Shadow of the Silk Road (11 page)

‘I don’t know why I look like this.’ He was alert, eager. He wanted us to explain him to himself. ‘In this village I’m the only one who has this face. It’s odd. My eyes are blue’–he thought them so–‘I believe they were inherited from long ago.’ He gazed at me in delight. ‘And we both have big noses!’

Later he brought in bowls of noodles and spiced cucumber, the
limit of their food. He said simply: ‘We are peasants. Our harvest is very little. We have barley…and some sheep. I’m sorry.’

As he sucked in his noodles with famished relish, I could not help wondering if his ancestors had not lived differently. Had some sturdy forefather marched into the Syrian desert and seen the silk standards unfurling over those terrible horsemen? I stared into his strange eyes, which glittered palely back. For all I knew, his predecessors had banqueted with Caesar on the Palatine Hill, or marvelled at the oratory of Cicero. But behind his head the window-frames were rotting, their shredded curtains dangling from a string, and the last mounds of cucumber were now dissolving into his mouth.

‘My father’s dead,’ he said. ‘But I look like my uncle. His eyes and face were like mine…like yours…pale…’ He pointed to a group photograph on the wall: his uncle taller than the others, brown-haired, out of focus.

Like Ying and Guorong, Wang wanted to be Roman. Recently a Beijing geneticist had taken blood and urine samples from two hundred local inhabitants, and run DNA tests, and forty of the volunteers showed some trace of Indo-European ancestry. But everywhere along the Silk Road this genetic confusion reigns. For centuries Western peoples–Persian traders, perhaps, Sogdians and Tocharians–trickled eastward unrecorded. When I looked from Ying to Wang my belief foundered in a mire of possibilities. And nobody had even asked what the legionaries of Crassus looked like. Republican Romans, these were not the blond giants of Chinese imagination, but a more motley crew–Sabines and Latins from the yeoman farms of Italy. Little by little, in my sad imagination, Wang’s Roman helmet was being dislodged by a Sogdian peaked hat or a Persian cap.

An hour later Ying and I were blundering down the track to a last village, looking for a farmer whom people described as fair as any Westerner. And there, in the naked compound of a destitute farmstead, I was astonished to see sitting a white-faced, sandy-haired man, who got up feebly to greet us. He was slight and strange. All the lines of his face fanned out from pearl-grey eyes and a thin mouth. I took his hand in astonishment. He flinched in
the sun. It was as if his hair and skin had sucked in all the desiccation of that bitter land, even his eyebrows and lashes gone platinum-white. His home was the poorest I had seen, bare under a ceiling of split reeds. A traditional
kang
brick bed, heated from below in winter, stood on a floor of beaten earth. A small broken television was the only luxury, and a single colour photograph was pinned to one wall–a sheet torn from a magazine, featuring a landscape with birds in a country gentler than this.

His aged mother hovered towards us with a mug of green tea–all they had–and for a long time her face circled and wavered in front of mine, trying to focus me. Her eyes glimmered tiny in a landscape infinitely faded. Yet her worn-out son was only thirty-four, he said, and his mother was my contemporary. In them the scuttling rural dialect had become an incomprehensible flow of aspirated consonants. I heard only: ‘Work is hard here…many things are difficult…for farming you need luck…’ And once his mother, gazing at him with an ancient, helpless tenderness, said: ‘His eyes used to be very blue, but now he’s ill…’

Ying said robustly: ‘Only he is like this. He doesn’t know why. People say his ancestors must be foreign.’

The man sat beside me on the
kang
, his hand curled rough beside mine, its nails cracked. Often a silence fell. I wondered at his hand’s pallor, the white veins. Even in my own veins the blood was infinitely more complex than I could know. His voice came faint, husky. Sometimes he gazed at me with a kind of amazed sweetness, as if we might be kin. His mother went on hovering before us with her kettle, refilling the enamel mugs. I imagined her feeling that in some way I might be their salvation, their way out. It became unbearable to look at them. I thought: we should not have come. Once, turning to me, all the man’s hopelessness filled his myopic eyes as he said: ‘Will you take me back to England with you?’

But I sensed that something was wrong. His skin was blotched brown and his eyes were hung with reddened pouches, their rims too pink. His wrists were flaky-white beside mine. He was, of course, an albino. Yet he imagined, in some cloudy way, that he belonged in Europe, in Rome, although he did not know where Rome was.

‘He’s ill,’ said Ying. ‘His eyes aren’t well.’

In parting, guilty, I offered him money, excusing it as a gift for medicine. Even this poverty-stricken man hesitated for a moment in decorum, before he accepted a small sum equivalent to many months’ income, and his face broke into a harrowing smile.

Overnight the snow has fallen. It whitens the fields and melts in the streets of Yongchang. As I leave, the mountains make a glacial confusion to the west. The minibus goes past small towns clouded in apple blossom, and over stubbled pastures where once the imperial horse herds grazed, tens of thousands strong. Soon, far to our east, the broken ramparts of the Great Wall appear. At first they are no more than isolated chunks and cubes, stretching dark over the snow like a file of disconnected railway carriages. Ruined forts have left a ghostly tracery alongside. Later the battlements, spiked with beacon towers, draw a near-solid line over the plain, the garrison’s walkways still clear along their crest.

A hundred miles beyond Yongchang, in the town of Zhangye, legendary birthplace of Kublai Khan, a nine-hundred-year-old temple shelters the largest reclining Buddha in China. He sleeps unvisited in its gloom, his eyes wide open, stretched out for more than a hundred feet. His smile is the height of a man. This is no mortal sleep, but the entry into nirvana. In effect, he is dying. Outside, an icy rain sets the bells tinkling on a pagoda. The clay arm on which his head rests is crumbling away.

I go out into thickening sleet. Under the temple eaves, the colours are flaking from the doors, the pillars and lattices. Beyond, in a shrine museum, I come upon the scrolls of six thousand Buddhist scriptures, bestowed on the temple in 1411 by the Ming emperor, together with the stone blocks incised for their printing.

I stare at these, at first, with no sense of time. The sleet gusts through the door. They rest in low glass cabinets: the mellow scrolls that unfurl right to left, the black stone blocks. Then I realise with a start that in Chinese centuries they are recent.

Printing was invented more than twelve hundred years ago, under the Tang, and movable type perhaps three centuries later.

This skill, it seems, travelled haltingly west over the Silk Road, reaching Europe via Persia and Mongol Russia, heralded by Chinese paper money and playing-cards. Some time in the fourteenth century the first crude religious images were being stamped in Germany, with ink almost identical to that used in China. I peer back wondering into the cabinets. At the time these scrolls were being created in a centuries-old routine, Gutenberg, the father of Western printing, was still a boy in Mainz.

The seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon cited three inventions which had transformed his contemporary world: printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass. They had been invented, of course, in China, and at first were put to peaceful uses there. Gunpowder created fireworks, not war. The compass was not yet used for navigation or conquest, but as a child’s toy and for the siting of graves. And printing did not usher in a revolutionary future, but sacralised and shored up the past, duplicating laborious commentaries on Confucian classics, ponderous dynastic histories, and the whole Buddhist canon in 5,048 volumes from 130,000 cut tablets.

For hours I tramped along a mountain road forty miles south of Zhangye, toward the cliff temples of Matisi, before the headlights of a van swung bleakly into view through the falling snow. Its driver shouted that the road ahead was closed: panic over the SARS virus was bringing everything to a standstill. All the same, he said, he would get me through.

We clattered unquestioned past a police post. Then, as the snow cleared and a weak sun came out, we entered an Alpine beauty of dark, unflowering trees under the Qilian mountains. In the village beneath the temples nothing moved. Someone had built a line of wooden villas, for pilgrims or mountain-lovers, but they were deserted. Against one slope a solitary farmer drove a yak at a plough.

‘This place is poor now. Maybe the temples are finished.’ The driver looked unsure. ‘It’s years since I was here.’ He was a young man, Gwelin, who worked transporting things. His lank hair framed restless eyes. He said with a tinge of self-wonder: ‘My uncle brought me here once. I became a Buddhist because of him.’

Nobody met us as we climbed the worn path to the cliff. The only account I had read had been written seventy years ago by a pair of hardy women missionaries. In a honeycomb of rock shrines they had found carvings still intact, tended by a proud community of lamas, and were astonished by a secret treasury of embroidered silk robes and lacquered headdresses–imperial gifts–which were accoutrements of the sacred Buddhist dramas.

The cliff reared two hundred feet above us in a wall of fiery sandstone. Banked up its face, uneven tiers of windows betrayed that the whole scarp was riddled by stairs and chambers. Here and there a short gallery hung in a wasp’s-nest of bleached timbers; murals glimmered in the darkness behind, and sometimes the statue of a vanished Buddha had left its halo on the rock as an orphaned circle of green.

A tiny, angry-faced monk lived here alone. The place was closed, he said, and it had been locked for a long time. But his robes jingled with keys. Gwelin and I peered helplessly through the barred mouths of the lower temples, where restored Buddhas blessed the gloom with gilded hands. We crouched along rock-cut stairs and over the suspended bridges. The monk dogged our footsteps, opened a few doors, refused others. He had come here in 1958, he said, when the lamas were many, but even before this the statues and paintings had been mutilated by local vandals. And then the Cultural Revolution came.

In the tallest temple a twenty-five-foot golden Gautama glared down at us, reconstructed, vacuous. In the murals around him the teeming images of one thousand miniature repeated Buddhas had been defaced by Red Guards, each one scratched with an obliterating cross, as if it were a mathematic equation that hadn’t worked out. Somewhere here, perhaps, fragmentary figures had survived from early dynasties, but I could not identify them. A bitter wind had got up, and the monk was chivvying us on. I began
to imagine that every chapel undiscovered, every stair unclimbed, concealed something important, beautiful. I remembered the treasury of silks which the missionaries had seen in its secret grotto.

‘It’s gone,’ the monk said, and turned away.

Farther down the slope, where the Mati stream idled between fields, a wooden monastery protected other caves. Stone figures lurched from their walls, the bodies repainted. Their heads–severed in the Cultural Revolution–had been balanced back precariously on their torsos. They wore expressions of odd pain, or of nothing. Gwelin prostrated himself before each one with a convert’s fervour, while a group of monks came curiously to watch us.

Nearby, as if abraded by water, the banks of a dry river had been carved with small stupas and bas-reliefs; and here in this empty-seeming country, in the hollows of the wind-smoothed sculptures, passing farmers had lain their pleas: some gold-tinted figurines of the longevity god, all broken, an effigy of Guanyin bandaged in cotton, a mound of steamed buns. I came upon them with estranged tenderness. These offerings were those not of lamas but of peasants: a man hoping to live longer, a woman craving a child.

Gwelin took me home, to a village whose inhabitants were thinning away. It was grimly familiar: the arid courtyard and the range of low, naked rooms, the
kang
and the few sticks of furniture where I was ushered to sit under a poster of Chinese gardens the family would never see.

They gathered shyly round us: his mother and grandmother like shadows of one another, bustling speechlessly for food, his quick sister and giant brother. Their smiles flickered on and off, and their laughter gusted and stopped. The father in his frayed blue jacket and Mao cap would not meet my eyes, but limply took my hand in greeting, then turned to tend the stove. He was out of work, Gwelin said, and ashamed.

I asked quietly: ‘Why out of work?’

‘Because he is too uneducated.’

Somehow his father had fallen foul of the freedoms of private
farming. Perhaps his family plot had been unwisely sold, I could not ask. Methodically, in silence, while the others warmed into talk, he continued cutting up potatoes and kneading noodles, as if this was all he was good for now.

Gwelin said: ‘Everything is backward here. It’s better to do odd jobs than farming. The land isn’t enough. Work in the fields is too hard. Look at my father.’

We ate potatoes and homemade bread, and noodle soup served so hot that I could not taste it; but everybody else tucked in. Eating a meal, in this famine-threatened land, was silent except for an earthy sucking and burping as bowls were lifted to avid lips and the chopsticks got to work.

Then the ritual was over, and as we eased into talk I realised that I was witnessing a deep generational divide. The older people–the parents, grandmother–were fading victims of China’s change, left suddenly, bitterly behind. Survivors of decades of political terror and folly, even their memories were not transmitted. ‘They never talk about their past,’ Gwelin said, and this too was familiar. Now, all these remote villages–you might mark them by hundreds of thousands–languished in the forgotten hinterland of the nation’s economic miracle. His parents had always been peasants, Gwelin said, and their pensions were no longer enough to sustain them.