Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  I asked Galina what food they took with them when they climbed. ‘It’s different now, with lots of convenience food. But in the Silk Road days, they had a lot of dried meat, dried fruits and nans. If they happened to kill a wild boar or an antelope, they could roast it whole, or cut the meat up and package it in the animals’ stomachs. You left them in the ashes of your bonfire. The next morning you would have a delicious stew. Of course, Xuanzang would not have touched it. But there are wild mushrooms, walnuts, pistachios, juniper berries, apple trees in the ancient forests – lots of nutritious things, good for medicine too. All the caravan leaders knew their life-saving properties. But a real feast for a caravan when they had done a big deal was to get hold of a partridge, a pheasant, a ram, a wild boar and a horse. Some say a camel as well but I doubt it: they are so important. Very expensive too. Anyway, I would leave it out. You put the animals inside each other and roast them till they are done. It would make a great banquet.’

  I was tempted by the idea of going up the mountain. It was not like the other overland route between China and Kyrgyzstan, where you simply drove through customs. This was actually the real adventure, as Xuanzang had done it. I asked Galina how it was organized. ‘We should have three or four groups now, coming along the Silk Road from Kashgar in Xinjiang, but they have all cancelled. This hostage crisis has really affected us, and the whole town. We live on the tourism of the Silk Road, just as our ancestors did on its trade. After drug trafficking, tourism is the biggest foreign currency earner, but it’s not happening this year. I have had only half a dozen backpackers like you. Normally we would have twenty times more around now,’ Galina said ruefully. ‘The good thing is,’ she added, ‘you have our fullest attention.’ Alas, though, I could not do the climb. I had to go with a group. As with the old caravans, you needed security in numbers, especially now.

  After breakfast next morning, Galina took me to see Lake Issyk-kul, which I had only glimpsed the evening before. As we drove along the shore I could see the white summits of the Heavenly Mountains filling the horizon, and below them a green expanse of forest and pasture, hemmed by fertile fields alongside the road. By the lake birches, poplars and apple trees rustled in the mild breeze, and beyond them stretched the water, a rippling, dark, cerulean blue. Xuanzang must have been relieved to reach here and find some repose after his escape from the avalanche, although he must have arrived on a much windier day: ‘This lake is about 500 kilometres in circuit, extensive from east to west, and narrow from north to south. It is surrounded by mountains on all sides; a great number of rivers flow into it. The colour of the water is a bluish-black and it tastes salty and bitter. Its vast waves spread out in immense sheets, and they swell and heave violently.’ The sense of brooding threat Xuanzang so vividly describes seemed unimaginable now, with the lake under a calm blue sky. He observed it with his usual accuracy. He called it Hot Sea, as the Chinese still do, and said it never freezes because it is so deep. He added what the local people probably told him: ‘Dragons and fish live in it and occasionally some monsters rise to the surface. Although the lake is abundant with fish, nobody dares catch them. Even travellers passing by stop to pray for their safety and fortune.’

  I thought the myths he relates had vanished: I saw women by the roadside selling fresh and smoked salmon and trout. ‘We look all the same to you, don’t we – just as we think all Chinese are alike,’ Galina read my mind. ‘But those women are Russian. We don’t fish in the lake. In fact, the Kyrgyz did not eat fish until the nineteen-seventies. Even today many old people refuse to touch it. They think it will bring them bad luck. The first time my mother ate fish, a bone stuck in her throat. She thought she was being punished by the monster in the lake.’ Galina laughed. She told me that the old people never swam in the lake either. They were worried it would disturb the monster sleeping at the bottom. To the Kyrgyz, Issyk-kul is sacred, to be worshipped and prayed to. In the spring, people living around the lake make their ritual offerings for rain and a good harvest.

  ‘That’s what is so amazing about Xuanzang,’ Galina exclaimed. ‘He came here thirteen hundred years ago and wrote down what he saw and heard. Today, people still believe it. Nobody was like him. OK, Marco Polo found a ram and called it Marco Polo’s sheep, Przhevalsky named a wild horse after himself, but Xuanzang left us invaluable information. Ecologists are very pleased to have his description from so long ago. They can see how the lake has changed over the centuries.’

  That afternoon we went to the market. For a moment I was not sure where I was. There were rows of stalls selling the exact same things I would find in China: pickled vegetables, spring onions, coriander, Chinese leaves, bean curd, jeans, sweaters, children’s clothes, and utensils. The women behind the stalls looked just like me; they wore the same dress as peasant women in northern China, bold floral patterns in bright red, green, yellow and pink. I smiled at them and they smiled back. Then they started talking animatedly in an incomprehensible dialect.

  ‘Where are they from?’ I asked them through Guljan.

  ‘Shanxi in northern China, also Gansu,’ several women said at once.

  ‘When did they come here?’

  ‘More than a hundred years ago,’ they said loudly in chorus. Meanwhile more women were joining us. We chatted a bit longer, but Galina was worried the gathering crowd would disrupt the market. She suggested we go to the mosque to find out more.

  The mosque was closed. Galina thought for a moment. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said. ‘The women in the market all come from the big Dongan village fifteen kilometres away. There must be lots of old folk there.’ Her husband had visited it once and he could take us. He agreed immediately. He was a charming man, not very talkative – he hardly put in a word at dinner the night before – but full of information whenever I asked him anything – except about the Dongans. ‘They keep very much to themselves and have nothing to do with us, except for selling us stuff.’

  There was hardly a soul in the village, apart from a group of children playing in the street. Guljan asked them where their parents were. ‘In the fields,’ they replied. They were looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and excitement, pulling at my bag and my shirt and gabbling at me in their language, thinking I would understand. Guljan had to explain to them in Kyrgyz that I came from Beijing, to which they replied that their great-great-grandfathers came from Shanxi. We asked them if they could show us their homes. Now they were all pulling me – I chose the nearest one.

  As in a northern Chinese village, all the houses had wooden latticed doors with carved lintels above them, and old trees on either side. In the courtyard there were heaps of onions, potatoes and tomatoes, and farm tools. The main room was dominated by a huge kang, the baked-earth bed that was heated up by the kitchen stove during cooking. There were photographs on the walls, wedding pictures and family portraits, with every woman wearing the brightly coloured, elaborate traditional Chinese dress that we put on for ceremonials. The quilts, the calendar, the chairs, the teapot and cups, even the food left over on the table – everything was Chinese.

  In the village mosque, we found a young man, Hamid Yusupov, who was training to be an imam. He was born in the village and grew up there. He greeted me warmly, shaking both my hands. We still had to communicate through Guljan: he could not understand my Mandarin, nor I his Shanxi dialect. The story he told was shocking. Most Chinese Muslims lived in the northwest of China. We call them ‘Hui Hui’, the people who must go back to where they came from. In 1862, Hamid explained, they started a rebellion that lasted fifteen years and almost brought down the Chinese empire. The Muslims’ grievance was an old one: oppression by the Han Chinese. ‘Allah says hell is where all evils are but this world is worse than hell,’ one Muslim rebel groaned at the time.

  The imperial army put down the rebellion after a protracted campaign: whole villages were massacred, and their farms and forests burned. Those who survived the reprisals were uprooted from their homes and resettled in wild, isolate
d places to prevent them for making trouble again, but not too isolated, so the government could keep an eye on them. In Gansu Province, two million Muslims, 60 per cent of the population, were killed; in Shanxi, where Hamid’s great-grandparents came from, they were almost wiped out. The remaining rebels and their families were pushed right to the border of China and Russia. Facing the daunting peaks of the Heavenly Mountains, and the pursuing Chinese army, they decided to cross over into what was then Russia.

  Most of them succumbed to the deep snow and freezing cold. Hamid’s great-grandfather lost most members of his family: his mother, with her bound feet, could not keep up the pace and he had to abandon her halfway up the mountain; his two young sons kept themselves warm at night by sleeping under the belly of a cow but he found them frozen to death one morning. Only six thousand out of fifty thousand people survived, and very few of them were women. ‘But we have not been exterminated,’ Hamid said proudly. ‘Allah knows how much we wanted to live, to carry on our faith, to seek a new homeland where we can live in peace, dignity and justice.’ His village was where the first group of survivors came to, in January 1878, when they struggled down the northern slope of the mountains, beaten, cold, hungry, but defiant.

  Today the Dongans have grown into a community of 100,000, dispersed in pockets in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. They are still expanding: their women have an average of seven children.

  ‘We have to preserve our people and culture,’ Hamid said.

  I told him the Dongans seemed to me more Chinese than the people in China.

  ‘We marry among ourselves and try to keep our traditions intact. Otherwise who are we? We would be like plants without roots, shadows without substance. Besides, our great-grandfathers would have sacrificed for nothing if we lost what they treasured. But we would never have left if we had not been forced to. We love our country and still feel attached to it.’

  I know something of how he felt. However long I stay in the West, I will never lose my attachment to China. Living in England has given me so much freedom, so much opportunity to explore myself and discover what I am capable of. I remember the first time I told my mother that I wanted to make documentary films; she just laughed, and said ‘You?’ – as if this was some wild fantasy that might possibly be realized if I had a beautiful face or married somebody powerful in the right position. In China we believe our circumstances tell us what we can do. ‘Toads should not dream of turning into swans.’

  All the same I will always feel Chinese in my bones. More than anything else, the ease of shared assumptions and values, the power of the language and the culture, and the pride in our long civilization, tell me who I am. And that is not going to change. All the pain my family went through in this century, in the company of most Chinese, does not affect that. On the contrary, it reinforces my sense of where I belong. I write and speak English all day long, but I dream in Chinese.

  After two most memorable days, Galina and her husband put me and Guljan on the bus back to Bishkek. I wished I had been able to stay longer and learn more; they had been so warm and helpful. Guljan said it was because they had nomadic blood in their veins. ‘That’s what makes them friendly and welcoming to strangers.’

  As our bus toiled along the lake, I noticed the hosts of Muslim tombs that crowd up to the edge of the road, the grandest of them surmounted by arches with little towers on either side, topped by domes or crescent moons. Inside the arch is a black-and-white photo of the deceased, looking out at the water. With the mountains behind them and the beautiful lake in front, they need no other paradise. It is here. I had to ask Guljan, though, why with so much space they do not build the tombs further back.

  ‘They are nomadic people too. They live on their own with their herds most of the time. It is very lonely. So in their next life they want to be with others, enjoying the company of cars, horses, tourist groups, holidaymakers. It makes up for the silence of their lives.’

  Did their nomadic life make them less religious than the other Central Asian peoples?

  ‘I guess we Kyrgyz are not very religious really,’ Guljan said. ‘We worship nature more than anything else – the sun, the moon, the rain, the earth. Anyway the nomads cannot come down from the mountains and go to the mosque every Friday, can they?’

  I had heard from John that young Kyrgyz were also joining the IMU. ‘They are paid to fight the jihad,’ Guljan said, much to my surprise, ‘quite a handsome salary too, by our standards, ten or fifteen dollars a day. How can they make a living otherwise? Nothing is working in this country. Eighty per cent of young people are unemployed. They are desperate. They will do anything for money.’ Guljan told me that poverty forced over four thousand Kyrgyz women to work as prostitutes abroad, some of them in China – they earned more foreign currency than tourism, second only to drug trafficking.

  It was a sad, if familiar, story: many parts of China had yet to overcome the backlog of inefficiency left by the socialist economy. So the calm of Bishkek, which I had found so charming, was not a blessing, but a sign of stagnation. Still, I really liked it. After my return from Karakul in the late afternoon, I went to the Pubovy Park in the city, a haven of trees and sculptures, with ancient stone statues, simple and organic, next to gigantic busts of heroic socialist workers and abstract modern works, even a giant statue of the head of the Soviet secret police. In front of the grand State Opera House, a few magicians were entertaining a group of children, producing pigeons from nowhere and making their hats disappear in the air. Their young audience was completely absorbed; a Silk Road tradition was still alive.

  Xuanzang would have had magicians, storytellers, fire-eaters and acrobats in the caravans he travelled with, who were mostly from today’s Central Asia. A ceramic figure of the Tang dynasty has a whole group of them on camel-back, on a platform – the best camels were said to be able to run with a cup of water on their noses, and not spill a drop. Each night performers took turns telling stories and doing their acts. Xuanzang would have made his own contribution by preaching. Monks could also be useful when the caravans went through customs – they did not have to pay tax, and sometimes they would carry goods for the merchants, which they said were for religious purposes. I am sure Xuanzang never stooped to this.

  Apart from its acrobats, musicians and dancers, Kyrgyzstan fires the imagination of the Chinese for another reason. Ak-beshim is called Suiye in Chinese. Here Xuanzang had one of the most important encounters on his entire journey, with the powerful Khan of the Western Turks. Here once lay the frontier of the Chinese empire at its biggest and most powerful during the Tang dynasty. I had to go there.

  John’s driver, Dima, came to pick me up with Guljan. John had also sought out Valentina, an archaeologist in her early fifties from the State Slavonic University working on pre-Islamic history, a rare speciality in Kyrgyzstan. If the shock of discovery on my arrival had left its shadow on my mind, I forgot all about it in the company of these three wonderful characters. Dima was a young Russian of heavy build and few words, who exuded an impressive but slightly dangerous authority. While Guljan was her usual quiet self, Valentina was a redhead, a bundle of energy, warmth and knowledge. She was so excited at meeting someone interested in what she did, she never stopped talking. She could not wait for Guljan to translate for me, and seemed to think we could talk to each other despite the language barrier. Occasionally she slowed down, when I was completely lost and turned to Guljan in desperation. After Valentina had spoken for ten minutes, ending with a sigh, Guljan could only sum up in one sentence. ‘Most of my colleagues are working on the Muslim period, as if nothing existed before.’

  Valentina had been with Japanese archaeologists on digs in Ak-beshim. It was a flourishing Silk Road town when Xuanzang arrived; his was the earliest record of it. Not long after, it became a garrison for the Chinese army when Taizong’s son defeated the Western Turks and took over their empire. It took us an hour to get there. To a casual eye, it looks like baked earth, as if farmers have b
een digging out mud to make bricks. There were remains of soldiers’ quarters, monastic cells, a palace – but it was not much to look at. After one glance Dima decided to wait for us in the jeep. ‘Why are you wasting your time here?’ he said to me. ‘If you really want to see something of the Silk Road, you should go to Samarkand or Bukhara. The bazaars are so colourful, and the mosques are spectacular.’

  But Valentina knew its value; to her it was a mine of information. She surveyed her kingdom of ruins with pride, and spoke to me excitedly. ‘This was a junction of the routes across the Taklamakan and over the Heavenly Mountains, and the grassland routes to the north. Our excavations were very much based on Xuanzang’s information. He says the town was about three and a half kilometres in circumference, which turned out to be very close to what we found. Xuanzang also says that merchants from surrounding countries congregated and lived here. They supplied the caravans with horses and camels, trading their leather, fur and livestock for luxury goods from the east and west.’ Then she opened her bulky bag and took out half a dozen pictures. The first one showed a pile of Chinese coins, round with a square hole in the middle. ‘We found so many of these here. Everyone must have used them. I think they would have been as popular as US dollars today. It was the profit from the Silk Road. That was one of the main reasons the Turks were prepared to fight you Chinese at any cost. Do you remember Xuanzang’s first impression of the Khan?’

  Hui Li has given us an amazingly detailed and colourful account of Xuanzang’s meeting with the Khan. What struck Xuanzang first was the Khan’s beautiful horses and the silk which was everywhere. The Khan ‘wears a coat of green satin, and his hair is loose, pulled back from his forehead with a silk band some ten feet long which drapes down his back. On his left and right stand two hundred officers, all clothed in splendid costumes of brocade silk. Outside are the troops mounted on camels or horses, dressed in fur and fine woollen cloth, carrying long lances, banners and straight bows; the line stretches so far that the eye cannot tell where it ends.’