Shadow of the Silk Road (13 page)

Yet other caves were still inhabited by their statues. In one surviving porch the six demon door-guardians bawled and threatened, twice life size, while beyond them the Buddhas of present, past and future towered huger still. But they were modelled perilously in clay, their bodices still painted with fragile Persian lozenges filled by horsemen and flowers.

Size itself held a grim mystique. Two giant seated Buddhas, eighty and a hundred and twenty feet high, had been shaped out of
a sanctuary deep in the cliff, and could be viewed only piecemeal, from a tier of caves superimposed against them. Their robes dripped senselessly out of the darkness. From one level I glimpsed a pair of six-yard feet, and some log-like fingers splayed over a knee; from another the nostrils and red upper lip flared into sight; from another, eyes that were crevices.

Then, just as I imagined this clay too coarse a medium, I entered a shrine of eerie beauty. On its dais the Amithaba, the Buddha of Infinite Light, presided over a semicircle of Bodhisattvas and disciples, whose sculptors had struck a haunting tension between naturalism and otherworldliness. The Buddha gazed from his double mandorla like a benign warlord, his face tufted with a light beard and moustache. Around him the slight double chins and high coiffures of his followers hinted at courtly decadence. But the unearthly pallor and delicacy of their faces, turned upon one another with half-closed eyes, endowed them with a remote, introverted majesty, and their hands hovered in rapt prayer, so that I felt I had intruded on some private ceremony.

But Buddhism in China kept open house. Here its founder’s austere journey to perfection shattered into clouds of myth and godlings, and was often subsumed by folk cosmology. In several shrines the ceilings teemed with Hindu angels and lotus flowers, while among them flew nine-headed dragons and all the Taoist pantheon: winged ghosts and horses, human-headed birds and airborne immortals. The Queen Mother of the West careered on her sled of phoenixes through a blizzard of falling blossom, and every scene–as if glimpsed dreaming–was sketched in with discrete dashes and swirls, like a celestial Morse code. So the otherworld was not stable at all, but a cosmic whirlwind in which animal and human, earthly and divine, were helplessly intermingled, and the borders between faiths swept away. Was the painted palace in Cave 249 the Hindu stronghold of Indra or the mansion of the Yellow Emperor? No one could be sure.

Beneath his regulation hedgehog hair, greying a little, Jiahuang’s face is abstracted and melancholy. At most times this incipient sadness finds no voice; but at others, as we sit at a restaurant table,
he hints at confused duties and frustrations. This is strange, because in Dunhuang he has just completed financing a complex of artificial sanctuaries which minutely reproduce ten of the genuine ones, and offer visitors the tranquillity of light and time. He has devoted himself to this for ten years.

‘I’m following my father.’

His father had been an expatriate artist in Paris, and rich; he had known Braque and Picasso. But in 1935 he had chanced upon a book about the temples of Dunhuang, and in fascination he returned to China. In the chaotic years before Independence, he became the protector and chronicler of the sanctuaries, and was still revered here.

Jiahuang shows me photographs on a little viewer. He thrusts this across the table between bowls of noodles, and I see his father, an elderly man in spectacles labouring at the excavation of a temple. I think how often parents dominate Chinese thought, even among the middle-aged. The old seem to stand on holy ground. And the dead are holiest of all. Jiahuang had grown up in the tree-softened house that was now a museum to his father.

‘But I hated Dunhuang when I was little. My parents were never with me, always at work on the caves. Dunhuang took them away. My father always wanted me to carry on his work. But I went off to Japan and studied painting and Buddhism there…’ The viewer is pushed across to me again, and his paintings flash on and off: landscapes in derivative European styles.

‘In the end I understood my father.’ His face splits into one of those smiles without pleasure. ‘Twenty years ago, when he lay dying, I told him: “I will return to Dunhuang.” And suddenly–although the doctor said he was unconscious–from under his eyelids, he started to weep.’

Of all the scenes that crowded the cave walls, the richest and most intricate were those of paradise. This was not the Buddha’s hard-won nirvana, but the solace of simple people in cruel times: the Pure Land of the Amithaba, to which entry needed only the invocation of his name. Again and again, over some enormous space, my torchlight awoke its floating palaces. In the paradise of
the Buddhist sutras the jewelled trees proclaim the law and the sky throbs with banners and music, and rains down flowers. But over the cave walls this prodigal hereafter had been patterned by the Chinese mind into a garden of tiered temples and kiosks, like those vanished from the terraces of Changan. Across a green lake, to which stairways dropped from colonnaded terraces and halls, the souls of the reborn floated as naked babies wrapped in lotus buds. Altars with flaming pearls were suspended above the waters, and celestial winds blew in from above. Over this easy world the blue-haired Amithaba towered from a lotus throne, while his Bodhisattvas assembled about him like the high domestics in a Tang household. Everywhere a crowded and gracious life was going on. Sometimes the angels paraded leisurely up and down the steps, or chatted together in distant pavilions, with a convivial nodding of haloes. And once I glimpsed them leaning over a balcony, releasing white doves.

And paradise remembered past pleasures. Close above the soul-filled lake, musicians accompanied a solo dancer. They were celestials at play, of course, voluptuously serene, but their instruments were those of Central Asia, and the spinning artiste a Western showgirl. Sometimes, like the deities above them, they wavered across stucco where the tempera coating had half gone. Then the orchestra began to disassemble and I would glimpse only the curve of a harp in the faded plaster, or a flute lifted to vanished lips.

As the Tang centuries wore on, this Pure Land grew ever more elaborate: an infinite living space for souls. Above the Amithaba my eye was drawn up into a mazy wedding cake of ochre and green roofs, then diffused among multiple vanishing-points where the last pavilions beetled skyward and clouds bore them away. In the quiet gloom, where the bored guide, perhaps fearful of SARS, kept several paces from me, I scrutinised the painted donors–humble or vain–who shuffled along the lower tiers. In their minds, perhaps, the gorgeous literalism of what they had sponsored hastened its realisation: they had created their own destiny.

Then my gaze would be drawn down to the lake. Sometimes its babies perched upright on their lotus flowers, their hands clasped
in worship, ringed with discreet loin-cloths. More often they were tiny, almost foetal, too young even to pray, the petals still furled around them. In later years the blooms scattered over Amithaba’s waters were said to be the spirits of people still on earth. They blossomed or faded with the fortunes of their mortal owners.

There was something poignant about this even now: the soul as a child. I lingered curiously over them. I remembered the swaddled souls of Byzantine frescos, where they rest papoose-like in the lap of Abraham, or are delivered up to angels. In my weak torch-beam they bloomed strangely on the water’s surface. In all paradise there was no adult human. They had stayed babies, or become gods.

My light fades over other murals, then picks up a merchant in magenta robes, pulling a mule. I imagine my Sogdian trader again. I see him more clearly now. He has hard eyes, but a wry mouth, and he detaches himself from the cave wall in my mind.

So what is this fascination with foreign religions? Is it because you’ve lost your own?

At first I find no answer.
It is about time passing. When you’re young, you don’t care.
This is hard to think about.
But now there are too many dead. Those you love take away a part of you, the self you were with them. So the Pure Land seems beautiful in its way, as if it were a place we once had, but was lost. You know this is foolish, but you imagine it with nostalgia, like something remembered…

He:
Nostalgia for lies! The Pure Land is a lie. I’m told we cannot escape one another, that in the end we shall all become One, and that is our eternity…

I:
I don’t want your One. I’m in the twenty-first century, a Westerner. I want to preserve my lover’s cast of mind, the tone of her voice. I want to hear my father again.

He [bitterly]:
I too want the lilt of my lover’s voice. He died of a fever two hundred parasangs from here, and I was not there. A boy from Penjikent. I should even like to see my horse again, the one from Fergana. There was never such a horse…But these are corrupt dreams. After we experience the Great Light, we won’t want them. We will be changed. So forget. There are goods to be bought…

I:
We say that to forget is to break faith with the dead.

He:
The dead are gone, idiot. Make peace with them.

I:
How can you know? We don’t know. You can’t even imagine my century…

He:
So you’ll be reborn in a lotus flower, will you, and sit among the Buddhas? I’d rather trade in hell.

I: [Angrily:]
You’ll go to dust.
[Relenting:]
But you’re as ignorant as I am. And there’s hope in ignorance. The mystery is consciousness. That I imagine I am here now. And you too, in a way.

He:
In a way.
[He grows impatient.]
But life is not like that. You must live it as if it was real. When I was young, my brother and I traded salt between Tibet and Khotan. It was profitable work, but Tibetan soldiers hounded us. Among them were horsemen in all-enclosing armour like scales, and faceless. My brother said they were not men at all, but demons, hollow inside. Then one day we found one fallen. When we pulled off his helmet he had a face, and he spoke.

I:
What did he say?

He:
He said: I’m wounded…Don’t hurt me…

I was led at last, like all travellers, to Cave 17, where my guide, suddenly animated, recounted a story of colonial duplicity and pillage. Some time around
AD
1000, a chamber in the cave had been blocked up and its entrance painted over with a parade of Bodhisattvas. For nine hundred years it remained forgotten. Then in 1900, when Dunhuang was all but deserted, the chamber was cracked open by earthquake, and its guardian Abbot Wang, after peering inside with astonishment, locked it up.

Seven years afterwards the Anglo-Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein, who had been investigating relics of the Great Wall nearby, heard rumours about the cave, and inveigled the shy abbot into letting him enter; and there, in the light of the priest’s oil lamp, he saw a wall of documents preserved in the desert air, banked almost ten feet high. With painful patience, and in secret, he coaxed the abbot into selling, and departed at last with twenty thousand manuscripts and silk paintings laden on to camels,
including the oldest printed book in the world. A rush of other adventurers followed–my guide identified them with disgust–French, Japanese, Russian. Stein returned, and took away five more crates, and the American Langdon Warner carried two of the ethereal Tang statues to Harvard, and incompetently prised out some murals.

Now the Bodhisattvas lose their way across the breached wall, and the chamber is empty. Abbot Wang lies buried under a stupa near the ticket office.

But the cache revealed a multicultural world which had barely been suspected. The pious Buddhist manuscripts were stiffened by used paper which often turned out more informative than they did: inventories, wills, legal deeds, private letters. Chinese ballads and poems came to light. And chance intimacies. There was a prayer to alleviate menstrual pains; even a funeral address for a dead donkey. A letter from a manual of etiquette conveys a guest’s apology for behaving indecorously drunk the night before. A nun barters a black cow; another bequeaths a slave. Somebody pens a whimsical argument between wine and tea. And beside the mass of Chinese prayers are documents in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uighur, Sogdian, Khotanese, Turki in a melange of scripts: a letter in Judaeo-Persian, a Parthian fragment in Manichean script, a Turkic tantric tract in the Uighur alphabet, even copies of the scriptures which the Nestorian priest Aloban brought to Changan. Language and identity become as shifting as the sands.

The silk paintings of Dunhuang have survived too, while their Tang counterparts in central China vanished. Because its manufacture caused the death of the silkworm, Buddhists viewed silk ambivalently. Monks wore it only on pain of being defrocked; but its bolts covered the sacred stupas, sometimes in thousands, and streamed as banners above the processional images. The silk-paintings of Dunhuang are sometimes magically preserved. Even a blue-eyed Nestorian saint emerges from their sheen, a liturgical cross clear on his crown and breast. In another painting the goddess Guanyin, her sex-change incomplete (tiny wriggles of moustache and beard survive), guides a human soul to paradise, her Indian nudity long ago draped in a complex magnificence of
silks and pearls. And the soul who follows her is ambiguous too: not a baby but an infantilised adult, her hair coiffured but her robes bagged childishly about her, and her face a waiting blank.

The deserts of Lop and Taklamakan–the western surge of the Gobi–still force travellers to skirt them north or south. The northern route, more populous and frequented, follows the Heavenly Mountains and the railroad to Kashgar, which is carrying a flood of migrants into the north-west. But the southern is still desolate. For fifteen hundred miles it moves between the desert and the Tibetan plateau on its own way to Kashgar, and has long been banned to foreigners. Even now it is intermittently forbidden. Here is the heartland of the Turkic natives of this enormous province, the threatened Uighur, and I chose it for this.

I climbed on to a bus for Golmud, hoping to branch off west: the closest way to shadow this southern route. The road into Tibet beyond was closed, and to the east, I knew, was a military zone. I was at the mercy of any official. I shrank into my seat and retracted my head into my dirty collar. But out of the faceless bus-station crowd a man in plain clothes detached himself. It is these men, not the uniformed police, who matter. They show no papers, and nobody questions them. He boarded the bus and ordered me off. I noticed my hands trembling.

I answered his questions until he grew bored with me, then I sunbathed mutinously outside the station, waiting for the crowd to thin. An hour later I climbed on to another bus, going in the same direction by a different route. I huddled among farmers behind the smeared windows and after an hour we took off free in a pall of dust.

At first we crossed an ocean of roughened sand. A solitary
billboard shouted at the wilderness: ‘Develop the West Lands!’, then the desert hardened into miles of strewn rocks. Three hours later, as we mounted to the plateaux of Qinghai, the wind was howling through a pass in driving snow. The heating pipe which ran the length of the antique bus clattered into life, and black mountains reared on either side. Yet even here a tent was pitched at the pass’s head and SARS officials, shapeless in army greatcoats, their faces wrapped against the blizzard, clambered on board to take our names and temperatures. I thought they might turn me back, but there was no transport, and they were numb with cold.

An hour later we were travelling through clouds over a tableland blistered by ice and wind. Its level deadness was split by sudden lesions and upheavals of rock, with no shrub or plant in sight. From time to time shadowy fortifications surged from the ground, but their walls all faced the same way, fanning parallel with one another in pointless arcs–freaks of geology and the wind.

For eleven bone-shaking hours the snows ringed us far away in a great bowl of emptiness. We seemed to be reaching nowhere. We were ten thousand feet up, our road cracked and corrugated by frost. It was night before we touched the foothills above the oil settlement of Youshashan. A few stars had come out, and the passengers lay asleep on one another’s laps or shoulders. I peered through the clogged windows in amazement. Under the weak starlight, all over the slopes, antique oil derricks were rising and dipping like prehistoric birds over their pools. We passed them in silence to the derelict village of Huatuguo, where I found a room by the bus station and fell into exhausted sleep.

The border of the great north-west province of Xinjiang, a region three times the size of France, lay at the mining town of Mangnai, fifty miles beyond where I was sleeping. This was an old, feared frontierland–High Tartary or Chinese Turkestan–one sixth of all China now, which barged up against Central Asia. But at Mangnai the road roughened to a stone trail, where trucks, even my bus, gave up.

The settlement was a monochrome horror. Half its buildings were smashed, the glass gone from their windows. Asbestos mines
ringed it in ashen amphitheatres. I walked in apprehension, wondering how I was going to get out, or go on. The miners’ houses were unlit dens, where wind-blackened men emerged like convicts. I was found by the police.

In the guard-post five men slept in one room, its walls insulated by old newspapers, under a thatch ceiling. Cellophane was stuck over the windows, where the glass had broken. Their only visible possessions were washing-bags hanging on hooks, and a pile of vegetables rotting in a shack.

A big sergeant, lethargic with power, leafed through my passport again and again, brimming with suspicion. His fingers ran over visas for Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, unsure what they meant. I told him, not knowing, that I was permitted here. He said I was not. His men muttered and grinned. Then I turned my age and occupation (I’d shamelessly become a historian) into a joke, and mimicked a myopic professor drowning under tomes. The laughter diffused things a little. Snow was fluttering through the door. The sergeant went out and lumbered up and down the torn street, thinking; while I followed. The waste-heaps spread ghastly pustules above us. The air was full of a light, corrupting dust. He intimated a bribe; I gave him some Marlboro cigarettes. He went on walking.

I was saved by chance. Twice a week a Land Cruiser carried post over ten hours along the hundred-and-fifty-mile track ahead, dropping through the Altun mountains to the Taklamakan desert. Now it pulled up opposite us, and the policeman, after a last hesitation, let me go. I crammed into the back. A Chinese miner from Shandong and a robust Uighur shepherdess were already huddled there, with an old Hui pedlar selling coloured stones between Tibet and Korla; he unfurled them over my lap from a little blanket, where they shone in veins of rose and green.

The stony track made no dust behind us as I watched the discoloured slag-walls drop away. Marco Polo, whether or not he came here, recorded asbestos somewhere in the mountains of Tartary, and said that Kublai Khan had sent the Pope a fireproof napkin to cover Christ’s face on the handkerchief of St Veronica. But to the early Chinese, asbestos was a mystery. It came to them
from the west, and they thought it the wool of a white rat. At the other end of the trade route, meanwhile, the Romans were cremating their imperial dead in asbestos shrouds, and using it for tablecloths and napkins which they cleaned in fire. They realised too its threat to health–slaves who mined or wove it died of lung disease–but this knowledge was forgotten for two millennia.

The miner opposite me had had enough. When I asked him about safety at Mangnai, he could not say, he only knew that everyone fell ill there. He was going back east to Shandong, home. He stared gauntly ahead through the windscreen. Two Chinese women were seated beside the driver, chirruping gossip, and dressed as if for shopping. For a while we followed a rutted riverbed, jostling against one another, and edged along the shores of a lake.

Then we entered the mountains. On my map the Altun looked like nothing: a thin outcrop of the ranges shielding Tibet. But now they erupted about us to eighteen thousand feet in sheets of inky rock. They made a fearful, sombre violence. All their intersecting ridges were picked out by snow, so that they engulfed us skyward in a chiaroscuro of blackly shining precipices. No shrub softened them. Soon we were running along five-hundred-foot chasms. As we ascended, they plunged and hacked their way into constricted valleys where nothing was, while high above them the mountains hung like wrecked stencils for hundreds of feet. The snow soon banked around us. It had fallen overnight, and lay virgin over our track. We all craned forward. Three times we clambered down to dig out the Cruiser, and once it slewed out of control altogether, landing at right angles to the verge two yards away. I went to the edge and stared down into nothing.

For hours we wound on more slowly, while the track coiled dizzily under us. The Chinese women fell silent, and the old Hui beside me turned his face to the steel frame of the window and fixed his gaze on it. The afternoon was waning before we left the snowline, but our path was now slashed by avalanches and mud-slicks. For hours longer we picked our way gingerly between boulders, and sometimes followed a stream’s course while its waters lapped our axles.

Then suddenly we were released, purring over sand. Before us stretched a plain where the horizon levelled to a purplish line, and dusk was falling. An old excitement welled up. I was on the rim of the Taklamakan, one of the largest deserts on earth, and the most bitter: the heart of Xinjiang. The Tian and Kun Lun mountains curl north and south like pincers upon Kashgar and the Pamirs, but the desert separates them in a vast, advancing oval and eats their rivers. Before India merged with Asia, this was the Tethys Sea.

At nightfall the oasis of Charklik sprang up to meet us. Dark with orchards, it passed us by in rural lanes fringed by irrigation channels, where farmers on donkey-carts were riding home. The centre was little more than a single arid street, too wide, where the few Chinese kept shops. Surrounded by the thick, unseen Uighur suburbs, there were no advertisements, no cars, almost no sound.

I sat in a half-lit restaurant, among a different people. A heavy woman with large, soft eyes and hennaed fingernails served me kebabs on sesame-sprinkled bread. From the room beyond rose an ornate, liquid song, and the plunk of a native lute. I had forgotten people sang. Sometimes outside, a horse-or donkey-cart trotted by in the night, driven by grizzled men in skull-caps, whose wives dangled their thick-stockinged legs over the side. And once a blind man came in, led by a child, and was given bread. This was the Muslim world. I was in another nation, only half acknowledged by my map.

A fleeting nostalgia touched me. I remembered a young man in Damascus forty years ago, seated alone like this, eating, watching. But now those around me spoke not Arabic, but the scuttling, stressless language of a Turkic people. Compared to the tight, boyish Chinese, the Uighurs seemed released into sensuous adulthood. They were bigger, laxer, more varied. Mongol cheekbones sometimes undercut hazel eyes, auburn hair, features thicker spread. The young women had a lush prettiness, which loosened early. Whatever etiquette constricted them, something vivid and earthy had kept alive, and was singing to a lute.

Perhaps this hedonism came down from those Turkic tribes which had coalesced in the sixth century all along the steppes of eastern Asia. The Uighur had founded a kingdom in north-west
Mongolia, and their military prowess kept the Tang emperors on their throne–at the price of much silk–before the Kyrgyz scattered them in the ninth century. Then they rode their shaggy ponies to the oases of the Tarim basin north of where I sat, their felt homes piled on carts and camels, and absorbed the ancient mélange of peoples settled there. In time, spreading, they lost the eclectic Manichean religion which had clothed them with Persian art and dress, and they turned to Buddhism. Centuries later they became scribes and teachers to the Mongols of Genghis Khan, before converting to Islam. Now they had become a living palimpsest of the Silk Road. Nationalism had passed them by, until anger united them against the suffocating Chinese. Scattered through the Taklamakan oases, their traditions were the easeful, mercantile ones of another time. They traced their myth of origin to a multilingual king.

In the only hotel a surly receptionist offers me a room at double price–five dollars–and a clutch of Uighur maids comes to stare. I can understand nothing anybody says, behind a palisade of sanitary masks. I know only that I am alien to them, that they are talking about me, and I suddenly feel irretrievably separate.

Later one of the women comes in with a thermos of hot water, which she sets down by the porcelain tea-cups on my table: a Chinese custom. Tentatively I ask about life here, and she starts to talk in a shy Mandarin.

The work is lonely. She earns 350 yuan a month, less than fifty dollars. She gazes at me with something between hope and anxiety, and says: ‘My face is pale, did you notice?’ She pulls off her mask.

‘Yes.’ I do now; it is broad and strange.

‘It’s like a Westerner’s. Someone–my grandfather’s father, I think–came from somewhere else. I’m not sure where…’

She sleeps in a cubicle behind a glass window: a bed, a chair, a ring of keys. ‘It can’t be helped.’ She points out her parents’ home on my map. It is a desert village eighty miles away. Then she leaves.

But she takes away with her my sense of alienation. Suddenly the
world beyond the room no longer belongs to others, or to anyone at all. Solitude is its natural condition. Fancifully I imagine it inhabited only by the excluded: a mass of exiles.

In the next-door room, hours later, I am woken by a raucous argument, then somebody weeping.

Within a few miles the road disintegrated into the desert. Floodwater from the Kun Lun glaciers had ignored or torn away its makeshift bridges and buried its asphalt under stones. Occasionally the mountains loomed in and out of haze to the south, then disappeared, and we were crashing across the scars of their rivers or winding over drifted sand. My bus was a skeleton, its seats punctured by cigarette burns or gutted altogether, its windows cracked, its arm-rests disintegrated to steel rods. Its only passengers were Uighur farmers, shaken into silence by the road, their booted feet spread sturdily and their heads thrown back in clusters of spiky beards and burnished brows.

There was nothing else on the track. Thirty or forty miles to the north our way was shadowed by old towns which had died in the desert alongside strangled seasonal rivers and vanished lakes. From the fourth century
AD
the retreat of mountain glaciers had turned their traders and farmers into semi-nomads, until deforestation set in and the desert drifted south. Three hundred settlements, it is said, lie under the sands of the Taklamakan. Whenever the wind pushes the dunes clear, petrified timbers poke up where orchards and wheatfields were, and explorer-archaeologists a century ago traced monasteries and fortresses, and dug out murals and silks desiccated by the dry air, with hundreds of documents on wood or paper, clay seals, even brooms and mousetraps.

For fourteen hours we struggled westward through this changing desert. For mile upon mile the roots of camel-thorn and willow lifted the surface into archipelagos of rumpled sand, littered with bone-white twigs. Then the earth would smooth to a savannah of bleached grass, running over ground so salinated that
it petered out under seeming fields of snow. A white-breasted hawk was perched on a stump, waiting for something to move. A tamarisk tree shone green above underground water. Once a herd of wild-looking donkeys crossed the track. Then the pure dunes would tremble into existence again and curve in yellow blades to empty sky.