Shadow of the Silk Road (19 page)

The biggest grave, when we reached it, simplified to a long wooden canopy, pinned with a blanket. It covered an inchoate heap of timbers and some bleached pigeon feathers. The sand was piling against it. This, said Arhun, was the grave of the sainted
padshah
, ‘the king in the sands’, and he lifted his hands and broke into song. For a moment, in that stark silence, only the flicker of the flags and his lonely prayer sounded above the graves. As for the pigeons, he had heard from old people about their multitudes. Fifteen years ago a broken-down sanctuary survived–he pointed to the level sand which had buried it–and he conjured the feathers, eggs and the mass of excrement he had seen left behind.

It was said that any bird of prey that tried to kill the pigeons would die while it swooped. But now, as we returned down the shifting slope, the sky was darkening towards evening in a void of gentian blue.

For three hundred miles the road bends north-west to Kashgar. The sands lap against it, but gently now, and the oases multiply and start to merge. You go through towns of venerable decay, past the sleepy Islam of nineteenth-century travellers, of cemeteries disintegrating in solitude for a Sunday sketchbook. The kings of Yarkand lie on a lonely platform under plaster cenotaphs ringed by trees and birds. The June sun pours down. To the west the horizon glitters into life as the Pamir foothills trace wavering lines of forest, and the peaks beyond them fracture the sky with an unearthly brilliance. Here the desert at last ends, and China is petering out. For a long time, as the road veers harder north, the mountains float above Central Asia in a stupendous punctuation mark.

My bus was half empty. In eastern China the threat of SARS was escalating, as millions of migrant workers returned to their villages from the infected cities. Monotonously we were flagged down and sterilised. Once the bus was invaded by card-sharpers, but nobody played their game. They were replaced by a crowd of youths from Guma. For a long time a fat salesman shouted questions at me in Uighur, before it dawned on him that I didn’t understand. Then he resorted to a slurred Mandarin, hitting my knee or shoulder with his loose knuckles before each question. The others joined in. Sometimes, for no fathomable reason, a bus or train ride would develop like this. Three youths crowded into my seat, alternately nudging and pulling at me. The fat one was selling clothes between Guma and Kashgar. What did I have to sell? How much was my
shirt? How much my trousers? He bunched them in his fist. What did my last hotel cost? Where was England?

Nobody notices your anger. Your book is lifted from your lap and fruitlessly scrutinised. Your map is opened, then torn while somebody locates his village. Somebody else tries on your glasses. Drowned in this Uighur boisterousness, you find yourself longing for the Chinese reticence. But the restaurant where you disembark is raucous with hard-headed Chinese from Sichuan, and soon you are romanticising the Uighur warmth and generosity. You reach your destination in a schizophrenic misery, and take refuge in your room, only to be invaded by a troupe of SARS doctors alerted by the hotelier to the fevered-looking foreigner.

Kashgar lies where the maps in people’s minds dissolve. The southern and northern Silk Roads converge here, and the desert dies against the mountains. Fifteen centuries ago, in its Buddhist days, its inhabitants were famously fierce and impetuous, and in time it grew to be a champion of Islam. To Europe it was barely known until the nineteenth century. Then, as tsarist Russia pushed south and east, Kashgar became a listening-post in the Great Game of imperial espionage, played out between the Russian and British empires beside an impoverished China.

But the game was China’s now. Through the soft sprawl of the Uighur town, the Chinese roads pushed like knife-blades. The crossroads of People’s Road and Liberation Road, carrying their white-tiled banks and emporia among serried offices, lay like a crucifix on the old city. And in People’s Square an antique, sixty-foot statue of Mao Zedong–too vast safely to dismantle–lifted his arm like a club. In these cold spaces the Arabic script vanished from the shop signs, displaced by Chinese. Official hoardings announced the friendship between the two peoples, betraying Beijing’s anxiety. The city was at flashpoint. In the year 1999 a long-planned railroad had arrived from the east, and was pouring in immigrants. Already the Chinese population had soared above its official ten per cent.

I walked along People’s Road. The Construction Bank of China, China Unicom, the Agricultural Bank of China, ChinaTelecom:
they marched together, trumpeting the new order. A high-tech centre called ‘Newyield Fast Foreign International Trade City’ was going up. I went into a shop selling videos of Chinese pop groups. They were called Power Station or WonderGirl, and pretended to be made by Miramax. The Uighur who walked these streets or sold trinkets on the bank steps looked suddenly out of date. A few were begging. Beside them the Chinese seemed hard and pale, the women’s tight skirts and faces–even their occasional silks–elaborately defined amongst the flaring colours of native headscarves and bodices. Each race reflected cruelly on the other.

Then I turned into the labyrinth of the old town, and all was changed. Its alleys converged in walls of plaster and whitewash, tunnelling blindly through mud brick. The paving dipped and splintered underfoot. Often the houses lurched overhead until they spanned the whole way on timbered bridges. Only occasionally, in the blank corridors of lanes, a carved door was left ajar, a breeze blew its hanging aside, and I saw courtyards and beetling staircases, a child chasing a chicken, an old man asleep among oleanders.

Then the way debouched into dinning markets of ironmongers, potters, wood-turners. In the crowds, at either pole of life, went little girls in iridescent caps, like old-fashioned dolls, and widows under coarse brown veils. The air reeked of resin and coal dust, and filled with the quavering music of Arabia. No Chinese was in sight. Central Asia was suddenly close and palpable. The turrets of streetside mosques scythed the sky with crescents, and stairs teetered up to prayer-rooms among painted pillars and potted flowers. Among the sheepskin hats and skull-caps of the Uighur went Kyrgyz herdsmen in white felt trilbies, and here and there were lean Tajiks from the Pakistan border, their women walking under high pillbox hats dripping with silver pendants. This resurgence of a once-nomadic world reached its crescendo in a teeming Sunday market where the bullocks, donkeys and wobbling chorus-lines of fat-rumped sheep mingled with the Barkol and Ili horses, and a few camels roared.

The cliché Uighurs dance and sing. There are statues and paintings of them: on crossroads, in restaurants. The sculptured figures are
extravagantly physical. The woman swirls in fandango while the man, fallen to one knee, glares up at her with conjuring eyes and bangs a tambourine. Fanciful pictures show rustic orchestras playing–lute, tambour, mandolin–in a hoary dream of craftsmanship and ecstasy.

At first these platitudes irritate, as condescending. Then you discover that they are the creation not of the Chinese, but of the Uighur, defining themselves against the occupying power. Where the Chinese see a village society, backward, irrelevant, the Uighur find zest and freedom. Each culture can embrace these symbols because they also define some perceived emptiness in the other: to the Chinese, a Uighur lack of balance or realism; to the Uighur, a Chinese failure of the heart.

Ahmadjan’s village lay deep in the oasis. Each weekend he returned there from Kashgar like a hero. He worked for the telegraph office in town, and traded in dried fruit on the side: the only man of his family to make good money. He was just twenty-three. He looked trim and efficient: a wood-chip nose and short chin, a powdery moustache. When he stood in his family compound–a ramble of stark rooms round an overgrown orchard–he liked to imagine its future. Already he had built an extra room with carved ceilings in the Uighur way, and in time, he said, he might add a new range, and live there with his bride.

His father listened in silence, perhaps ashamed. He was a peasant in broken sandals, and he could not afford these things. From time to time Ahmadjan’s mobile phone would ring and he would talk importantly to someone, while his younger siblings gazed at him as if he were a sorcerer, and his mother clucked and smiled.

Later, ambling round his village across poplar avenues and fields of barley, he said: ‘Perhaps I won’t live here at all. Perhaps I’ll live in the city.’ He gestured hopelessly. ‘I can’t work in the village. It’s boring, terribly boring. And hard.’ In this community of five hundred, he said, there were nine mosques, with an imam for each, and when we reached the graveyard his hands cupped automatically in prayer. ‘My grandparents are here, and my sister. All my ancestors, buried on their sides, facing Mecca.’

Incongruous for a moment in his belted jeans dangling keys and cellphone, he stood praying in the dust.

And how many in this village were believers?

‘All of them, I’d say.’ He thought, repeated: ‘All.’ There was no other belief. Above the house doors as we passed small plaques proclaimed: ‘This is a five-star [or eight-star or ten-star] civilised family.’

Ahmadjan laughed. ‘I don’t know what they mean. It’s a Chinese thing.’

He spoke bitterly of the Chinese incursions, of the sterile streets laid over Kashgar a few years before. He remembered as a boy playing football in People’s Square, now a cemented desert, and the blooming of fruit trees along vanished alleys. ‘I think Kashgar will become a Chinese city, like Urumqi. Pure concrete.’

With an outsider’s boorishness, I found myself probing his allegiances, as if identity were not a slippery, partial thing, but something whole and graspable. Did he feel himself a Uighur or a Kashgari, or simply a Muslim? Living between urban desires and country loyalties, China and Islam, he seemed to encapsule a deep dilemma.

But he said: ‘I don’t know what I feel. Kashgar is like a country. So is Khotan, and the rest. All isolated. Perhaps we Uighur are a group of countries. Communism has changed nothing.’ Far away a few figures acknowledged him across the fields, then bent to work again. ‘Even in the villages you find the farmers drunk in the evening. And some get married many times, and some even have more than one wife, in secret.’ He had forgotten that Islam sanctioned this. ‘I hate it. I’ll marry only once.’

He looked bright and sure. I asked: ‘Do you know her?’

‘Well, there’s a girl I’m chasing, very pretty. She works in a cement factory.’

I imagined a Soviet poster. ‘She’s a builder?’

‘Oh no. She operates a computer, computing the cement components. Experimental work.’

He sounded proud of her, although she was not yet his. But her factory was Chinese, of course, as was his own workplace, and was
producing the prefabricated concrete blocks which would one day smother his city.

Eighty miles to Kashgar’s north the mountain republic of Kyrgyzstan, fearful of contagion from SARS, had closed its borders against China, severing my route. I settled into the Seman hotel, which had been built on the remains of the old Russian consulate, and waited with a cluster of stranded backpackers and thinning staff.

Frustrated, torpid with the summer heat, I roamed the city by day and oscillated at night between Chinese and native restaurants. In food-palaces worked by waitresses in crimson and gold-frogged uniforms, giggling and careless, pale versions of eastern Chinese dishes were served up with an emigrant’s nostalgia; while in the Uighur eateries pilau and
laghman
noodles would be thumped down before me in enamel bowls, kebabs oozed oil over roundels of new-baked bread, and businessmen and traders drank pigeon soup in discreet dining rooms which mimicked the Chinese.

Behind my hotel the long-defunct Russian consulate spread cottagey rooms like wooden chalets turned to stucco. Inside, the gloomy chambers with their moulded ceilings and brass-handled doors were eerily untouched. Even their brown-painted wooden floors remained, with a sprawling mythological mural. Here, at the end of the Victorian age, the tyrannical consul Nikolai Petrovsky–temperamental, polymathic, stormily ambitious–had bullied and threatened the local Chinese under the shadow of the tsarist empire. Now there was no more than a derelict laundry where his forty-five Cossacks had slept in grey-blanketed berths and eaten at monastic tables.

In 1890 the British, alarmed for the northern gateways to India, opened their own residence half a mile away, and for twenty-eight years the assiduous George Macartney sparred with his Russian rivals, while his wife turned their quarters into an English country home, complete with gardens and a cow, and took turns serving
cream teas with the Russian wives, while their husbands played tennis. The British Foreign Office sent out a coat of arms to hang above the gate.

Now the old residence had been swamped by a thunderous new hotel, where Pakistani traders–come up on the Karakoram Highway to buy televisions or trade in tea–went back and forth in dazzling white, on holiday from puritanism, and drank alcohol and pursued the local girls. Behind its looming glass and concrete, I found a modest building painted orange and white, plumped with a crenellated tower. It was locked and derelict. The English apple trees, of course, had gone, with the acacia avenues and ornamental pond. The chief rooms had been turned into ‘the Tasty Restaurant’, now defunct.

I padded like a revenant to the building’s rear, where casement windows had once looked down on melon-fields and a Russian cemetery. Its terrace was shored up on plaster arches. But beneath me there was only the rubble of demolished suburbs; and the Pamir and Tian mountains, which freeze the sky in pastel waves to the west, were obliterated by the high-rise hotel.

After Macartney a succession of able consuls, with their sturdy wives and patient Indian secretaries, had played out the last of the Great Game, until India became independent in 1947. Now, around the shuttered desolation of the consulate, where I searched vainly for traces of the Macartneys’ garden, a lonely irony flowered. Had things gone otherwise, and Russia conquered Xinjiang, the region would have been enrolled as a Soviet Socialist Republic among the states of Stalin’s Central Asia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would have become an independent nation like the rest, a landlocked country rich in oil and minerals: the Republic of Uighuristan.

‘Communism, what can it do for us? We need to feel looked after, that there’s a future. But the Party’s lost. In the offices, nobody works. They take in a newspaper and some tea, even a pillow for napping. Then each one sits in his own room, doing nothing. In a
day they read a few government documents, perhaps, and hold a meeting. That’s all. There are thousands and thousands of these offices, all doing nothing.’

The woman’s forehead knits with anger, but is cleared again by laughter in a soft, continuous duel. We are walking up a hillside beneath the tomb of Mahmud Kashgari, compiler of the first Turkic dictionary a millennium ago. The anonymity of our meeting here releases a fleeting intimacy.