Who would journey from Khotan to Kashgar in a day must rise early and depart by starlight. The distance is more than 300 miles, and the road is often choked with sand from the Taklamakan Desert, the largest in China. Its name, ominous in the local Uighur language, means "You go in, you don't come out."
This sandy demi-ellipse in Xinjiang province is one of the loneliest stretches of the old Silk Road, a place that still seems unmapped and time-sprung, even in this age of global positioning satellites and space shuttle photography. Its remoteness, its strangeness are a falling away from the days when it was the first pathway of globalization, a thin sandy strand along which East and West met and melded.
Xinjiang is almost too far away, a region nearly three times the size of France, ringed by mountains on three sides: the Pamirs, the Kunlun range, the Karakoram. Among them are sub-ranges with epic names: the Mountains of Heaven (Tianshan), the Mountains of Gold (Altyn Tagh), the Mountains of Blinding Darkness (Quaranghu Tagh) and one wild stretch of the Pamirs known as the Khafa Gumbaz (Domes of Wrath).
It is an edge-of-the-world place, where the solid rule of China tatters and frays away into Islam and sand-buried ruins of ancient cities, windy and desolate. It is inhabited sparsely by the tough Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, who sullenly resent their Chinese overlords, as much now as they did 150 years ago. Afghanistan reaches a long finger up to touch it, through the Wakhan corridor, where the popular fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud defied all the tanks and helicopters of the Soviet Union and where he was assassinated last September 9.
The dusts here still yield swatches of ancient silk, which gave the Silk Road its name and purpose. Two thousand years ago the ancient Roman encyclopedist Gaius Plinius Secundus was the first to tell Europe of silk, which he said came from a faraway country to the east, beyond the wastes of Scythia, where the gentle, clever Seres lived. The Seres, Pliny wrote, made a mysterious and beautiful fabric from a kind of "wool" that grows on trees. They combed this wool from the leaves, soaked it in water and wove it into a marvelous thread, which was "sought with such manifold effort, from so far away across the world, all so that a woman may shine in public."
The old Silk Road ran from the shores of the Mediterranean, from the great trade depots of Antioch and Byzantium, across the heart of central Asia, to the ancient capital of China at Xian. Coins as old as the reign of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius have been found here, proving the trade route was in use by the second century. Not only silk, but glass, perfumes, incense, pepper, jade and ideas traveled along this lonely and often perilous path. Buddhist paintings and sculptures in lonely caves remain today, hostages to fortune, commissioned from the fourth century onward by merchants hoping for the favor of Heaven in making a safe trip.
Ubli the driver and his Nissan all-terrain vehicle stand ready to leave under pre-dawn constellations, outside the guesthouse in dusty Khotan, where the streets are unpaved, powdery traceries of wagon-wheel ruts.
A gulp of hot tea, and the trip starts. Ubli twists the long silver key in the Nissan's ignition switch, and we're off, traveling northwest. The pale sand of the desert reflects the scant light up, as if from counterfeit snow. The old road is empty at this early hour.
The Silk Road splits into two arms in westernmost China, running around the northern and southern rims of the Taklamakan Desert. Lately it is regaining some of its former danger and uncertainty, thanks to tension in Kashmir and the war in Afghanistan, whose northern border it brushes, on the way to Samarkand, Bukhara and Merv. The great Buddhist idols at Bamian, destroyed last year by the Taliban, lie to the west and south of the road, but were evidence of the power of Buddhism in centuries past. Buddhism was driven out of the region by militant Islam around a thousand years ago, and the destruction of the Buddhas was seen as unfinished business.
Peter Levi left a haunting description of the old giants in his 1972 book, The Light Garden of the Angel King. "The sun set exactly at the end of the valley, like a clear yellow liquid draining out of a pale blue sky. The valley was dusky and peaceful. Two heavily built Buddhas tower in niches in the northern cliff-face. Once they were red and gold, now they are the same clay as the cliff. They stare like tranquil magical robots at the snow and sky . . . There is a disturbing presence about these two giants that does express something."
A description of Bamian in its glory days in the fifth century comes from the pen of a Chinese pilgrim monk, Fa Hien, whose Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms is still extant. Fa Hien arrived here at the height of a five-year festival, in springtime:
"When this is to be held, the king requests the presence of the Sramans [monks] from all quarters of his kingdom. They come as if in clouds; and when they are all assembled, their place of session is grandly decorated. Silken streamers and canopies are hung out in it, and waterlilies in gold and silver are made and fixed up behind the places where the chief of them are to sit."
Most of the really spectacular archaeological finds--wall paintings, magnificent sculptures, a whole hidden library walled up in a cave since the 11th or 12th century, marvelously intact--were made on the northern arm of the Silk Road's ambit around the Taklamakan. Vanished towns, once fed by gla-cier melt then flowing from the surrounding mountains, have long since been buried by the scalloped sands.
It was probably the southern Kashgar-Khotan route that led Marco Polo east in the 13th century. If Polo were coming to China today, he would get no farther than Khotan. Eastward the road to Lop, Keriya and Charchen is closed to outlanders. A large laogai, or "reform through labor" prison camp, is situated near Lop, and the road thither is barred to the stranger.
One must go west from Khotan, passing through towns whose names stir the imagination: Moyu, Pishan, Khargilik, Yarkand, Yangi Hissar, Kizil, Kashgar. It is one of the rarest, strangest journeys in the world, across a cruel country, along a route that coasts the southern curve of the Taklamakan, over the Tarim River, which rises in the wild solitudes of Oprang, tumbling down from the high passes of the Karakoram (the Black Mountains), some of the most difficult and remote terrain on Earth.
By contrast the desert road is flat and, apart from the drouthy dust, easy to negotiate. Travelers of old have written fascinating accounts of this region, and it is uplifting to journey in that bygone company. Robert Shaw came in 1869 (Visits to High Tartary, Yarkand and Kashgar); Clarmont Percival Skrine lived in Kashgar for two years as British consul in the early 1920s (Chinese Central Asia); Lt. Col. Percy Etherton passed through perilous times in the early 1920s, when the region nearly fell under Soviet influence, as he described in his 1925 book, In the Heart of Asia; Peter Fleming (News from Tartary) and Ella Maillart (Forbidden Journey) came through in the troublous early 1930s. In 1900 and again in 1906 archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein used Khotan as his base to explore and excavate buried cities of the southern Taklamakan. His 1904 book, Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, is one of the rarest of all early travel and archaeology books.
In their footsteps come I, and this is an account of that journey, newer and less valuable than the old accounts in the books I have with me. Those early wayfarers came astride horses or astraddle donkeys, or on foot. Stein loaded camels with blocks of ice to melt for water in the desert, and took 36 days on horseback to cover the same journey in 1900, though he rested for 10 days along the way. Today the journey can be done by Land Rover in a day.
The modern world is crowding in on this stretch of the southern Silk Road. Television antennas rise beside mosques and minarets. Satellite dishes sit like inverted mushrooms on tall buildings at Khotan and Yarkand, and propeller planes and helicopters flit across the dreadful dunes of the Taklamakan in an hour or two.
But the older ways persist, too. Donkey carts far outnumber cars, and there are great donkey parking lots outside these villages on bazaar day. Sheep are everywhere, alive and woolly-white; or dead and turned all inside out, glistening guts atop gory fleeces. Down the poplar-lined oasis lanes trot big Bactrian camels whose shaggy pelts flop like rugs at every shuffling, splay-toed step.
At Pishan, across the desert at dawn the sunrise was muffled by dust, "the accursed dust haze," consul Skrine called it more than once, for he was an amateur photographer and it ruined many of his best pictures.
This morning the sun is a faint orange-white globe above the rolling duned horizon, orb over planetary orb, hung lamplike, so dim in the band of dust above this desert that it can easily be gazed at without blinking. This section of the southern Silk Road is reputed to be the coldest of all, and an old place nearby, Chulak Langar near Moyu, stands on a slight rise facing the desert, its name recalling a misfortune of long ago.
"Chulak" means "lame" and refers to a poor man who stumbled into a caravansary, a halting point here, many years ago with his arms and legs frostbitten. There, Skrine recounted, he remained for the rest of his life, a beggar until he died.
This desert route used to be divided up, not by miles, but by marches known as "tash," each four or five miles in length, and marked with stones. Stein mentioned wooden posts, driven at intervals along the road, as groping aids for travelers lost in sandstorms.
"Tash," means "stone." "Su tash," means "water stone," the local name for jade, the "jasper and chalcedony" mentioned by Marco Polo. It washes down in the snowmelt of spring from the Kunlun Mountains, whose mighty peaks Kongur and Mustagh Ata (Father of Ices) glitter on rare clear days.
The finest jade in China comes from two little rivers near Khotan, the Karakash and the Yurungkash (the River of Black Jade and the River of White Jade, respectively). It is still found today, white, black, yellow and all shades of green. It can be collected in an ingenious way: by walking barefoot through the river shallows and feeling the pebbles with the soles of the feet. Jade has a special, greasy touch to it and one variety is called "sheep's fat."
The sky gradually lightens to gray as one travels northwest. Near Wuji village the poplars give way to a gravel wasteland, as though millions of marbles had been trolled here by schoolboys, then forgotten. The road is empty, with a double line of power poles marching down either side. Ubli pushes the Nissan to 80 mph on flat stretches.
After about five hours' travel, we stop for gasoline at Pishan, and outside the station there is a stand selling liquor for Chinese drivers. Ubli, a faithful Muslim, does not drink, however.
"If you drink, you have no sense of decency or sin," he explains. "You may insult a woman. You may even forget there is a God."
Beyond Pishan there is a low line of dunes, faint gray, to the north and the desert looms away limitlessly: "Inexpressibly awe-inspiring and sinister," Skrine called it.
"The yellow dunes of the Takla Makan, like the giant waves of a petrified ocean, extend in countless myriads to a far horizon with here and there an extra large sand-hill, a king-dune as it were, towering above his fellows. They seem to clamour silently, those dunes, for travellers to engulf, for whole caravans to swallow up as they have swallowed up so many in the past."
The sands are everywhere, reddish, yellowish, grayish, a whole palette of dusty colors, talc-fine stuff, milled by millennial winds. You walk through it with floury little puffs underfoot. It drifts in scalloped dunes, with wavy lines of black where the heavier, granitic crystals come to rest. It sparkles where billions of tiny quartz flecks catch the pale sunlight.
The slightest breeze makes life very unpleasant. All starts to sift and blow, the finer stuff floating across the surface smokily. You feel a coolness between your toes, just as if you were walking barefoot, then a subtle, flickering rasp in the ears and nose, and finally the grit is in your mouth, so that your teeth grind and you start to cough, itchily and without real relief. Such was the weather yesterday, at Meirlike, near Khotan, and it was like drowning slowly.
This desert, said Shaw, is connected with "wonderful superstitions" dating from the period of the conversion of the oases to Islam, around 1000 A.D. "They say there once dwelt a heathen nation there, to whom went Jalla-ood-deen preaching Islam. They agreed to become Mussulmans if the saint could turn all their dwellings into gold. A few prayers and the thing was done. But now these infidels turned round on him and said, 'Old man, we have all we want; why should we be Mussulmans?' The holy man turned away, but, as he left them, the sand rose and overwhelmed them and their possessions."
Dunes are swallowing up telephone poles on one side of the road and must be thrust back periodically by bulldozers. Near here in 1923 Skrine saw a tiny place named Zawa being slowly devoured by the sands.
"One whole village we passed was in its death-throes," he wrote. "A spear-head of dunes from the north had pinned it against the barren foothills, and all the houses had been abandoned except two or three, to which the owners still clung pathetically though the sand was heaped right up to the roof . . ."
Between Luohe and Khargilik pigeons still roost and whirl among the poplars in the oases. Pigeons were far more abundant here a century ago. "If you sprinkle grain on the sand at the 'Kaptar Mazar,' or Pigeon Shrine of Qumrabat Padshahim (literally, My King's Castle in the Sand) in the desert between Goma and Khotan," Skrine wrote, "thousands of pigeons will stream out to meet you, a sort of Milky Way of pigeons, and the sound of their cooing and of their myriad wings is like the sea . . ."
"They are believed to be the offspring of a pair of doves which miraculously appeared from the heart of Imam Shakir Padshah, who died here in battle with the infidel, i.e. the Buddhists of Khotan," the more pedestrian Stein explained in 1900. The dead were too many to bury, and it was impossible to disentangle the bodies of the kafirs, or pagan Buddhists, from those of the shahid, or Muslim martyrs.
"Then at a prayer from one of the surviving Mussulmans, the bodies of those who had found martyrdom were miraculously collected on one side, and the doves came forth to mark the remains of the fallen leader. From gratitude, all travellers on the road offer food to the holy birds."
As I pass, the pigeons are far rarer. It is still early morning, hazy and half-lit by a sky of frosted glass, thanks to the high clouds of floating sand. Perhaps the birds are asleep; perhaps they are long dead, devoured by hungry people during the 1958-60 "Great Leap Forward," which brought terrible famine to China. But no whir of wings breaks the silence at Kaptar Mazar.
At the mention of burial customs, Ubli tells an amusing tale. He may be pulling my leg, but he seems sincere. The body is washed, he says, then shrouded in white. An earthen sepulcher is built in the form of a small house, sometimes with a door and windows. The body faces toward Mecca. It is toppled into the grave and if it falls face up, it means the deceased was a good man. If face down, he led an iniquitous life, and extra prayers are needed.
Such corpse-toppling may be permitted at Khotan, but when Muslims of Kashgar hear of it, they are shocked and say to me, hands fluttering expressively, that they lay their dead to rest with all gentleness.
A horse wearing a harness of scarlet wool tufts and jingling bells trots along, its breath fuming in the chill air. The Uighurs pilot their flat buckboards canoe-fashion, resting on their bent knees. One animal takes a curve too eagerly. His bearded master falls sideways off the buckboard in a flapping of wool and black boots, gets up and gives the beast an angry beating. Houses at Khargilik blur by, made of wattle and daub, with rock-based mud walls and awnings of dried grape leaves.
Shaw noted a gallows pricking up beyond the city walls of Khargilik in 1869. The gallows is long gone, and the walls with it. A single red lamp indicates the Gong An Bu, the Chinese public security bureau's office.
Stein found Khargilik a virtual paradise in 1900, an oasis of plenty in the midst of the dasht, or desert waste: "I shall always look back with pleasure to the short stay at Khargilik," he wrote. "There was nothing to remind me of the neighbourhood of the desert or the equal barrenness of the outer hills. As far as the eye could reach over the large plots of fields and gardens fertility and plenty reigned."
Consul Skrine had an ear for Uighur songs and proverbs and wrote many down in the early 1920s. Ubli recognized these as still current: Mushukni bir ishgha buiradem, mushuk quruqini buirade. "I gave an order to the cat, the cat gave the order to its tail." (The equivalent of our "passing the buck").
Yitkan malning sape altun. "The whip that's lost always had a golden handle."
Puli-barning gepe ong, puli-yoqning gepe tong. "A rich man's word is always right, a poor man's talk is always silly."
Adam uttuz, Khuda toqquz. "Man says 'Thirty,' God says 'Nine.' " (As our "Man proposes, God disposes.").
As Ubli talks, a truck with two basketball backboards trundles past. Signs of the West jar here; the cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, a glossy calendar showing the Las Vegas strip on a wall in an old restaurant, where Muslim graybeards eat noodles with mutton and drink strong, astringent, black gunpowder tea from bowls.
When Shaw approached Yarkand in 1869 he saw a walled city on a plain. The walls are broken open and torn down, though long stretches remain, gashed and powdery yellow. Yarkand has broad paved avenues today, though the donkey is the vehicle of choice. Roadside stands are filled with yellow apples and green raisins.
The biggest mosque in Yarkand is the Au Dun Misht. Two beautiful 19th-century tiled tombs stand behind it, like big snuffboxes with blue-and-white tiled sides, an elaborately carved wooden circular window, and crumbling minarets. Tombs are everywhere beneath the bare trees, and beside one a woman in a brown shawl is wailing and clawing the dusty sepulcher wall. Two dogs sleep in the sun on a terrace above her, unmoved by her grief. Her neck is swollen in a big bubble of brown skin: goiter. Goiter was pandemic here in the 1930s: Ella Maillart saw girls as young as 16 in Khotan afflicted with the hideous neck bubbles.
Here the spell of the old Silk Road is powerful, and every step, every tomb and arch and minaret, seems dry-carven from the surrounding desert, casting deep blue shadows on the yellow loess streets in the early afternoon. Uighur men in dark coats, turbans and long boots sit in the sun near the graveyard.
"They are tall and somewhat gaunt," wrote Shaw in 1869, "resembling the typical American as depicted in caricatures, or even portraits of the late President Lincoln. They have long-shaped faces, well-formed noses, and full beards."
The Chinese used to call Uighurs "chuan-tou," or "turban heads," into the 1940s--but rarely to their faces. In 1933 the Muslim population of Yarkand rose in revolt and slaughtered all 2,000 resident Chinese soldiers, bureaucrats, traders, men, women and children. A brief Muslim republic flourished for a few months, under a president named Sabit, with its capital at Kashgar. Short of paper, the government issued a curiously beautiful, soft currency made of red and blue woven and patterned cotton, specimens of which can be seen in the museum at Khotan.
In the bazaar at Yarkand, diners gather sociably in the open air on benches around a big pot full of translucent noodles and red spices, and tuck in, chatting to each other. Sheep are led along like pets on a rope leash, or are trussed up and bounce shaggily on buckboards to the butcher, completely unconcerned and awaiting their quietus from the quick knife.
In this bazaar in 1869, Shaw's servants reported a ghastly sight to him: a teenage girl with her hand amputated for theft, obliged to sit in the sun and display her bloody stump as a warning to others.
"She is compelled to sit in a public place with a bare arm, and, whether by compulsion or of her own free will, keeps no bandage on the wound," Shaw wrote. "To-day the heat had made it more painful than usual. For she had scraped together a heap of sand, which she had flooded with water, and into this she had thrust the stump for relief, as she lay on her side in the sun!"
Television antennas sprout up here, too, nowadays. A truck at a depot is unloading about 50 brand-new Chinese-made color TV sets, along with six Flying Pigeon bicycles. The May First Cinema is showing films from Taiwan.
Stein had an enjoyable time in Yarkand in the fall of 1900, shopping for exquisite brasswork and antiquities. He was invited to a formal banquet by the local Chinese governor and, despite fearing the "ordeal," had quite a nice meal. It is amusing to read that this god of archaeology, this man who brought back the richest spoils from the old Silk Road, including scrolls from a hidden library walled up for some 800 years in the caves of Dunhuang, this man who lost several toes to frostbite and who liked to read a 17th-century edition of the Roman poet Horace in the snowy solitudes of the high Pamirs--the great Stein couldn't master chopsticks:
"The dinner consisted of only 16 courses, and was duly absorbed within three hours . . . Having regard to my deficient training in the use of eating-sticks I was provided with a fork (never changed or cleaned) and a little bowl to eat from. As my host insisted on treating me personally to choice bits, a queer collection accumulated on this substitute for a plate."
Poplars line the road west out of Yarkand, and once again the cultivation yields to the desert--a very gravelly and rough desert this time, slashed with gullies and washes. Here and there are pinkish sands, standing out against the ashy gray. A low range of backlit mountains looms to the south, the Kunluns, ghostly in this westering light.
Across the waste dance white dust devils, furious and far off, sometimes three or four at a time. Some form wide conical spouts that rip up clods of earth and even small bushes from the desert floor. Others are delicate fumaroles, slender and pencil-shaped, focused aslant in a single spot, as though a subterranean boiler had sprung a leak and steam were escaping from the sand. For a few seconds they drill furiously at the desert and then, upon an instant, dissolve in a puff of air.
At Yangi Hissar, solitary gray dunes rise up smooth from the desert scrub. Alkali water leaves the earth white where it has evaporated. Crows peck horse droppings for undigested grain. "The sand-dunes seem to grow in height as we slowly approached," wrote Stein, passing this selfsame way a century before me, and seeing the same dry waste of sand and gravel. By 5 p.m. we are near Kashgar, and the roads approaching the city are flanked with poplars three deep. Black sheep fleeces are pegged to the earthen walls, drying in rows, resembling the skins of condemned criminals exposed to gratify the mob. This place was ruled from 1917 through much of the 1920s by the terrible Chinese general Ma Titai, who kept a chopper fashioned like a modern paper cutter to relieve thieves of their thumbs.
Lt. Col. Etherton paints a frightening image of him in In the Heart of Asia: "An unusual number of thefts in the Kashgar district caused him to round up all the suspects and known criminals. As a precautionary measure, to prevent their moving about freely and so getting into mischief, their ankles were slit, a knife being thrust through and the tendons cut. They were thus crippled for life and an effectual stop put to potential evil-doing, the warning also having its effect on other malefactors."
Islam is still so strong here in Kashgar that women walk about with brown shawls over their heads, like burqas, and the huge Id Kah mosque is one of the few in China that was never shut down, even in the harshest days of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. The Chinese simply didn't dare. The ultramarine light of evening hangs over the lonely city, said to be the most landlocked place on earth. Here, one is in the very heart of Asia. It is so far from Europe that, in the 1890s, British consul George Macartney was allowed two years' home leave, it being understood that it would take him nearly a year to reach England, and nearly another year to return to Kashgar.
The desert is passed, vanished as have vanished the insubstantial stories of treasures in its depths. "I was lost one evening in the Takla Makan," an old man told Skrine in 1923, "and had no water. Suddenly I saw before me great walls in the sand and a gateway in the midst of them. I passed through the gateway and found myself in the outer court of a huge yamen [magistrate's palace]. I went through more doors and courtyards and at last I entered a great hall which was full of treasure, gold and coral and pearls. But there was a huge tiger on guard there; flames issued from his mouth and I knew he was an evil spirit. I fainted from fear, and when I came to my senses I was among the sands, and there was no yamen. Next day I came upon the tracks of woodcutters and came home."
Kashgar, lonely Kashgar, seems Chicago, after the wastes of the desert and its little towns, strung behind like clay beads on a long dark string, lost in an Eastern evening. The journey is ended, the day gone. The sun, which seemed to hang motionless over the dusted horizon at Pishan, has sped faster than you and has departed the sky, leaving a deep blue winter dusk. A strange sense of emptiness lingers.
"I was among the sands, and there was no yamen . . ."
By Michael Browning
Sunday, June 23, 2002; Page W10