Shadow of the Silk Road (10 page)

The immense doors unlock, and for an instant, looming in scented darkness, I glimpse the Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, like a vast doll squeezed into a cupboard. As the gilded features disclose themselves high above, a band of pilgrims pitch to the ground, not daring to lift their eyes again, murmuring long-learnt prayers.

I stare up through the fumes of floating candles and the stench of yak butter. The enormous face does not see me. Its heavy-lidded eyes are gazing unfathomably beyond. It is splashed with anemone lips and flanked by the long ears symbolic of wisdom. This passionless titan–far-focused, oracular–is how the Maitreya was anciently conceived. The last things are in his hands. At some unknown time–in ten thousand, a hundred thousand years–he will be reborn on earth to redeem all living beings.

But like the messiahs of another culture, he spawned sedition.
Peasant rebellions arose in his name, under leaders claiming to be the Maitreya reincarnate: men with fallible desires, and too-mortal destinies. In Tang times, it seems, this dangerous Indian deity was suppressed, to reappear centuries later as a fully Chinese domesticated godling: a fat, laughing hedonist swarming with little children. This ‘Laughing Buddha’ embodies a worldly ideal: a full stomach and many progeny. He squats in the doors of Chinese temples, and is the bane of curio shops. Here only the Tibetans remember the promise of his austere ancestor.

Beneath the temple the pilgrims at last clamber to their feet, sheathed in dust, and dare to gaze up at the Maitreya. Still standing, I feel nervously profane. But I see swathes of silk falling from golden shoulders and the coil of gold dragons on his crown. Behind him blossoms a mandorla of luminous intricacy, and eight Bodhisattvas circle the hall around him. Then the doors clang shut and the image is gone.

In the long Gansu corridor, curving to the end of the Great Wall, the air hung dim with the dust of the Gobi. Aeons ago the wind-borne loam had layered itself beneath the mountains in putty-coloured scarps, combed into vertical furrows and gashed by gullies. To the west the Qilian ranges, rising toward the plateaux of Tibet, glimmered through the haze in flanks of sallow stone.

Down this desolation glided a new highway. Eighteen years ago I had laboured this way in fierce cold on a train packed with Hui farmers. Now a sleek bus moved through the wilderness, and I sat among unkempt commercial travellers bellowing into mobile phones, while a conductress served mugs of hot water, and a kung fu film fluttered across a television overhead.

For millennia this passageway to central Asia had drawn nomadic tribes south-eastward into China’s heart, and funnelled merchants and armies the other way. It was chronically restless. In the nineteenth century the rebellious Hui, rising under Muslim banners, had been decimated by Chinese arms and hunger. The villages still looked poor and half populated under that colourless sky. Even their tiled roofs vanished; they became mud squares and rectangles, which crumbled like biscuit. Auburn mules tugged their ploughs through the dust.

For two hundred miles we pounded between derelict fields and gravel flood-beds, while on one side the hills flattened to desert and on the other the mountains lit up with snow and gleamed before us in a long, jagged blade of dimming light. I disembarked on to the empty highway, in a valley whose ends had blurred away, then
started along an embankment toward a town two miles across the fields. I had no idea what Yongchang was like: it had caught my curiosity for strange reasons. For all I knew it was off-limits to foreigners.

There was no one to be seen at first. Then beneath me I noticed a middle-aged peasant lying with his back propped against the dyke, masturbating. I went past in quiet some twenty yards behind and above him. I wondered what he was dreaming, or if he was dreaming at all: of the village beauty, perhaps, or a blonde fantasy from one of the porn movies that circulate in secret; or perhaps he was remembering his wife. But I went by fast, silently laughing a little, my feet noiseless on the track above, and did not look back.

An hour later I entered a neat country town, prospering mysteriously in the bleakness. People crossed the street to stare at me. Others burst out ‘Foreigner!’ in open shock. In my small hotel the Soviet system survived–of a guardian with keys on each floor; but mine was young and distracted, and kept peeping down from her window into the local secondary school, where the little emperors were playing netball. Outside stood a Ming dynasty bell tower, complete on a crossroad. But at the town’s southern end, heralding the rumours which had drawn me here, was the statue of a mandarin flanked by a Roman soldier and a Roman matron. They were chunky and weirdly characterless. The Romans had Chinese eyes, half Chinese dress. Only an inscription identified them.

They disclosed a strange story. In 53
BC
, when Rome was ruled by the triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and the Chinese empire was expanding under the Han dynasty, the boorish and avaricious Crassus, hunting for the military glory of his peers, marched an army of forty-five thousand against the West’s ancestral enemy, the Persian empire. But Persia no longer fielded the cumbrous phalanxes of its past. It had been overrun by a half-nomadic Parthian dynasty, whose elusive horsemen could fire a tempest of heavy arrows at full gallop. As the Romans started across the desert beyond the Euphrates, they were surrounded by a haze of cavalry. In an unnerving moment, while the air shook with a terrible reverberation of leather drums strung with bells, the Parthians unfurled banners of blinding gold-embroidered silk–a
stuff the Romans had never seen. Although the legionaries formed their traditional ‘tortoise’, converting themselves to a moving shell of locked shields and spears, the Parthian bolts pierced clean through their armour, sometimes nailing their arms to their shields, their feet to the ground. Through three long, hot days twenty thousand Romans died without getting to grips with the enemy. Others escaped back over the Euphrates. Crassus was killed–the Parthian king would fill his skull with gold–and the last exhausted ten thousand men surrendered.

According to Plutarch, these shattered soldiers were marched away to guard the eastern frontiers of Parthia as mercenaries. There they vanished. In 20
BC
, when Rome made peace and requested their repatriation, not a remnant could be found.

Two thousand years later they re-emerged in the imagination of an Oxford Sinologist, Homer Dubs. In Han dynasty annals he discovered the account of a Chinese battle against a Hunnish chief, seventeen years after the Roman disaster. The Chinese recorded in astonishment how a corps of elite soldiers had defended the gates of the Huns’ stockade with their shields locked in a curious fish-scale formation. After the Chinese victory, Dubs believed, these soldiers–the leftover veterans of Crassus–were among the handful captured; and around this time there appeared in Han records a little settlement named Lijian in the Gansu corridor. It was common practice for settlements to be named after those transferred there, and Lijian–a Chinese corruption of Alexandria, perhaps–was synonymous with the Roman empire. Soon afterwards, in mounting oddity, the place was briefly renamed Jielu, ‘Captives from the Storming’.

For years the notion was lost in the corridors of academe, then resurfaced for a moment in the enthusiasm of a Chinese scholar who died with his work unpublished. In 1993 some archaeologists, digging near Yongchang in the village of Zhelaizhai, the supposed site of Lijian, identified Roman-era walls. Stories began appearing in the local Chinese press. The people of Zhelaizhai were rumoured to have blond hair and blue eyes. They were very tall. They practised bull-worship. Two professors at Lanchou University argued the contending cases. Then the story faded again.

I found the tiny museum of Yongchang indefinitely closed; but someone went to fetch a caretaker they called ‘the redhead’, while I waited on the pavement in stirring apprehension. A few minutes later Song Guorong was shambling towards me along the street. He was instantly strange. A knee injury tilted his six-foot frame into a gangling limp and his hair curled to his shoulders in fox-red strands. His eyes were light almonds. When I shook his hand I saw that it was pale and reddish, like mine. As a crowd began to gather round us, I imagined his face perfectly European. Yet he was a local villager–awkward and shy–and his dialect put his speech beyond my comprehension.

A bystander turned his words into simplified Mandarin. He could not open the museum for me, he said. He had no power, he was just a clerk. But was it true, I asked, that the museum kept a two thousand-year-old helmet unearthed in the area? It was rumoured to be inscribed with the characters
zhao an
, ‘one of the surrendered’.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have seen it.’

Would soldiers have fought under such a legend?

‘We cannot show it. It is being restored.’

A soft-drinks vendor gave up her two chairs to us, and the crowd thickened. Guorong’s strangeness grew as he talked to me. In his long face–its skin more rosy than yellow–the eyes were deeper set than those around him. His heavy, high-bridged nose plunged to a loose mouth crammed with discoloured teeth. Yes, he said, there were others like him in the villages round about. Sometimes they were born fair, then went dark. He did not know why. But no, there were no traditions of their ancestry. It was all too long ago. ‘But look at him!’ He pointed to a friend, Luo Ying. ‘He was born in Zhelaizhai. That’s the place called Lijian. He was born right there.’

Ying looked dark and suave. But his face, too, was puzzling. The rosy complexion, the pointed features and aquiline nose might have been north Italian. He had curly hair, and under his arched brows the eyes shone light hazel. Compared to the smooth, yellow faces round us, which were smiling in perplexity, I imagined us three Europeans–our features different from one another’s, but different too from theirs.

Ying owned a decrepit three-wheeled taxi, and offered to take me to Zhelaizhai. He had left the village at the age of five, he said; his father had found life hopeless there. Guorong would not come with us. In parting, when I asked about his family, he said simply: ‘My people were Romans.’ Then he retreated into the crowd which now overflowed the pavement: the multitude of others in which he could never quite be lost.

Ying’s cab crashed over the fields. Once we crossed the motorway as it followed the Silk Road north-west: a new snake gleaming supernaturally between archaic villages. For ten miles we jolted along a gravel track over desert scarred by floods. Black-cloaked shepherds were grazing their sheep on the scrub. In front, the shadows of the Qilian mountains bloomed ashen on the sky.

Zhelaizhai was one of the poorest villages I had seen. It hedged us in a yellow blaze of walls. It was almost deserted, the houses half windowless, their doors locked. Many were in ruins. People owned just patches of corn or barley, Ying said, and a few had sheep. Nobody followed us as we inspected the ancient wall. Built of tamped earth ten feet high, it was incised with the scars of spades, where farmers had hacked at it for building material. Now it extended barely twenty yards, and was enclosed by a ceremonious chain, labelled ‘Lijian’. But once it had been formidable: in his youth, Ying said, it had risen three times higher and stretched for almost a hundred yards.

‘I remember the archaeologists coming. They told us how the Romans assembled wooden panels in sections and filled the spaces between with mud. That was how they built.’

In the village of his memory the children were often yellow-or red-haired. ‘But we never knew our history. Even now I only know what the archaeologists told us.’

When we tramped through the alleys there was no one he remembered, no one who greeted us. We heard only the whisper of an irrigation channel, and a few cocks bugled from the rooftops. A small brown-haired girl was digging in the dust. But her brother was black-haired, and the villagers who hovered to their doors were black-haired too. In this Chinese sea, it seemed, some rogue gene would surface out of the distant past, and stamp
its bearer with the mark of a world that had otherwise left no remembrance.

Ying walked buoyantly, glad that this destitution was no longer his. All around us, those who remained had stacked their hay in the gutted homes of those who had left, hoping for better times. Then we came to where the wall re-emerged and steepened, as if to a ruined acropolis. A crude Doric pavilion had been raised there by some local official, and was already cracking. In the rampart of compacted loam and rocks, a few ashlars–grey and pink regional stone–had been cut to frame a doorway or edge a palisade. Ying read out the inscription beneath: ‘Built by Romans, under the Chinese. They came to conquer the East, but lost heart.’

The Chinese must have looked on these barbarian campaigners with fascinated awe. Rome and China were so mutually ignorant that even a century later they mistook for one another the central Asian middlemen with whom they traded in dumb-show. It would be two hundred years before a Roman embassy from Antoninus Pius reached the confines of China.

As I examined the shapeless bastion, its few carved stones–painstaking, intimate–surprised me with faint sadness, so that I touched the faded chisel marks in a moment’s foolish communion, where the ageing legionaries of Crassus–my disbelief suspended–had come to rest at last, and built a rampart to hold their shrunken fellowship in place.

When I returned to my hotel, a phalanx of masked, white-coated men fanned out to meet me. The SARS virus had leapfrogged west to Lanzhou, bringing panic and bureaucracy. In the foyer, while passers-by crowded in to watch, I was inquisitioned about my itinerary, a thermometer stuck under my armpit and blood extracted from my earlobe by a nurse with a surreptitious needle. I might be quarantined, they said, if my temperature was up. After a while I was handed my haematology report, which I could not decipher, and a histogram whose graph featured a low, solitary hump, like the tomb of the Yellow Emperor. Then they all smiled, apologised, filled in their forms and departed. But I feared for my journey.

The desolation is palpable, of a land once watered, softer, now close to wilderness. Villages that once sustained themselves have shrunk inside their bleached walls, their people ageing, half their doors and windows bricked up. For two days Ying and I searched for farmers rumoured fair-skinned, red-haired, freakishly tall, while his collapsing taxi carried us down rutted tracks and over long-dry irrigation channels, the sluice gates raised uselessly above them. Often the only crops were the paper flowers from the graveyards, which had disintegrated and blown over the fields, to stick on shrubs in a wan blizzard. Sometimes we encountered a few grizzled shepherds in dusty pastures, where goats and sheep moved. They returned to ghost villages at night. It rained here less and less each year, they said, nobody knew why. Many had abandoned the region altogether, and gone to faraway towns. Those whom Ying remembered tall or fair had vanished too. His childhood friend Liu now lived who-knew-where; another friend was dead; and the red-headed Yan had emigrated to Xinjiang.

But in another hamlet we knocked at the courtyard gate of Wang Zhonghu. I was inured to disappointment by now, to friends gone and rumours petering out. So Wang’s face came as a chill shock. He had hazel-green eyes, and above his wide brows flowed curly cinnamon-coloured hair. Some subtle disposition of features–the receding mouth, tapering chin–reminded me of Westerners I knew, and this haunting expression continued to disrupt me from time to time, with the fantasy that he might break into English.

But his look of urbanity was a genetic fluke. His people were peasants, with black eyes and inscrutable dialects. They left us nervously alone. He was unemployed, barely twenty. His family courtyard was cluttered with washing and a broken walk-tractor. The main room showed a single bed, and a stove on a brick floor.