by Sun Shuyun
The Communist government inherited much of the practice of its dynastic predecessors. Each political campaign – and there were quite a few – created a wave of prisoners, many of whom ended in labour camps in Xinjiang. Periodic crack-downs on crime, together with a regular stream of serious offenders, added to their numbers. In the old days, criminals were treated like slaves. No matter how hard they worked, they could never redeem themselves. They were not allowed to leave Xinjiang even after they finished their sentences, and their descendants made up a large proportion of the ethnic Chinese population in the region. Banished officials were dealt with more leniently: no one was sure whether the emperor might not one day realize the wisdom of their criticisms and call them back. Writing about exile has long been a genre in Chinese literature, and thrillers involving the police and escaped convicts from Xinjiang are a new source of entertainment in movies and television dramas. But it was something much closer to home that I had always associated with Xinjiang – my aunt.
My aunt, Father’s sister, came to Xinjiang in 1952. She had seen pictures of it at a government recruiting fair in her village. She said it looked like heaven on earth: under the crystal blue sky, cows and sheep roamed on the endless grasslands; water from the melting snows irrigated fertile land; grapes and melons were as sweet as the handsome Uighur boys and girls. She was also promised a place in a factory. My paternal grandfather was horrified and pleaded with her not to go: ‘No one in their right mind would want to go there. That’s where they send prisoners.’ But she would not listen to his pleas. She did not want to stay in the village all her life; Xinjiang was her ticket to freedom and a passport to the world. One night she left secretly, without telling her parents.
My earliest thought of my aunt was the belief that she lived somewhere beyond the moon. It came from a repeated threat from my parents whenever I misbehaved: ‘If you are naughty again, we will send you to join your aunt. You will never see us any more!’ When I learned to write, I was encouraged to correspond with her and her family. I was told not to mention our life – it would make them homesick. I simply reiterated how much we missed them and always ended the letter by saying ‘we hope to see you some day’. I soon began to realize that day was far away. Mother said the journey would take seven days by train and another day by bus. Neither family could afford the fares but I never stopped repeating my hope until at last my aunt, uncle and their four children came to see us in 1980, after saving up for years. My father and I visited them in 1982. For the rest of the time, letters kept us close. We also had an annual ritual. Every Chinese New Year, our family would have a group photo taken with all of us grinning madly. We would put it in a parcel with sweets, peanuts, a long letter, a small sum of money, and sometimes a luxury like a radio. My mother still performs it after forty years: ‘It is our way of saying we have not abandoned her.’
Before I began my journey, my mother prepared another package, with the most recent photograph of the family, a letter, and a bottle of whisky for my uncle. I felt divided about seeing my aunt, who now lived in Korla. I could not wait to spend some time with her and the family after all these years. But I also dreaded the waves of emotion that my coming would evoke. Aunt and Uncle were retired now, and could think of nothing but their desire to come back home. As the Chinese say, falling leaves return to their roots. It would all pour out. And they would be worried about where I was going and want to come with me. I decided, hard though it was, to wait till I came back from Kucha before I called them.
I did have someone else to look up in Korla; a professor of Islamic studies in Beijing had recommended him to me as a guide and interpreter. The Chinese have this saying: ‘Rely on your parents when you are at home; rely on friends when you are travelling.’ Xuanzang used a different system: he had the monasteries. Wherever there was a Buddhist monastery – and there were plenty on the Silk Road in his day – he would find food, lodging and the information he needed.
Salim was waiting for me at the station early next morning, ready with his overnight backpack. He held up my name on a piece of paper – I appreciated his giving up the whole day for me. ‘Please don’t mention it,’ he said in a friendly way. ‘I have always wanted to see those wonderful caves in Kucha myself. Now you are giving me the opportunity. I can also practise my English.’ Salim was a schoolteacher. I could not tell his age: he had dark hair and a short beard, and a somewhat resigned look, but he spoke warmly.
A Uighur driver was waiting for us at the taxi rank. Salim gave him directions in Uighur and in no time I found myself in the centre of a brand-new city, with wide boulevards, grand government buildings and smart high-rise apartment blocks. It was not what I had expected: it was like a prosperous metropolis on the coast, modern and full of promise, not a city in the desert, thousands of miles from the sea. There was no characteristic Islamic architecture in sight, nor many Uighurs.
We were driving slowly on a narrow tarmac road in the country, our taxi jostling with large flocks of sheep, donkey carts driven by old men, and trucks with heavy loads. Tall poplars shaded the road; the fields on both sides were green with orchards. We were back on the Silk Road, the route Xuanzang would have travelled on to Kucha. I was curious to know what Salim thought of Xuanzang.
‘After you told me what you were doing, I bought a copy of your monk’s book and glanced through it. I want to be a proper guide, you know.
‘I think Xuanzang was first and foremost a Han Chinese, and then a Buddhist monk.’ He looked at me to make his point. ‘Although he was a great master, he did not treat people as equals. If you read his descriptions carefully, they were not exactly flattering about us nomads, especially those who were not Buddhists. He described them as violent, greedy and vulgar-looking. Anyway his book was as much military information as a pilgrim’s account.
‘Let’s take Kucha for example. Xuanzang said the country was very big, in fact the biggest oasis in the Western Region, with mild weather all year round. The soil was good for growing millet and wheat, rice, pears, peaches and apricots. It was rich in gold, copper, iron and lead. Monks did not need this information. It was for the Chinese army. In fact, it says in the preface that the book was written at the request of the emperor.’
That was an interesting take on Xuanzang, one I had never heard before. Salim had done his homework very thoroughly. Emperor Taizong, the very emperor who forbade Xuanzang to leave, did ask him on his return to write down in detail what he had seen and heard of the countries he travelled through. The result was the Record of the Western Regions, mostly about Buddhism but with many passages of no obvious interest to pilgrims. I had not thought about it that way, but I could see Salim’s point: the information could be very useful for imperial expansion, which was exactly what the emperor had in mind.
Still, what impressed Xuanzang about Kucha, or Qiuzi as it was called then, was its flourishing Buddhist community. He tells us there were over one hundred monasteries, with five thousand monks who were all very diligent in their studies. A large number of them turned out to greet him. They put up tents outside the city, with Buddhist statues in them. They played their drums and cymbals and chanted as he approached, and gave him flowers to offer to the Buddhas. It took him until sunset to go around all the tents, receiving the monks’ homage. He must have regretted missing the biggest celebration of the year at the autumnal equinox. The monks told him how they decorated their statues with silk and precious stones and paraded them on carriages through the city, drawing thousands of people to watch. They assembled with monks from all over the country outside the Western Gate in front of two giant images of the Buddha, ninety feet high. They stayed there for several weeks and the king and all the people came out to fast, and to listen to great masters preaching. Xuanzang would no doubt want to consult the masters himself.
My first sight of Kucha was a single long empty street lined with shopfronts that seemed to be clones of each other: they were all decorated with shiny white tiles reflecting the glaring deser
t sun, hardly enticing for customers. There was not a single tree in sight. The Uighurs always planted trees anywhere they moved into. But this was a settlement for the Han Chinese, with everything copied from China proper, no thought given to local culture.
My heart sank. ‘Sadly all the towns and cities in Xinjiang are like this, as if they had been built to the same plan,’ Salim said, observing the disappointment on my face. ‘Xuanzang would not have recognized this place. It used to be rich, fertile and independent. Now it is full of criminals, nuclear waste and Han Chinese migrant workers. Even when I was small, I remember I could pick wild fruit in the city. An open water conduit ran in front of our house directly from the mountains. Now the water is drying up; the desert is swallowing the oases; and I haven’t heard birds singing for a long time – there is so little forest left. It’s nature telling us there are too many people here.’
The relations between the Chinese and the Uighurs were quite different in Xuanzang’s time. The Uighurs were much feared, admired and needed by the Chinese. Their constant threat to the Chinese apart, they actually came to our rescue when our capital, Chang’an, was sacked by the Tibetans in the eighth century. But perhaps they may still regret, even to this day, their decision to supply China with the means for their own defeat. The Chinese had realized the significance of horses since the first century BC. Their paramount importance was stated very clearly in the Tang Annals, the record of the Tang dynasty: ‘Horses are the military preparedness of the state; if Heaven takes them away, the state will totter to a fall.’ In exchange for horses, the Chinese court was obliged to humble itself in many ways, not least by giving large quantities of silk as gifts. For a dowry of fifty thousand horses, a royal princess could be married off to a Turkic prince.
But it was the Uighurs who controlled the horse trade. They regularly brought herds of thousands of ponies to the Chinese frontier and charged an exorbitant forty bolts of silk for a pony worth only one bolt. One year they sent a special agent with ten thousand horses for sale, many decrepit and old. Their price was more than the annual income of the government from taxes. The emperor thought long and hard, and finally took six thousand of them. He tolerated this unequal trade and referred to it in the euphemism of ‘Uighur tributes to the court’, but it was really their way of paying back the Uighurs for their assistance against the Tibetans, and, more importantly, buying time for their own military preparations. Steadily the cavalry of the Tang dynasty was built up from a few thousand horses to over one million, crucial for the expansion of the Tang empire, and for keeping the nomadic marauders at bay.
Throughout our conversation, Salim was speaking slowly and forcefully from the front seat, occasionally turning to me to get his points across. His profile was that of a typical Uighur man: thick eyebrows, big eyes in deep sockets, straight nose, with a haughty expression. Uighur men were much admired in Xuanzang’s time by Chinese women; the women rode about the streets of Chang’an wearing Turkish caps and men’s riding clothes and boots. A Tang emperor had to pass an edict forbidding the Uighurs in Chang’an to ‘lure’ Chinese women into becoming their wives or concubines. I told Salim that. He did not find it amusing. ‘Very few Uighur men would dare to do it today, even with no emperor to disapprove. They would be ostracized by their own people.’
How about his coming on this trip with me?
‘Oh, there are plenty of unemployed Uighur men looking for jobs,’ Salim said seriously. ‘They would think I am your guide, interpreter or even bodyguard. I can tell you that not many Chinese women dare to travel on their own in Xinjiang today. It is not safe.’
Then he asked for my guidebook. ‘Let’s see what it says about Kucha. “Population: thirty thousand”, perhaps a third of what it was in Xuanzang’s time, three-quarters being Uighurs. “Religion: Islam”, with three big mosques in the old town, but six Buddhist sites. “Climate: mild with no rain”, the same as in the Tang dynasty, but I think it is getting worse. “Local specialities: Kucha women and music”, inherited from at least your monk’s days, if not earlier.’ I laughed – he was copying the way Xuanzang described Kucha in the Record. ‘Don’t worry. We will find Xuanzang’s Kucha,’ Salim said confidently, ‘on the walls of the Kizil Caves.’
‘I hope so,’ I said, but I was not so sure now.
After finding a hotel for the night and eating a quick lunch in its restaurant, we headed off for the Kizil Caves, an hour’s drive away. The car stopped at the edge of a welcoming stretch of green oasis. From there a rough path wound through bushes and trees, towards the mountain. At its foot a cluster of poplars shades the Kizil Research Institute. Beyond it, the caves, dozens of them, hang from the huge, rugged rock face. Kizil means red in the Uighur language, and in the midday sun it was almost glowing. Xuanzang did not mention the caves – we do not even know what they were called back then. But he must have seen them. This is the oldest Buddhist cave site in China, and in his time, the biggest in the Western Region. They date from the third to the ninth century, and the peak of activity was in the sixth and seventh centuries, just when he was in Kucha. Hui Li tells us he spent some time visiting the sights in and out of the capital.
But what would have moved him most about Kucha was that it was the birthplace of his great hero and his inspiration, Kumarajiva. Xuanzang had learned Buddhism from Kumarajiva’s translations of the sutras, as many monks in China still do, alongside his own. Born to an Indian father and the royal princess of Kucha, Kumarajiva went at the age of seven to Kashmir, the centre of learning of his time, to study Sanskrit and Buddhism. After he returned to Kucha his reputation became such that when a Chinese army attacked in 385 AD, the order was to bring him back to China alive. The Chinese emperor admired him so much that he surrounded Kumarajiva with beautiful and intelligent women so they could produce his heirs. He spent the rest of his life in Liangzhou and then in Chang’an, translating the sutras into Chinese, with the help of the hundreds of monks assigned to him. He did more than anyone else before Xuanzang to propagate the teachings of the Buddha in China. Before he died, he told his disciples: ‘Accept my work but do not take my life as an ideal. The lotus grows from the mud. Love the lotus but not the mud.’
Near the entrance to the institute stood a bronze statue of Kumarajiva, in the posture of Rodin’s Thinker. While I was pondering his extraordinary life and how he inspired Xuanzang, Salim was buying our entry tickets. He returned with a young man called Jia who would be our guide. After a very brief exchange and an offer of cigarettes, Salim discovered they had both studied at Xinjiang University. He asked Jia to show us the caves with the best frescoes from Xuanzang’s time. ‘The best are in Berlin,’ he told us apologetically. ‘The Germans spent a lot of time in Kucha from 1902 to 1914 and took the best murals away.’ The chief perpetrator, Albert von Le Coq, was more than happy with his spoils in Kucha. In The Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, he wrote: ‘Everywhere we found fresh, untouched temples, full of the most interesting and artistically perfect paintings. The daily recurring surprises gave us such pleasure that we could smile at all life’s annoyances.’
‘But I will do my best,’ Jia said. He told us to follow him up a flight of stairs and then a steep hill. We stopped in front of Cave 205. It was dark inside and I could hardly see a thing. After our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we found ourselves staring at a blank wall.
‘What is this about?’ Salim asked.
‘You might have seen this photo already.’ Jia took out a booklet from his pocket and a torch, which he shone on the cover. ‘This mural used to be right here, in this cave. The German stole it,’ Jia said. The photograph showed a royal couple in the company of a monk. They are extravagantly dressed in gold and green robes. The woman has an ornate head-dress and the man what seems like a halo around his head. They have dark hair and round faces, with cheerful and benign expressions, looking to their left, with their heads slightly lowered. She is holding out the palm of her hand, more in pleasure than in blessing. ‘We think they were
the king and queen of Kucha from Xuanzang’s era. Look at them. Don’t you think they could be greeting a distinguished guest from afar, like your pilgrim himself?’
Xuanzang said that the king and queen turned out with the country’s monks to greet him and organized a welcoming banquet in the palace the next day. He felt honoured, but he did not think highly of his host. He tells us that the king was weak, a mere puppet of his powerful ministers, who realized that the Chinese empire was getting more powerful by the day and that it would be wise to keep their easterly neighbour happy. They wanted to find out more about the new Emperor Taizong from the Chinese monk. The last time the Chinese army took Kucha, they needed 20,000 camels and 10,000 horses to take the loot home. After meeting Xuanzang, the king sent a tribute of excellent horses to the Chinese court, hoping to placate the Chinese.
At the banquet, the king and queen must have entertained their important guest with the music for which Kucha was renowned along the Silk Road, from Chang’an to Samarkand. For centuries, thousands of Kuchean musicians and dancers dominated musical life at the Chinese court, introducing their melodies and exotic instruments: the lute, the harp and the long-necked drum. We even have the names of the tunes that might have been played to Xuanzang: ‘South India’, ‘Music of Kucha’, and ‘Watching the Moon in Brahman Land’.
But was music not more appropriate for royalty than for a monk? The Kucheans did not think so. They worshipped the Buddha with music and dance, the means of expression they knew best. The Buddha said music softens people’s hearts and puts them in a more receptive mood for the Dharma. No other people of the Silk Road elevated music to such prominence in their worship. Jia told us that the majority of the Kizil Caves had apsaras, heavenly beings, playing musical instruments while the Buddha was preaching or meditating. He showed us a particularly beautiful one on the rear ceiling of Cave 69. The apsara is soaring through the air, playing a lute. His torso is bare and his legs are covered with a swirling sarong. A green scarf, twined around his neck and arms, floats with him as though he is flying fast but effortlessly through the air. He is the very symbol of grace.
