying took a final portrait of the driver, standing beside the bus.

That model had been among the country’s earliest hybrids.

“Its retirement marked the end of the first chapter of China’s new energy buses,” Ying said. “Now, the electric era has fully begun.”

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image:  Trolleybuses on Nanjing Road, Shanghai, May 1987. Jean-Marc Charles/Gamma-Rapho via VCG)