Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  Xuanzang sent the letter with his trusted servant, and while he was waiting for a reply, he taught the King of Khotan and the monks about Yogacara and other sutras he had learned in India. He would also have spent some time visiting various places in the country because his record of Khotan was very detailed, perhaps second only to his account of the holy land of the Buddha. Reading Xuanzang, I often wondered why he recorded the things he did, apart from what was important to him as a Buddhist. Sometimes they seemed quite random; sometimes they seemed to be dictated by the emperor’s desire for information. But in Khotan I realized what his purpose was. He observed what really mattered to the people here, their faith and their very survival in this fragile oasis on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Nothing more and nothing less.

  I wanted to experience as much as possible of what Xuanzang saw and recorded: first, the Buddhist ruins which figured so prominently in his description. Here I had another guide besides Xuanzang, the British explorer Aurel Stein. Born of Hungarian parents in 1862, Stein from a very early age was fascinated by campaigns and travels in far-flung places. His hero was Alexander the Great, his guide and patron saint Xuanzang, his bible Record of the Western Regions, and his first expedition Khotan. In four explorations into western China spanning thirty years between 1900 and 1930 he retraced Xuanzang’s footsteps in the desert and excavated many sites described in the Record. What he found were some of the most extraordinary antiquities discovered in the twentieth century: rich hoards of documents in Kharoshthi, an ancient Indian script, buried in rubbish dumps; classical murals of winged angels painted by a Roman artist named Titus in a ruined monastery; countless stucco heads of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the Gandharan style; and most stunning of all, over ten thousand manuscripts from the Dunhuang Buddhist caves. Stein was hailed by some as ‘the greatest explorer of Asia since Marco Polo’ and was knighted by the British government for his contribution to the understanding of Central Asia. His secret weapon was Xuanzang. As he said proudly, ‘My well-known attachment to the memory of Xuanzang … had been helpful in securing me a sympathetic hearing both among the learned and the simple.’

  I called Yang the next morning about my plan in Khotan. She apologized for not having come to see me the night before: ‘You couldn’t have come at a worse time. The government has put us on a twenty-four-hour rota. Everyone was on duty last night. We are in a war situation.’

  She had more bad news for me: Fat Ma had asked her to find me a Land Rover to go into the desert, but due to the state of emergency, all vehicles were on standby and their use had to be given the go-ahead by the mayor’s office. She could not get any car, let alone a Land Rover. She would continue her search. She asked me what I would like to do in the meantime. Without hesitation, I said the bazaar, which I had heard was one of the most colourful in Xinjiang. There was a long silence. ‘Why don’t you rest for the morning? I can take you there during my lunch-break. It is not safe for you to go there on your own, especially now,’ said Yang gently. I could hear the concern in her voice, but she was busy and I could not sit in the hotel and venture out only when she could accompany me. I told her I would be very careful. ‘Don’t buy anything. Don’t bargain with them. Don’t linger,’ was her parting warning.

  The Khotan bazaar did not show itself immediately. You knew something was coming because the streets were full of people, carts and bicycles almost in gridlock. As you got closer, you began to hear the voices of stallholders crying their wares, rising to a great din once you were actually there. It was all in the open. A pall of sand and dust hung in the air and covered everything with a thin film. The huge bazaar was divided into hundreds of sections in a myriad of lanes, selling everything you could imagine.

  In a street leading from the eastern side of the bazaar was the market that sold the most prized commodity of Khotan – jade. It was everywhere, on stalls, on tables, on the ground, and being passed from hand to hand, in dazzling variety. It was all unworked, smoothed by water and picked up every September when the snows melt from the beds of the Karakash and the Yurungkash, the Black and White Jade Rivers. The locals used to believe that jade was feminine, so women would be better at finding it. Now the job was left to men, who seemed to have found plenty. There were huge brown rocks, smaller dark green stones with a glossy lustre, and the finest ones, tiny, translucent and milky-white, called Lamb’s-Tail-Fat. I felt like a child in a sweet shop, spoilt with choices. I wanted to touch, caress and hold every piece to my skin, like a man with a woman. It was clear why jade, especially the white varieties, represents female beauty to the Chinese: smooth, glowing and sensuous.

  Xuanzang of course tells us that Khotan was known for its jade, which the Chinese treasure more than gold. We have a saying, the best jade is worth more than scores of cities. The First Emperor sacked Handan, where I grew up, and killed 400,000 people, because he had been refused a famous jade disc. We have been besotted by this precious stone since the early Neolithic age. For a long time it was worshipped as a repository of divine power and used to honour the deities. But it was not reserved only for gods. Emperors loved to sleep on jade pillows which supposedly gave them wonderful dreams; aristocrats were buried in suits made of jade; officials wore girdles of jade plaques as tokens of their rank and prestige – the emblem of their office was a seal made of jade; Buddhists carved statues of the Buddha in jade to show their piety. In classical Chinese literature, we read poems and lyrics in praise of its toughness and fine texture: they symbolize the Confucian virtues of the upright man and his humanity and benevolence.

  If jade had all these symbolic meanings, I also loved the silk market of Khotan. This was the first Silk Road town where I actually saw silk, in all its forms, being sold. Men squatted on the ground selling delicate cocoons in baskets; bundles of yarn hung on clothes-lines; eye-catching fabrics of bright colours and geometric patterns were spread out on carpets; young women tried out silk dresses in the latest fashion. Perhaps this could be what Xuanzang would have seen, a busty oasis kingdom prospering from the vast number of merchants of the Silk Road, all with a keen eye for its fabled commodity. The Khotanese actually made silk, as well as trading it. Xuanzang soon found out how they acquired the secret of making it – a Chinese monopoly for a long time – and told us this enchanting story.

  The King of Khotan was a very clever man. He saw how popular silk was with merchants, and he wanted it for his country. But his easterly neighbour refused to pass on the secret. So he decided to ask, with a valuable dowry and humble words, for the hand of the princess of the silk kingdom. His request was granted. He told his envoy who was to fetch the princess to give her this message: ‘Khotan has no mulberry trees or silkworms. Your Highness should bring the seeds for both so that you will be able to make the gorgeous clothes that you are used to wearing.’ China had always kept the making of silk a secret, for good reason. Knowing she was forbidden to take the seeds out of the country, the princess hid them in her headgear. When the wedding party crossed the border, the guards searched everywhere except her head-dress. The princess planted the mulberry seeds in a nunnery and raised silkworms on the leaves. Xuanzang even saw tree-trunks which he said were the original mulberry trees. When Stein excavated the ruins of a monastery in Khotan, he found a painting on wood. An elegant lady with dark hair stands in the middle, with an elaborate head-dress and a basketful of cocoons in front of her. On either side is a female attendant, one pointing her finger at the lady’s head while the other is busy at a weaving machine. It is the perfect illustration to Xuanzang’s story.

  From Khotan cocoons were taken further west, beyond the Pamir Mountains, across the Oxus River of Central Asia, and finally reached the Mediterranean. It was said that a Zoroastrian monk hollowed out his staff and hid the cocoons inside it and then presented them to the court of Byzantium in the sixth century AD. Whether it was a monk or a merchant, it is fairly certain that it was from Khotan that the secret of silk-making came to the West, where the myth that silk grew on
trees was laid to rest at last.

  I bought a handful of cocoons. I also wanted to buy a piece of Khotan silk, just as a memento. A pile of fabric in front of a very old Uighur woman drew my attention. It was different from the others, very thick, more like brocade than cloth, and the design was simple, even modern, with black and white squares like a chessboard. I asked her where it came from.

  ‘My families, relatives and people in my village make them,’ she said proudly, and then added, ‘all by hand, feeding the silkworms, spinning the cocoons and weaving.’

  Where did they do it? I asked.

  ‘In a village with lots of mulberry trees,’ she said.

  How long had they been making it?

  ‘I can’t remember.’ She hesitated. ‘Our mulberry trees are very old, hundreds of years old. We must have been making silk back then.’

  I bought one piece of her fabric, and took down the address of her village.

  I met Yang for lunch in a Chinese restaurant. She was in her early forties, the same age as Fat Ma, who was at college with her. She looked older than her age, not because of the wrinkles on her forehead but her worried expression, like my mother’s, but she was very warm when she spoke. She asked how I enjoyed the bazaar, and I showed her my purchase.

  ‘You can get it anywhere. Look here, it isn’t even good quality,’ she said, pointing to a white thread in the black square, the imperfection of all hand-made cloth, which many thought added to its charm.

  ‘But it’s special for me,’ I said, and then told her Xuanzang’s story.

  ‘Oh.’ She paused. ‘I never understood why we have so many silk factories here.’ She was almost speaking to herself now.

  I asked if the factories made silk as beautiful as the chessboard silk. She shook her head: like state enterprises everywhere, they were on the verge of collapse. ‘Even I prefer the silk made elsewhere. It’s better quality.’ Yang pulled the corner of her collar out from her jacket to show me. ‘And much cheaper.’

  Yang was happy to come with me to the family silk cooperative during her lunch-break, if we could find a taxi. There seemed so few of them around and I had not been lucky in the morning. I was relieved when after twenty minutes a battered old car pulled up in front of us. It was not a comfortable ride; the driver, a Uighur in his late twenties, started complaining as soon as we got into the car, with good reason. A week ago the government had pulled nearly all the taxis out of service for fear that the drivers would use them to help troublemakers get away. Today was his first work in a week, and he was not compensated for the loss of earnings. ‘Is there such a crazy logic in the world?’ he almost yelled at us. He was only partially appeased when we told him we would double the fare on the meter if he would wait and bring us back.

  When we told him where we wanted to go, there was another tirade of indignation. It took me quite a while to understand it. In order to preserve Khotan’s silk industry, the government required a tax of twenty grams of baby silkworms from each villager. It did not sound very much, but the price they offered was so low that farmers could not be bothered with it, although this was not the only problem. Silkworms were very delicate creatures: constant feeding day and night, clean habitat in semi-darkness, moderate temperatures, everything had to be just right, as I knew from my own days of keeping them as pets. The season in Khotan is May and August. August happened to be the harvest time for the much more profitable melons and other fruit. The villagers simply did not want to spend a month taking care of the silkworms. It made no sense to them either, especially now all the silk factories were bankrupt. But if they failed to hand in their specified quota, they would be fined. Looking at the seemingly endless mulberry trees on the roadside, I felt sad. They were once the ‘money trees’, providing eight feeds a day for as many silkworms as the Khotanese could manage, day after day, year after year, and century after century. For the nine months Xuanzang was here, he must have seen women busy picking the tender leaves for the silkworms, heard the non-stop sound of the shuttles on the wooden handlooms, and watched the hustle and bustle of animals being loaded with silk and heading off as far as India and Byzantium. But there was no sign of any activity in the forest of mulberry trees today. The leaves drooped under a thick layer of dust and looked as if they had not been picked for a long time. On some of the trees near the road hung big banners: ‘Down with the Separatists! Strengthen the unity of the motherland. Stability is the cardinal principle!’

  Policemen and Uighur militias with guns slung over their shoulders stood in the middle of the road, waving us to stop. They stared at the driver long and hard and checked his papers thoroughly before they allowed us to continue. After many check-points, the taxi screeched to a halt again, this time in front of a big sign for the silk cooperative. Through the gate we came immediately upon skeins of multi-coloured silk thread that the workers were drawing into patterns, ready for the weavers. Beyond them were three rooms where old Uighur men and women were weaving on wooden handlooms. There was hardly any light, just a low-voltage yellow bulb making a feeble attempt to dispel the gloom. The looms were utterly primitive, looking as if they had been there for centuries. The weavers were old, like the woman in the bazaar, perhaps in their seventies or eighties. And dust covered almost everything, except for the bright silk that rolled out from the looms. Through a broken side window I found myself staring at a giant cauldron in the back yard where two women fished cocoons out of boiling water and passed them over a big spinning wheel four feet across. Their faces were pink with the heat and their blouses were soaked with sweat.

  This must be how they used to make silk long ago. I said as much to Yang excitedly, my camera clicking away. ‘I am not sure the wealth of the Silk Road or of Khotan was really made in this primitive way,’ she argued. But it was. Ancient documents discovered in Khotan reveal that two families in one district handed in as much as forty-two metres of silk in tax in one day – Khotan had tens of thousands of households! Court papers exist recording the debts owed to silk weavers. ‘There are no Chinese merchants coming here,’ one document reads, ‘so we could not investigate the silk debt. We have to wait for their arrival and conduct more investigations. If there is any dispute, we will settle it in the royal court.’ Although producing in great quantity, the Khotanese could not compete with the Chinese for the quality of the silk: as Buddhists they refused to boil the cocoons before they were hatched. The thread was too short and the silk was coarse, but also cheaper, taking not a small portion of the silk trade. When they finally perfected their skill, they even sent their brocade as tribute to the Chinese emperor. At the turn of the last century, Khotan produced over 55,000 kilograms of cocoons, half of which were exported to Russia and Britain. The manager of the cooperative, a young Uighur in his thirties, told us there are still over two million mulberry trees in Khotan today.

  I asked him how they could survive when all the silk factories in Khotan were closing down. ‘It’s in the family,’ he said, looking around his workshop. ‘We’ve been doing it for a long time. When I was small, I used to help my grandmother feed the silkworms, thinking I would like to play with them all my life. Now I’m doing just that with the help of customers like you.’ Tourists cannot make up for the merchants of old, but it would be sad if after so many centuries this ancient craft were to disappear.

  On the way back, Yang asked me why Xuanzang recorded silk-making in Khotan. ‘Monks aren’t even allowed to wear silk,’ she said.

  I was wondering about it too. Did he think the emperor would want to know how this close ally acquired its wealth? Or was it part of Xuanzang’s practical concern for his faith: if the people were prosperous and content, the country would be stable, monasteries would be supported, and Buddhism would flourish.

  ‘He sounds more human than the one in The Monkey King,’ Yang said. He definitely was.

  I dropped Yang at her office. I decided to go to buy some stamps for letters home. The place looked deserted. Above the high counter of the post
office were olive-green bars that went up to the ceiling. On the bars was a wanted poster for a dozen members of the separatist movement. They were all in their twenties, but looked much older with their heavy moustaches. Some had a red tick against their names, which meant they had given themselves up. The poster appealed to the families of the rest to report them to the police or give their whereabouts. It ended with this warning: ‘Give up and you will be given a chance; resist and you will come to a bad end.’

  I had plenty of time to imagine what the bad end would be before a middle-aged Uighur woman appeared from behind a door, rubbing her eyes, not quite awake from her siesta. I said I wanted to buy twenty stamps for postcards. She pulled out a sheet and then asked me: ‘Which nationalities do you like?’ I thought it very strange. Then I saw they were the commemorative stamps for the fiftieth anniversary, with the fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups in China all celebrating it. I said I did not mind. ‘I will leave out whichever nationalities you dislike,’ she said in a matter-of-fact way. I decided to take them all and get out quickly. When she gave me the change, she said with a smile: ‘It is very cheap to buy all nationalities. Don’t you think so?’

  I almost fled. Outside under the bright sunshine, I calmed down, unfolded the big sheet and had a closer look at the stamps. They were indeed very beautiful, each one showing a different nationality, wearing their national costumes and demonstrating their best-known activity – singing, dancing or playing a musical instrument. It reminded me of a popular Chinese song: ‘Fifty-six nationalities are like fifty-six flowers; fifty-six nationalities are one family.’ It is easy to put them all in one song and on one set of stamps; but to make them into one big, happy family will need more effort.

  I told Yang about the incident when I went over to her house for dinner that evening. ‘That’s why I didn’t want you to go to the bazaar on your own this morning,’ she said warily. ‘I hardly go there at all. It’s a pity. It’s such a lively place.’ She was standing over the kitchen sink, preparing our meal, her shoulders stooped. She was alone – her husband had gone to Shanghai for a trade fair and her daughter was with Yang’s parents in Urumqi.