by Sun Shuyun
The Germans carved out Turfan, Karashar, Kucha and Tumshuq, the major oases on the northern route of the Silk Road, as their sphere of influence. Their man was Albert von Le Coq, who spoke several oriental languages and worked for the Berlin Ethnographic Museum. He and his assistant spent two years from 1904 to 1906 combing through all the ancient sites of Turfan, which were mostly ruins or buried by sand. They heard about Bezeklik from a shepherd and found the caves filled to the ceiling with sand. They were overcome by the murals once they removed the sand: ‘If we could secure these pictures,’ Le Coq wrote in Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, the record of his explorations, ‘the success of the expedition was assured.’ With a hammer, a chisel, a knife and a fox-tail saw, he and his assistant managed to remove all the best-preserved murals of Bezeklik, which filled 103 huge trunks, each weighing well over a hundred kilograms. After twenty months of travelling they arrived safely in Berlin, where they occupied an entire room of the museum. ‘This is one of the few temples whose sum-total of paintings has been brought to Berlin,’ he wrote with a great deal of satisfaction. Moreover, he thought he was doing the Chinese a favour by his crude archaeological theft. ‘It cannot be too often emphasized that it is solely due to European archaeologists that any of the Buddhist treasures of Turkestan have been saved.’ He would never have suspected the Berlin Ethnographic Museum would be the graveyard for these precious objects. After surviving for more than 1,500 years in the desert, most of the murals were reduced to ashes in the bombing of Berlin in 1945. Only photographs remain.
I was in and out of the caves in twenty minutes. I was not the only unhappy visitor. A woman in high-heeled shoes and a long black velvet dress was blaming her partner loudly: ‘I’m baking hot. It’s all your fault. I told you we should have gone to the bazaar …’ When I got back to the car, I was complaining to Fat Ma about the destruction by the barbarians.
‘It wasn’t just the Germans,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine did his bit too.’
‘What? Your friends helped the Germans?’
‘No, it is a different story.’
There were still a few murals in some of the caves a decade ago. His friend and five other amateur archaeologists were told to clean them with soap and water. After the grime and mud were washed away, his friend saw a lovely face of the Buddha. He worked very hard for several days to clean the rest of the murals, Fat Ma explained, his voice falling almost to a whisper, as if he were afraid he would be overheard. But in a few days the cleaned murals began to crack and disintegrate; in no time they were gone. The cleaning had washed away the glue that held the pigments together. What had stood for so long and survived various depredations was finally destroyed by the ignorance of good intentions.
It was a sad story, and it matched my disappointment with the caves. Fat Ma tried to cheer me up. ‘Come on, lighten up. You’re going to see something really interesting. Promise.’
Barely two hundred yards from the caves, by the side of the narrow road, stood a grinning monkey, bright yellow and made of clay, and a pantheon of other characters from the novel – the gluttonous piggy, the novice, a red demon, a crab, a fox and of course the venerable Xuanzang on his white horse. They were crudely made and painted in day-glo colours. I had not noticed them before because I was looking for the water I could hear but not see. There was a terracotta dome in the background and on top of it the Islamic symbol of the crescent moon, presumably to appeal to the local Muslim population as well as tourists. The backdrop of the whole site was the red rock of the Flaming Mountain. ‘This theme park is for visitors so they can relive the myths of The Monkey King,’ said Fat Ma enviously, no doubt regretting that he had not come up with this enterprising idea. Two young men seemed to be enjoying themselves: for 30 pence each, they put their faces through cardboard versions of the Monkey King and Xuanzang, and then had their photos taken. For a pound, they could be the monkey, putting on a mask and a bright yellow martial-arts costume, with a walking stick for his cudgel. If the pilgrim himself took their fancy, they could put on a monk’s robe and get up on a real white horse.
I stood surveying the scene, a little shocked that the government had given permission for a theme park to be built so close to a grade-one listed ancient site. Turfan is not exactly crowded – it is as big as Ireland – and most of it is desert. They could have built this garish entertainment anywhere. But Fat Ma said, ‘I would have chosen this spot too. It’s near the famous site, many people come this way. And after the disappointing caves, why not have some fun?’
‘They have the Flaming Mountain,’ I said.
‘That’s where we are going next,’ he replied.
In The Monkey King, the Flaming Mountain bars Xuanzang’s way: for hundreds of miles around it everything is on fire and nothing can grow. To cross it, he has to borrow the magic fan from the princess of the Iron Fan. Waved once, the fan puts out fire; twice, it raises a wind; and the third time, it brings on rain and makes everything flourish. The local people have to sacrifice a child every year to appease the evil princess and borrow her fan for planting and watering their crops. Naturally the princess will not lend it to the monk. So the monkey uses his magic and turns himself into a tiny insect, gets into her stomach and makes trouble there. She is forced to give him a fan, but it is a fake one which shoots up flames almost engulfing the sky. He then pretends to be her husband and takes the fan from their marital bed, but without the right spell. A whirlwind blows him ten thousand miles away like a fallen leaf. He is lucky the third time, with the help of a host of celestial spirits. He puts out the fire and returns the fan to the princess, who now promises to use it for everyone’s good. The monkey gathers their packs, saddles the white horse for Xuanzang, and they cross the Flaming Mountain without flames.
The real Xuanzang could not have avoided the Flaming Mountain when he was in Gaochang. It was the most striking feature of this oasis kingdom and it was right on the Silk Road. Just as Fat Ma and I were discussing it, I saw spiky rocks on the horizon. They grew taller, rising inexorably. They almost seemed to throb with their curious red as we drove nearer. I had read about the Flaming Mountain so many times and seen many pictures of it, but still I was amazed at its grandeur. The steep sides are criss-crossed with deep gullies of dark red stone; the mountain-tops make hectic zigzags against the blue sky. Under the blazing sun, it really does seem ready to burst into flames. It made me realize why it was the perfect backdrop for one of the most dramatic episodes in The Monkey King, firing the author’s imagination, mine and that of everyone who has read the novel throughout the centuries.
I decided to have my photo taken with the Flaming Mountain in the background. I could not return empty-handed from the land of my childhood dream that had been burning in my head for the past thirty years. But Fat Ma said no. I thought he did not want to get out of the jeep in the scorching sun, so we drove on. After another fifteen minutes, we left the main road, cruising on the gravel towards the foot of the mountain. Suddenly we screeched to a stop. ‘Photo time now!’ he declared proudly. ‘I have searched the whole mountain from end to end: this is the ideal spot.’ I thought it was very considerate of him to do it just for me but it turned out to be a more serious business matter. In Turfan as in the rest of China in the reform era, everything is about money. Fat Ma said they were having a Flaming Mountain fever right now – half a million people had visited Turfan the year before. ‘We should put a billboard on the road, saying “Ideal Photo Spot for the Flaming Mountain”,’ he said excitedly. ‘We will have a guard and charge fifty pence per photo. We will make a fortune.’ He seemed to be intoxicated by his dream of riches – or maybe it was just the heat.
Before I read Xuanzang’s biography the only thing I knew of him in Turfan was the Flaming Mountain story – and this is still true for most Chinese. I had no idea that it was here in Turfan that the real Xuanzang, by his courage and determination, gave his pilgrimage a solid chance of success. He arrived here penniless, with a warrant over his he
ad, far from certain that he could survive the journey. Now he could carry on with every hope of fulfilling his dream. The king of Gaochang provided him with everything he would need: clothes to suit all weathers, one hundred ounces of gold and three piles of silver pieces, and five hundred rolls of satin and taffeta as donations to major monasteries. He was also given thirty horses, twenty-four servants and five monks to look after him as far as India and back. But most important of all, the king wrote state letters to be presented to the twenty-four different kingdoms along the way. In particular, he asked the Great Khan of the Western Turks, who controlled the whole of Central Asia at the time, to protect the Chinese monk. Xuanzang wrote these words that expressed all the elegance of his mind and his depth of feeling:
For all these favours, I feel ashamed of myself and do not know how to express my gratitude. Even the overflow of the Jiaohe River does not compare with your kindness, and your favour is weightier than the Pamir Mountains. Now I have no more worries for my journey … If I succeed in my purpose, to what shall I owe my achievements? To nothing but the king’s favour.
The contrast between fiction and reality could not be greater.
The Monkey King has hidden the real Xuanzang, but the fiction has an important role to play. Life for most people in China had always been oppressive. They were subjugated by hardship and tyranny and The Monkey King was cathartic, not just as a rich and colourful fantasy world, but as the story of a maverick spirit who symbolized what we could only dream of: rebellion. It was sheer magic. The thrill of reading it for the first time is still with me.
But it had another significance: it carried any number of Buddhist messages. I remember Grandmother trying to explain some of them to me. She said although the monkey could fly up to Heaven and dive into hell, slay dragons and subdue demons, he could also be arrogant, jealous, angry, greedy, selfish and harmful. That was why Guanyin gave him another name, Wukong, meaning ‘Understanding Emptiness’. Guanyin hoped the monkey would come to appreciate the limits of his power and the vanity of life. We even had a saying: ‘Mighty the monkey may be, but even with his 180,000-league jump, he can never escape from the palm of the Buddha.’ The monk, on the other hand, was kind, loving, selfless and compassionate. He had the Way – that was the secret of his power over the mighty monkey whom he kept under control simply by reciting the Heart Sutra. It did not make sense to me at the time. Now I can see what Grandmother meant. In fact, the last sentences of The Monkey King, which I had not taken in before, make it very clear: ‘I dedicate this work to the glory of Buddha’s Pure Land. May it repay the kindness of patron and preceptor, may it mitigate the sufferings of the lost and damned. May all who read it or hear it read find their hearts turned towards Truth, and in the end be born again in the Realms of Utter Bliss.’
There was one more thing I wanted to see in Turfan: the archaeological museum. Before I visited it the next morning, I took a walk around the old part of the city. It was pleasant, still full of traditional courtyards, each under its canopy of vine-hung trellises. The inhabitants sat under the vines, enjoying the shade, and the cool of the damp earth that they frequently spray with water. There is a central bazaar, with Uighur women in their bright printed dresses and old men in their skull caps tending the stalls. They sell a huge variety of fruits, fresh as well as dried. Visitors stock up with them, not because they will not be able to buy more on their journeys but because the fruits are so sweet – the result of all the sun and the pure oasis water.
The new part of Turfan, unlike most Chinese cities, is spacious and clean, with wide streets planted with trees. The museum is located in a quiet corner. The collection here testifies to the vast wealth accumulated by a Silk Road oasis kingdom over two thousand years. It is a goldmine: silk brocades, figurines of foreign merchants, the travel documents they carried, murals, scroll paintings and Buddhist scriptures, even desiccated bread and cakes – many from Xuanzang’s time. There is also a segment of Xuanzang’s Record of the Western Regions, believed by scholars to have been a gift from his disciples to the descendants of King Qu Wentai.
A rich hoard, but perhaps the shortage of funds makes it impossible for them to do a proper job about the exhibits. The rooms are dark and gloomy and the dusty display cases look like antiques themselves. The exhibits progress chronologically: on the ground floor from the neolithic age, to stone, bronze, primitive, feudal societies, and a collection of blackened mummies on the first floor.
The mummies are behind glass. In any museum in Europe, they would be a sensation. But the room is humid and hot, and they have mostly darkened as if they came from Africa. But they are in fact Caucasian, as you can see from one woman’s hair, a golden, straw colour. She is from a people believed by many scholars to be the earliest residents of the Taklamakan Desert, going back to 2000 BC. But why and how they came here, to one of the most inhospitable places on earth, nobody is sure. Fat Ma told me there was one mummy of a man who had actually met Xuanzang, but it had been shipped to Urumqi, the capital city of the region, some eight hundred miles away. This was General Zhangxiong. He had been a magnificent man, almost six feet tall and barrel-chested as befits a great warrior. The stele in his tomb said that he was the commander-in-chief of King Qu Wentai’s army. He would have been ordered by the king to go and listen to the pilgrim’s teaching; also the king had insisted that his entire court come with him to say goodbye to Xuanzang. They rode with him for several miles. General Zhangxiong died in 633, six years after Xuanzang’s departure from Gaochang.
While I was looking at the precious objects behind the dusty glass, I could not help thinking that if Xuanzang had his proper place in history as a great national hero, his experience here in Turfan would have made him the focal point in the museum. They could re-create the rich culture of a lost oasis kingdom on the Silk Road and weave in the story of Xuanzang’s dramatic experience here. It could be as absorbing as the theme park: it might even surprise the visitors and give them something really valuable, and true, to remember. Instead we seem to value him less today than the king did. As Hui Li tells us: ‘On the day of departure, the king and the monks, the ministers and commoners – everyone came out to see the Master off. The king embraced him with tears, while the monks and laymen all felt sad. Their cries resounded in the desert sky.’
* Anxi here refers to the Western Region.
FOUR
Exile and Exotica
TURFAN STATION is a lonely point in the silence of the desert. It looks more like a place to be stranded than somewhere you could leave from. The sun had set, and the cool of twilight replaced the day’s burning heat. This was the most pleasant time for the Silk Road merchants to travel, but not the safest. My train was standing there; I thought I was late and scrambled on to it. From inside, I saw the silhouettes of a number of armed policemen.
The train was for Korla; from there it would be another four hours by car to Kucha, where Xuanzang stayed for over two months. Before I had time to warm up my seat, the ticket collector came to check our identity cards and passports, asking where I got on and where I would disembark. A transport policeman burst in ten minutes later and demanded to see our documents again. He stared at me for some time and then made a comparison with my passport photograph.
‘Are you looking for criminals on the run?’ I joked with him.
‘What criminals? It’s my job,’ he said gravely. Before he left he turned to me: ‘Please look after your belongings carefully. If you have a lock, please lock your luggage to the legs of the beds or the table. If not, please put everything under your pillow.’
I thanked him. It was strange that he made so much fuss, but it was better to be safe.
I looked at the Uighur couple sitting opposite me. The man threw up his arms, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his conversation in Uighur, which I did not understand. I felt like an intruder and decided to leave them alone until bedtime. I walked along the corridor, from one carriage to another, till I could go no further. The door w
as locked and a dark blue curtain was drawn over the glass of the next carriage door. A Chinese man was smoking in the corridor and I asked him if there were some VIPs in there – the security arrangements seemed unnecessarily tight for mere mortals. He laughed: ‘You don’t live in Xinjiang, do you? You are sharing this ride with criminals on their way to labour camp. When you got on the train didn’t you notice the windows in some of the carriages had their curtains drawn?’
Xuanzang could have done with more security for this leg of his journey. He no longer needed to worry about being discovered – he was in the Western Region, outside Tang territory and beyond the control of the emperor. King Qu Wentai had equipped him as a royal envoy, opening all doors for him. But bandits, the biggest threat to the Silk Road caravans, lurked around every corner. Shortly after leaving Gaochang, Xuanzang and his men were stopped by a group of robbers, who were fortunately content with just a share of their supplies. But the scores of foreign merchants in his company were not so lucky: they set out in the middle of the night to cover more ground and when he caught up with them in the morning, he saw their bodies scattered, the sand underneath soaked with blood, their riches gone. They had travelled barely three miles. Hui Li says that Xuanzang was ‘deeply affected’ by the incident, and made sure they stayed off the road at night after that.
Xinjiang has more robbers and criminals today – but they are behind bars. When China finally brought the region under control in the eighteenth century, it immediately became the most important place of exile. Too many executions would reduce the legitimacy of the emperor; after all, he was supposed to rule with the mandate of Heaven. Banishment demonstrated benevolence and provided the new frontier with manpower. Furthest from the capital, and shielded on three sides by impassable mountains and a huge, hostile desert, Xinjiang was ideal for the purpose. It was where serious offenders from all over the country were sent – political dissidents, disgraced officials and scholars, rebels of all religious sects and murderers. It was China’s Siberia. We used it like the British who transported their prisoners to Australia.
