by David Eimer
Jolting down a dirt track brought us into a field running parallel with the road we had been turned back from. After crawling through giant ruts of mud, Mahmut spun the steering wheel left and we regained the road with the checkpoint out of sight behind us. For the next few kilometres, we both kept checking the mirror to see if our unauthorised manoeuvre had been spotted.
Not far on, we joined the Tarim Desert Highway, which runs through the middle of the Taklamakan, linking the north of Xinjiang with the south. It was built in 1995, to ease access to the oil that lies beneath the sand all around here, as well as to enable the PLA to move swiftly south in the event of a Uighur uprising. A smooth two-lane road, it is flanked by reeds and scrub bushes, planted in an effort to stop the desert encroaching. Beyond them, sand dunes rose up in the distance till they seemed to touch the few clouds floating in the blue sky.
The Taklamakan has been described as the worst desert on earth, home just to the ruins of a few scattered cities that were once the capitals of long-forgotten mini-states populated by the Uighurs’ forebears. They crumbled back into the sand when the rivers which flowed into the region started to retreat towards their sources in the Kunlun Mountains. Even here, on a modern highway still close to Niya, there were no people or animals to break the monotony of the endless dunes.
Only a few oases exist in the desert proper and we arrived in one of them soon after turning off the highway. Kapakaskan is a farming village surrounded by irrigation channels, its mudbrick houses dotted along a poplar-lined road that leads to Mazar Imam Jafar Sadiq. A makeshift barrier blocked our way and we went in search of the shrine’s gatekeeper. He was a fiftysomething farmer with a doppa on his head, short and unshaven and slow in his movements and speech.
‘You can’t go, the police don’t want foreigners here,’ he said. I pleaded I had travelled all the way from Hotan just to see the Mazar. Mahmut confirmed that and there was a brief, muttered conversation in Uighur I didn’t understand. Finally, the gatekeeper relented and wrote down my passport number and accepted the entrance fee. ‘Don’t take any pictures,’ he told me.
Cars, minibuses and even a coach were parked in front of the entrance to the shrine. ‘People come from as far away as Urumqi to pray here,’ said Mahmut. A green gate in a tall arch of sand-coloured bricks, with minarets on either side, led into a courtyard, where there were tonur ovens and kebab grills. Blankets were stacked for the pilgrims who stay overnight. One side of the courtyard was taken over by a small mosque.
A few hundred metres away in the open desert is the shrine itself. The footprints of previous pilgrims pointed the way along a path adorned with sticks thrust into the ground and crude little arches made out of tree branches, all decorated with scrappy bits of cloth. Offerings unique to Xinjiang’s Muslims, they date to the time when the Uighurs’ ancestors migrated here as animists, in thrall to shamans and the natural world rather than Buddha or Mohammed.
Climbing up the hill which the shrine sits atop, I passed worshippers on their knees chanting prayers with their hands held in front of them. In the distance, wave after wave of the largest sand dunes I had ever seen rippled north towards the horizon. They appeared grey, almost muddy, and far more sinister than the photogenic ones I saw on the way from Niya.
Despite the dramatic approach, the shrine itself is unremarkable – a simple and small white-stone mausoleum opposite a makeshift tent that acts as a prayer hall. White, green and blue flags surrounded the tomb, snapping back and forth in the strong wind while people waited their turn to pray. The presence of so many pilgrims is the only tangible indication of the supreme spiritual hold the shrine has over the Uighurs.
Who is interred here is unknown. The actual Imam Jafar al-Sadiq was a Muslim saint, descended from the Prophet himself, and is buried in Medina. His name was most likely appropriated around the eleventh century, as the Uighurs who had converted to Islam fought those who stayed loyal to Buddhism. Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-British archaeologist who pillaged his way across north-west China in the early part of the twentieth century, speculated that the tomb honours the remains of Muslim leaders from Hotan and near by who were martyred in the battles.
An old man in a white robe with a long, straggly beard approached me as he left the prayer tent, his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandson in tow behind him. He placed his right hand on his heart, greeted me with ‘Salaam Aleikum’ and asked me if I was from Pakistan. I shook my head and said I was ‘Angliyelik’, Uighur for English. He was from Hotan and had been to the shrine before. ‘It is the first time for my grandson,’ he said, smiling.
Their seven-hour journey to pray together puts the CCP’s efforts to separate the Uighurs from their religion in profound context. Just as the Taklamakan has resisted all efforts to tame it, so the Uighurs’ devotion to Islam remains unchanged. Matched against the antiquity of the shrine, the CCP’s restrictions appear entirely futile, the equivalent of the spindly reeds that line the Tarim Desert Highway trying to hold back the sand.
But even here, there was an example of Han insensitivity towards people of faith. On my way back, I looked into the prayer hall of the mosque in the courtyard. As I did so, a group of Chinese arrived. There were two men, a woman and two young girls. One of the men produced a camcorder and started filming the girls as they skipped across the patterned red rugs in their trainers. A watching Uighur clicked his teeth in disapproval. Their parents probably didn’t even know to tell their children to take their shoes off inside a mosque.
Chance encounters while travelling sometimes have an impact out of all proportion to their apparent significance. My meeting with Ma Zhilin was innocuous enough, but we were fated to spend the next few days together on an ill-starred journey. By the time we parted, I never wanted to see him again. But I couldn’t have guessed that when he came up to me at Niya’s bus station after hearing me enquire about a ticket to Cherchen, the next town on the trail back to inland China.
‘I’m going to Cherchen too. There are no more buses today but we can get a shared car. There are two other people who want to go as well,’ he said. Ma was small and wiry with a homemade haircut and a wind-beaten face relieved by bright, curious eyes. In his old army jacket, stained blue sweater and trousers that swung around his ankles, he could have been any one of the hundreds of millions of country Chinese who toil with their hands for a living. He was returning to his village outside Golmud in neighbouring Qinghai Province, the final stop on my journey, after working at a gold mine in the mountains near Hotan.
Ma is a common surname among the Hui people and he was Hui, although he didn’t go out of his way to advertise his Muslim faith and was always keen to differentiate himself from the Uighurs. The most notable thing about him was the deep, dirty cut running between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Extremely angry and obviously painful – Ma cradled his crocked hand whenever he could – it needed antibiotics and stitches. But when I suggested he get medical help, he just said, ‘Mei wenti,’ no problem.
Sitting shoulder to shoulder with him in the cramped car taking us to Cherchen, I had no inkling Ma was a jinx. He was over-solicitous, in the way Chinese people not used to the company of foreigners can be, forever pressing on me the expensive, for China, cigarettes he smoked and suggesting we share a room when we got to Cherchen. But I was accustomed to that and he knew the route over the Altun Mountains to Golmud well, so I thought it would do no harm to have a companion.
Like Niya, Cherchen was another speck of a town surrounded by the desert that was growing more tedious by the day. The late-afternoon sun had retreated behind high clouds when we arrived and a gusty wind was lifting the sand on the streets into the air, shrouding the shoddy buildings in a nasty brown haze. Cherchen is a place only to pass through, infamous for its long association with China’s prison system. During the Qing dynasty, it was the site of a penal colony where opponents of Manchu rule were banished. Now Cherchen is home to a laogai, one of the forced-labour camps that house those who ha
ve offended the CCP.
It lies on the outskirts of town, its watchtowers and wire fence shielded from view by tall poplars. There are over a thousand similar labour camps in China, holding almost seven million prisoners, and they function as farms, factories and mines. Most of the inmates are now ordinary criminals. In Xinjiang, though, some are Uighurs convicted of political crimes, as well as dissidents from other parts of China. The prisoners do twelve hours of manual work a day, subsisting on a mostly meatless diet of watery soup and rancid vegetables.
Xinjiang’s laogai are run by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). Better known in China as the bingtuan, the XPCC is one of the most secretive organisations in the country. It was established in 1954, when soldiers from the defeated nationalist armies, demobilised PLA troops and workers willing to go west in return for better salaries were recruited to form a paramilitary reserve to the PLA that was also designed to take control of Xinjiang’s economy.
Based in Shihezi, a small city close to Urumqi, the XPCC is in effect a parallel regional government, running whole towns and industries, including the lucrative tomato and cotton farms scattered across rural Xinjiang. The bingtuan has its own university, newspaper and TV station and currently accounts for around 10 per cent of Xinjiang’s GDP. An unknown amount of that comes from the sweat of laogai labour.
We went through a bingtuan settlement an hour outside of Charklik, the last town of any size on the southern Silk Road. Miran was previously known as the 36 Regiment Farm, and began its existence as a laogai. For the Han sent there either as prisoners or guards in the 1950s, it must have been like landing on the moon. Miran sits in the largest county in China: 200,000 square kilometres of windswept nothingness, where the Lop Desert meets the Tarim basin and the Taklamakan. So vast and under-populated is the area, the Chinese tested their nuclear weapons here until 1996.
Miran’s residents seemed to be all Han, living in neat little houses surrounded by the cotton fields which justify the town’s existence. The presence of so many Chinese in the middle of nowhere was a sure sign I was in bingtuan territory. Just 6 per cent of the 2.5 million employees of the XPCC are Uighurs, while the 700,000 seasonal workers it hires annually to pick cotton are mostly recruited from outside Xinjiang.
Charklik had been a lunch stop. Ma and I arrived in the early afternoon, after a miserable night in Cherchen. I had planned to sleep in Charklik, leaving early the next morning to ensure I crossed the Altun Mountains and reached Huatugou, the first town in Qinghai Province, the same day. But Ma was keen to keep moving. He dug me out of a restaurant and hustled me back to the bus station, where a minibus was slowly filling with passengers.
‘The driver says we’ll be able to get a ride to Huatugou tonight no problem,’ said Ma. That wasn’t a surprise. The more people the driver carried, the more money he made and he didn’t care if we ended up stranded. Ma was insistent, though. ‘We can be in Golmud tomorrow,’ he said. I was running short of cash and there are no ATMs between Hotan and Golmud, so against my better judgment I climbed in.
After leaving Charklik, the camel caravans following the southern Silk Road travelled across the desert for almost a thousand kilometres, skirting the Altun range, until they arrived in Gansu Province and the start of the Hexi Corridor. Now a road over the mountains into Qinghai is the quickest way back to Han China. It passes through some of the loneliest country I have ever seen. From Miran on, there is nothing save a wasteland of sand and rocks to the left and deserted peaks on the right.
Pushing on at a steady speed, we entered a narrow canyon with a sheer drop on the left-hand side down to a dried-up river bed. Then we started the ascent proper, looping upwards until we reached a plateau surrounded by the spectacular, snow-dusted summits of unnamed, unclimbed mountains. At almost 4,000 metres high, with the desert far below us, we shut the windows to keep out the chill and sat swathed in cigarette smoke.
Our journey’s end, Shimiankuang, appeared as a vision of hell amid a starkly beautiful mountain wilderness on the border between Xinjiang and Qinghai. Shimiankuang means ‘asbestos mine’ and that is what it is, an open-cast pit around which a grim village has sprouted like the weeds which pop out of contaminated water. Its inhabitants walked the rutted dirt streets swaddled in padded jackets and trousers to keep out the vicious wind, bent forward like old men to make better headway.
All wore surgical-style cloth masks over their mouths and noses, in a vain effort to keep out the asbestos dust that was surely and slowly shutting down their lungs. The shops were windows in the crude brick boxes that passed for homes, through which could be glimpsed cigarettes, bottles of beer and instant noodle packets. There was a police station, the only building of any quality, and a mobile-phone mast, while patriotic music from the 1980s blasted out from antique loudspeakers mounted on poles.
Before I had even retrieved my pack from the minibus’s roof rack, a car pulled up and four of my fellow travellers jumped into it. Only as it drove off did I realise it was the promised transport to Huatugou. ‘You’ll have to stay the night,’ said the minibus driver with a broad smile. He pointed out a shack which offered beds. ‘There’s a bus in the morning,’ he said as he strode away.
For once, Ma was lost for words. It was past seven in the evening and we were stuck in a mountain village where invisible and deadly dust danced on the wind and the temperature was dipping remorselessly towards zero. Hope came in the shape of one of our fellow passengers, a young Han geologist from Chengdu in Sichuan Province, returning home via Golmud after two years of prospecting for minerals in Xinjiang.
‘A classmate of mine from college is working in Huatugou,’ he said. ‘He’s coming to pick me up. He’ll give you a lift.’ We settled down to wait, huddling out of the freezing wind behind the wall of the police station. After an hour during which it got dark and progressively colder and there was no sign of the classmate, a car stopped and offered to take us to Huatugou for 50 yuan each. Ma said it was too expensive. The geologist insisted his friend was on his way. So I stayed with them.
Eventually, the classmate arrived with another chum in a pick-up truck. There were smiles and handshakes all round, and I thought I still had a chance of a late dinner in Huatugou. But the road was bad and after twenty-five kilometres of pitching in and out of deep potholes, the driver turned off it in an effort to avoid what he said was a particularly rough stretch. It was a terrible decision. Apart from the light of a waning full moon and the truck’s headlights, we were running blind across mud made dangerously soggy by the streams gushing down from the mountains.
Riding our luck for twenty minutes, crawling along at walking speed, we were close to regaining the road when the truck lurched violently to the right and stopped moving. Its front and rear right wheels were sunk so deep in soft, sticky mud they had almost disappeared. For the next two hours, we dug the wheels out with a shovel that was in the back of the pick-up. We collected stones to give them something to grip on, while the driver revved the engine madly in an attempt to get us moving. We tried to manhandle the truck out. Finally, we jacked it up to see if that would lift the wheels out of the cloying mud. Nothing worked.
Midnight approached with everyone sitting in the truck trying to stay warm. The geologists and the driver carried on talking about ways to extricate us, as if the last couple of hours hadn’t made it obvious we were going nowhere until another vehicle hauled us clear. Ma and I looked at each other and, for the only time in our travels together, I agreed wholeheartedly with what I could read in his eyes. Without saying a word we slipped out of the truck, grabbed our bags and made for the road.
Guli was our saviour, a Uighur housewife in a headscarf driving a red hatchback. She went past as we reached the road and I shouted at her to stop, although the words came out of my mouth as a high-pitched scream. Amazingly, she pulled up. We sprinted to the car and explained our situation. I offered 100 yuan, and she agreed to turn around and drive us to Huatugou. My last sight of the geologists
was of them illuminated by the truck’s headlights, still trying to excavate the wheels as if they were digging deep for minerals.
Huatugou was a village until oil was discovered beneath its mountain mud. Now, it is a scruffy, fast-growing town. As we approached, the winking lights of the derricks pumping away around the clock looked like stars which had descended from the night sky. Then we turned on to the main street and ran headlong into a swirling gale that flung debris at the windscreen. When Guli dropped us off, we were enveloped by huge clouds of dust coming from the partially constructed buildings all around.
Most of the hotels refused to take foreigners. While Ma disappeared quickly to a bed in a dormitory by the bus station, I walked the unlit, empty streets for what seemed like for ever before finding a place that condescended to admit a westerner. Lying on the bed at three in the morning in a room with no hot water and too tired and cold to take off my clothes, I cursed myself for not ignoring Ma and staying the night in Charklik.
Yet I couldn’t really blame him. Like so many ordinary Chinese I’d met, the future wasn’t something he planned for: things just happened, good or bad, whether you liked them or not. Mostly, they were bad. You lost your job, your salary was cut or you were injured working like Ma had been. Maybe the local government and a property developer conspired to take the land your family had lived on for generations in return for a pittance. China is a cruel and unpredictable country, so it is understandable why most of its people concentrate on the immediate – the next meal, the next bus ride – and leave the rest to fate.
Five hours later, I was at the bus station. Ma was waiting for me. ‘The tickets for the morning bus to Golmud are sold out, but I’ve found someone who’ll take us in a car,’ he said. I decided it was time to end our brief acquaintance, and turned around and walked out. My ride to Golmud was uneventful, and I know for sure that if Ma had been with me we’d have broken down or had a puncture or been delayed somehow. Ma was a Jonah, and proof that it is nearly always better to travel alone.
