The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  For my mother and father

  Shan gao huangdi yuan:

  The mountains are high and the emperor far away

  Traditional Chinese proverb

  Contents

  Map

  Introduction

  Part I: XINJIANG – THE NEW FRONTIER

  1 ‘Uighurs Are Like Pandas’

  2 The New Silk Road

  3 Exiles

  4 The Great Game Again

  5 Return to Kashgar

  6 Three Borders

  7 Uighurstan

  Part II: TIBET – THE WILD WEST

  8 The Tibetan Borderlands

  9 Lhasa

  10 A Night at the Nangma

  11 U-Tsang

  12 High Plateau Drifter

  13 The Precious Jewel of the Snows

  14 Going Down

  Part III: YUNNAN – TROUBLE IN PARADISE

  15 Shiny Happy Minorities

  16 Dailand

  17 Down the Mekong

  18 The Dai Diaspora

  19 With the Wa

  20 Women for Sale

  Part IV: DONGBEI – PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

  21 The Pyongyang Express

  22 The Third Korea

  23 Spreading the Word

  24 The Arctic Borderlands

  25 Along the Amur

  26 An Empire Expanding

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  For almost 400 years, the fort at Jiayuguan marked the end of the known world for the Chinese. Everything further west of this final outpost of the Great Wall in Gansu Province was beyond both their understanding and their control. Savage tribes and legends of demons which rose out of the desert sand waited to torment the travellers who ventured beyond the fort’s high walls. Those who did journey on soon found themselves in a land which ethnically, culturally and geographically had everything in common with central Asia, while sharing nothing with the China they had left.

  To be stationed here at the far frontier of the Chinese realm was to endure isolation on a grand scale. It was the equivalent of the British garrison guarding convicts in Botany Bay in the early eighteenth century, a place so distant as to be unimaginable. Even now, gazing out from the battlements, it is easy to understand the fear the soldiers must have felt. The constant wind that swirls through Gansu, sending the topsoil skimming through the air, is a portent on its own, rendering those exposed to it more susceptible to the lifeless landscape surrounding the fort.

  The desert, too, is still the same unforgiving, gently undulating carpet of sand and rock it was in the fourteenth century. A road has been carved through it and there is now a railway line, leading towards neighbouring Xinjiang Province and the west of the current Chinese empire. But the vista from the fort has remained constant. To the north, shaded in delicate, distinct hues of brown, are the Beishan Mountains, which divide China from Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. South lies the Tibetan Plateau, guarded by the Qilian range.

  In Imperial China, Gansu was a border province ringed on three sides by past and future enemies. That made Jiayuguan the ideal place for the beginning of my travels to the extreme edges of China, because the fort still marks an unofficial internal boundary. It is the point where the China of the Han Chinese, who account for almost 92 per cent of the country’s population and whom the outside world thinks of as ‘Chinese’, begins to give way to its colonial conquests in the west. From here on, the Han cease to be the majority ethnic group and live alongside people who remain reluctant citizens of their country.

  There are around 100 million people in China who are not Han. They belong instead to fifty-five officially recognised ethnic minorities scattered mainly across the borderlands: a vast area that takes up almost two-thirds of the country, much of which was absorbed into China relatively recently. There are another 400 or so groups with fewer than the 5,000 people needed for them to be acknowledged formally as minorities by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

  Some chafe under Chinese control. The Tibetans and the Uighurs of Xinjiang have fought the Han ever since they started pushing into their homelands. Other ethnic groups resisted Chinese attempts to subjugate them too. The nascent CCP acknowledged that unhappiness with Beijing’s rule as far back as 1922, promising the minorities they would have the right of self-determination, and even the option to secede from China, when it took power. That pledge had been forgotten by the time of the communist takeover in 1949, resulting in a legacy of distrust and tension that remains today.

  Many of the minorities are a mystery even to the Chinese. Living thousands of kilometres away from the Han heartlands, they inhabit regions of geographical extremes: the remote deserts of the west and north, tropical jungle in the south-west and the Siberian-like taiga that still covers the far north-east of China. Speaking different languages and sometimes following religions viewed with suspicion by the CCP, most have much stronger ethnic and cultural ties with the peoples of the countries across the nearby borders than they do with the Han.

  Those links ensure that China’s distant frontiers are places where nationality is a nebulous concept, where the passport a person possesses is less important than their ethnicity. That in turn makes the borderlands inherently volatile. They are areas where the old Chinese adage ‘The mountains are high and the emperor far away’, meaning Beijing’s hold over the locals is tenuous and its influence unwelcome, still resonates.

  An urge to explore those distant reaches and meet the people who live in them brought me to China for the first time in 1988. From the moment I laid eyes on a map of the Middle Kingdom, I was determined to reach Kashgar. A fabled former staging post on the Silk Road, it lies at the very heart of Asia in the far west of Xinjiang. It took me six weeks to get there, struggling west from Hong Kong by train and bus, hampered by my non-existent Mandarin and encountering wide-eyed stares from people who had never seen a westerner in the flesh before.

  China had begun to open up to foreign travellers in the early 1980s, but few ventured east of Thailand back then. Everything from my sideburns and stubble to my sunglasses and jeans marked me out as I made my way towards Xinjiang. It was impossible to avoid attention. Followed down the streets of obscure towns by their residents, or surrounded by silent, staring groups of people while eating, I began to crave anonymity.

  Only when I arrived in Turfan, a desert town in eastern Xinjiang famed for having recorded the highest temperatures in all China, did I find a place where I wasn’t so obviously a foreigner. The majority of the population are Uighurs: the Muslim ethnic minority native to Xinjiang whose roots are in the Caucasus and central Asia. I felt far more at ease with them than I did with the Han. For the first time since my arrival in China, I was among people who needed to shave every day. And with my tan I could even pass as a Uighur, in the dark anyway.

  One night, I met a Belgian backpacker who told tantalising tales about Kashgar. He spoke of an ancient oasis, complete with camels, mosques and smugglers, which rose out of the desert like a hallucination of the past. I was entranced already by the romance inherent in Kashgar’s very name, but my desire to visit was perhaps enhanced by the hashish he’d acquired there. Travellers to South-east Asia couldn’t walk down the street without being offered drugs, but in China in the late 1980s a joint was as alien as I was.

  Getting to Kashgar was not easy, though. Located so far west it is just a day’s journey from the borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, or a bus ride north to Kyrgyzstan, there was no train linking Kashgar to the rest of China at that time. The couple of flights a week on the then national airline CAAC, known to foreigners as ‘China Airways Always Crash’, were too expensive an option. Unless you were rich or a senior
government official, you had to travel by road across the Taklamakan Desert, a 330,000-square-kilometre stretch of sand and scrub that sits in the middle of Xinjiang.

  After three long days on a bus more suited to a suburban route, I arrived in Kashgar. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, its proximity to British India had made it a battleground in the Great Game, the struggle between Britain and Russia for control of India and central Asia. Bearded and tanned British army officers posed as locals, real-life versions of John Buchan characters, while Russian agents headed south through the most distant stretches of the tsar’s domain to counter their influence.

  With the Cold War still spluttering on in 1988, the echoes of dead and dying empires continued to resound in Kashgar. You could find a bed at the Chini Bagh, the old British consulate, or the more comfortable Seman, the former Russian consulate. I chose to stay loyal to the Crown and so passed through the gates of the Chini Bagh into a mudbrick-walled compound of low-rise, distressed wooden buildings on the edge of the old town.

  Peter Fleming stopped at the British consulate on his way to India from Beijing in 1935, a seven-month journey recounted in his book News from Tartary. Then, the gates were guarded by Gilgit Scouts on loan from the Indian Army with whom Fleming played polo in the mornings. His nights were spent chatting over bridge and whisky with the consul, his wife and the Swiss skiing international and adventurer accompanying Fleming on his trip.

  Times had changed, the Gilgit Scouts replaced by Pakistani traders. They slaughtered and gutted chickens in the filthy communal bathrooms and grilled mutton kebabs on open fires, which they ate with naan, the flat, doughy bread of Xinjiang. Unwise travellers who sampled them invariably spent the next day perched precariously over one of the Chini Bagh’s squat toilets.

  Two years before my arrival, the Karakoram Highway linking China to Pakistan had opened. In the summer, the traders came across the 5,000-metre mountain passes to sell what were then such unobtainable luxuries as western soap and shampoo, before loading up with as much cheap Chinese tat as they could carry back home to sell in their local markets. The ones staying in the room next to me also raided the remnants of the old consulate library, which I had discovered by chance in a cellar. They took the fading volumes with ‘British Consulate Kashgar’ stamps on their title pages, without offering me one as a souvenir.

  Bound by their shared faith in Islam, the Pakistanis and Uighurs had a mutual dislike of the Chinese. In Kashgar, the Han and I were equally foreign. Yet they were more isolated, because the Uighurs were and still are far better disposed towards westerners than they are to the people who conquered them. Some 4,300 kilometres away from their capital by road, surrounded by hostile locals who spoke an incomprehensible Turkic language, the small numbers of Chinese civilians in the city then maintained a low profile, especially once the sun went down.

  The longer I stayed in Kashgar, the more I began to realise that Xinjiang was a country within a country, one with far closer connections to its central Asian neighbours than to China. The Sunday market, the social event of the week, was an exhilarating mix of local tongues and minorities. Ethnic Kyrgyz and Tajiks from the surrounding countryside arrived on donkey carts piled high with watermelons, or trailing dispirited lines of sheep, to join the Uighurs and Pakistanis in selling their wares. The different languages vied with each other to such overpowering effect that I no longer felt I was in China.

  Kashgar was my introduction to the huge, unwieldy and unstable empire that is China. The outside world tends to regard the country as a culturally and ethnically homogeneous entity. But until the CCP took power, China’s leaders acknowledged their imperial role openly. The Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to 1912, established a separate bureaucracy called the Lifan Yuan, or Court of Colonial Affairs, to manage the minorities who populated the far-flung regions it conquered. It functioned much like the former Colonial Office in the UK, which administered the British empire.

  Shaking off the perspective that equates China solely with the Han Chinese is difficult. The Han-dominated CCP assiduously encourages a view of the country that relegates the other ethnic groups to the fringes. Just as they exist at the geographical edges of China, so they occupy an uneasy space at the margins of society. The Chinese like to think of themselves as one vast family with their unelected leaders, whether the emperors of the past or the CCP, as its patriarchs. China’s minorities are at best distant cousins, linked to their relations by forced marriages rather than blood.

  As such, they are present in small numbers at important family events. They march in the parades through Tiananmen Square which mark the anniversaries of the CCP’s time in power. When China’s version of parliament meets for its annual session each March, a photo of the token minority delegates in their colourful headgear and traditional costumes is always splashed across the front pages of the state-controlled newspapers. One old Tibetan joke says their official representatives have only three responsibilities: to shake hands when they enter, clap hands during speeches and raise hands to vote yes.

  I returned occasionally to China after 1988. But only when I moved there in early 2005 to work as a journalist did I decide it was time to revisit Xinjiang. That prompted a more ambitious plan: to travel through the most contentious borderlands and examine the relationships between the different minorities and the Han. I wanted to find out why many still view the Chinese as representatives of a colonising power. Giving the different ethnic groups a voice – something mostly denied them in China itself – while journeying to some of the least-known corners of the world to do so is the principal motivation for this book.

  Challenging the notion that China is a nation largely insulated from outside influences is another reason why I felt the need to go to the ends of China. Far from being cut off, the Middle Kingdom is inexorably bound to its neighbours. China’s land border stretches for 22,117 kilometres, the longest such frontier on earth. Along with Russia, China borders more countries, fourteen, than any other nation in the world. In the north-east, south-west and west, China is surrounded by the most isolated countries of South-east Asia, the ’stans of central Asia, Afghanistan, Bhutan, India and Pakistan, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea and Russia.

  They are some of the most unpredictable states on the planet, and the conflicts that rage within them inevitably spill across the frontiers. To explore the border regions is to enter a very different China from the glittering mega-cities of Beijing and Shanghai, one that is often lawless and prone to violence. Now they are areas where some of the world’s most pressing problems confront China directly. The war against terrorism and on drugs, people smuggling and the exploitation of the environment all have their own unique Chinese aspect.

  Twisting history, the CCP does its best to insist that the borderlands have long been part of China. The party ignores how it, and the emperors who came before, took some of those regions by force as little as sixty-odd years ago. It maintains, too, that the minorities enjoy far more prosperous lives under its rule and are content to be part of China, even as its grip on the most restive areas, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, is dependent entirely on the presence of huge numbers of soldiers.

  Part of the process of attempting to expunge China’s colonial past, while simultaneously reinforcing Beijing’s dominion, involves erasing physical memories of it. In Jiayuguan, only the heavily restored fort and a few crumbling sections of the Great Wall stand as a reminder of the time when it was a border town. The arrival of the fort, built in 1372 during the early days of the Ming dynasty, and the Wall was an acknowledgment that the emperor’s influence stopped here.

  Now, as in most Chinese cities, Jiayuguan’s architecture is designed to impose a uniformity – one that, consciously or not, diminishes the role of the minorities in its history. Lined with the same bland white office blocks and apartment buildings that can be found all over the country, the streets are named after provinces and cities from the distant east, a none too subtle declaration of where po
wer in China resides.

  But many of the people who walk those streets are not Han. Jiayuguan has a significant population of Hui, a Muslim minority descended from the Arab and Persian traders who came down the Silk Road thirteen centuries ago. They are perhaps the strangest of all China’s minorities. After hundreds of years of intermarriage with the Han, they are indistinguishable from them physically. Nor do they have a language of their own. They have spread all across China too, unlike most of the minorities who remain clustered in their traditional homelands.

  Just their faith in Islam marks them out and the ten million Hui are the sole people classified as a minority because of their religion. Yet, despite their closeness to the Han – the Mandarins of the Qing dynasty distinguished them from more troublesome minorities by dubbing them HanHui – their presence is still an inconvenient hangover from the past. They are the most tangible evidence that Jiayuguan was once both a crucial junction on the Silk Road and China’s far western edge, a place Marco Polo claimed to have passed through, the gateway to and from Muslim lands where Beijing had no remit.

  Until the eighteenth century, the Chinese were content to stay put in Jiayuguan’s fort. Only after the Ming dynasty was overthrown by the Manchus, who swept down from north-east China to take Beijing and establish the Qing dynasty, did China turn its attention towards the territories beyond Jiayuguan. Under Emperor Qianlong, the Qing decided they needed to put more space between them and the central Asian tribes they feared would invade.

  Armies of Manchu Bannermen started moving west. By 1759, they had massacred around one million people and terrified everyone else into submission. But the Qing’s control over the region the Chinese now call Xinjiang, which means ‘New Frontier’, was always unconvincing, as a series of revolts in the nineteenth century confirmed. Uprisings continue to this day.