China Road

by Rob Gifford

  “I hope the friendship between our two countries grows stronger,” he says.

  Someone shouts for him, and he calls in Chinese that he is over here, behind the corner watchtower. A man appears. His father. A soldier, who speaks no English and probably had no choices in life. His son has choices, many of them. He is so full of hope for himself and for his country. He wants to make China great. He is courteous and friendly, and eager and idealistic, and overflowing with optimism. It is impossible not to like him.

  Whoever said it is better to travel than to arrive never took the night bus from Jiayuguan to Dunhuang. Like the intrepid Trio, and many others before and since, I decide to travel overnight. It should take me just eight hours, but instead it takes sixteen. Route 312 is being widened. The project is scheduled to be finished by 2007, so by the time you read this, it will likely not be a problem, but for sixteen bone-shaking hours it’s a problem for me.

  Farther east, before Route 312 reaches Jiayuguan, where there are towns and villages beside the road, the new four-lane freeway has been built alongside the old 312—two straight black lines flowing west beside each other. But it is not without reason that Jiayuguan is known as “the mouth” of China, for outside the mouth, there really are very few villages at all. So there is no reason to retain the old road. It has been dug up and is being relaid as a four-lane expressway. While this expressway is being built, both lanes of traffic have been diverted to the actual surface of the desert, parallel to the road.

  If the music of the Old Silk Road was the sound of camel caravans, the theme tune of the New Silk Road is the kung-fu movie on the long-distance bus. We’ve barely pulled out of Jiayuguan bus station when the driver slips in a pirate DVD of Fists of Fury, or is it Lethal Ninja, or perhaps Warriors from the Magic Mountain? I lose track. True to form, none of the Chinese passengers seems to notice the kicking, punching, and shouting that explode from the small television set mounted at the front of the bus, and the driver is surprised when I ask him to turn the volume down.

  My sleep is governed by the bumps in the road and the cell phone of the man next to me. It plays Beethoven loudly whenever it rings, which is often. No matter where I sit on a bus, I always seem to end up next to the guy with the orchestra in his underpants.

  I wake with a stiff neck around daybreak, expecting to be almost at Dunhuang. But the driver says we are nowhere near. We haven’t even reached Anxi, a town about 130 miles west of Jiayuguan. Dunhuang itself lies about 70 miles off Route 312 to the south. After we turn off Route 312, the traffic work ends, and the driver is able to accelerate along the tarmac to try to make up some time. Fluffy white clouds dot the bright blue sky overhead. Old beacon towers made of mud can be seen by the road, towers on which fires were once lit to help people navigate toward the oases. Cell-phone towers now stand beside them. I receive a text message from a friend who is sitting beside the swimming pool of a luxury hotel in Bangkok.

  The bus seems to be half full of construction workers, heading west in pursuit of work and a better salary, perhaps a hundred dollars a month, not ninety (and that makes a big difference), benefiting from the central government’s recent campaign to develop the western regions. They are mostly Han or Hui people (the Islamicized Chinese). A journey like this, taking them far “outside the mouth” of traditional China proper, now seems as natural as anything. There are no demons in the Gobi anymore.

  I sit next to an older man, over fifty, who seems a little out of place among all the young migrants.

  “Life is so much better now,” he says to me. “There are so many more opportunities. We used to have to scavenge simply to get food during the fifties and sixties. Now, every garbage collector has a cell phone. Are you telling me that isn’t progress?”

  It’s easy to lose sight of how much things have improved in China when you travel the length of Route 312 and spend so long in poor rural areas. For people like this man, who experienced the famines of the late 1950s and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the sixties, modern China, for all its many problems, is a million times better. There are no crazy political campaigns, no lunatic economic campaigns, no forced denunciations of neighbors. It’s your perspective that makes all the difference. For me, the mere possibility of government intrusion in my life is unacceptable. For him, the fact that those possibilities have receded, even if they are still there in the background, means modern China is paradise. “Compared to what?” is always the question you have to ask in China. This man has probably seen and suffered things, and participated in events, that few Westerners have ever had to bear. Now he can choose what he does. And that, for him, is progress.

  The bus struggles on, a lonely speck inching across a sea of sand. The Mongolians to the north of here have a saying about the raw beauty of the Gobi Desert. They say, sometimes you must go down to the Gobi to stretch your soul. As you travel across it for hours and hours, you start to understand what those Mongolians mean. After the teeming towns and villages, and the hills and valleys of eastern China, the land and the sky here open up and embrace each other, and make you want to stop, get out, and embrace them too. But be careful what you wish for.

  We have turned off Route 312 but are still about sixty miles out from Dunhuang when suddenly we hear a rather ominous grinding noise from the engine. The bus loses power and pulls over to the side of the road. It would have been hard to pick more forbidding territory for this to happen. There is literally nothing but desert for miles around. No truck stops, no villages, nothing.

  The driver lifts the cover over the gearbox beside the steering wheel, then gets out to take a look under the bus. After a while, it becomes clear that we are going nowhere, so I make him open up the luggage compartment. I grab my backpack and walk a hundred yards up the road from our stricken bus, trying to flag down another one. A few don’t stop, but finally one pulls over, and I have to run up the road in the heat with my heavy pack on my back to where it has stopped. The driver opens up his luggage compartment, and I throw in my pack and jump onboard. It’s full of Japanese tourists, who must be driving from the nearest rail link, at Liuyuan, just beside Route 312. The bus is beautifully air-conditioned and is not playing loud kung-fu movies.

  Finally, oh so very finally, we approach the city. The desert slowly starts to recede and is replaced by purple gorse bushes, then poplar trees and some cornfields, and finally the road is lined by the full, dazzling green of the oasis. This is Dunhuang, the legendary Silk Road oasis and home of the sixteen-hundred-year-old Mogao Caves, where travelers would stop to pray for safe passage across the worst of the desert, as it opens up toward Central Asia.

  18. The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas

  On the rooftop of the four-star Silk Road Dunhuang Hotel, a group of wealthy Greek tourists is standing looking out at the rolling dunes known as the Singing Sands and dreaming of a time gone by. Behind them are Spaniards, who also seem in some kind of reverie. Beside them are two Americans, staring straight up into the star-studded night sky. A stray Englishman sits sipping his beer, knowing better than to be taken in by all that fake Silk Road tourist schlock, but all the same, he looks up at the sky and breathes deeply, as though the crescent moon might be exuding some tangible smell of the Orient. It is hard, in Dunhuang (pronounced Doon-hwang), not to be sucked into the sheer romance of the whole thing. For Westerners, the town is a place to dream all your exotic Arabian Nights dreams of the East.

  A few miles away, a roomful of young Chinese men sit fulfilling their fantasies of the West. There are no Arabian Nights here, and their only thoughts of the Silk Road are probably how to get as far away from it as possible. The gaggle of Chinese youths is sitting in a twenty-four-hour Internet café in the center of Dunhuang, their eyes glued to their computer screens as they do battle in online video games. On the sidewalks outside, aspirational young couples window-shop at stores awash with choices, electronics and cosmetics, clothing and real estate, relishing the new prosperity of their town and perhaps thinking about t
he possibilities of travel outside it.

  Not since the Bund in Shanghai has the contrast between East and West been so stark. Foreigners try to re-create some intangible, romantic Chinese past, while Chinese people try to escape the past and build a tangible, very unromantic future.

  The Silk Road Dunhuang Hotel has been designed to fit into the Western image of the Silk Road. With its faux adobe walls and its cool, high-ceiled lobby, it is built in a style that seems, to the foreign eye, to be Central Asian. I have no idea if it is, but the fact that it fits into my preconceived idea of Silk Road architecture makes me feel good about staying here, even though it is the most expensive hotel in town, and they charge Westerners extra for breakfast. It doesn’t hurt that it has a wonderful rooftop bar, from where you can see the dunes of the desert and the bright, bright stars splashed across the sky at night.

  The name Dunhuang in Chinese means “Blazing Beacon,” which gives you a good visual idea of the town’s geographical situation. It has always been a crucial oasis town, though its population has increased greatly in the last century, to over one hundred thousand. The Silk Road from the ancient capital at present-day Xi’an to Central Asia and Europe ran almost directly to Dunhuang, along the path now taken by Route 312. Just north of the town, the Silk Road branched into two main routes: the Northern Silk Road, which I will be following, snakes northwest to Hami and Turpan and Urumqi, skirting the northern side of the fearsome Taklimakan Desert. The Southern Silk Road wove, and still weaves, its way southwest, through the ancient, less-visited towns of Miran, Khotan, and Yarkand along the southern rim of the Taklimakan. The Blazing Beacon of Dunhuang was the last big oasis before the huge stretches of desert, and it signaled to the traveler that here was food, water, and shelter.

  But it was, and is, much more than just a watering hole. For Dunhuang is the home of some of the oldest and best-preserved Buddhist cave paintings in the world, where travelers would gather to pray for protection in crossing the desert, or to give thanks for safe passage. And, what’s more, events that took place in this obscure oasis town in the early twentieth century played a significant role in spurring on a weak, defeated China to reinvent itself and become the increasingly strong and respected country it is today.

  On March 12, 1907, a Hungarian-born archaeologist working for the British government in India stumbled into Dunhuang from the southwest after a three-week trek across the desert. He and his team of local helpers, camels, and horses had traveled 260 miles from the ruins of a forgotten desert city called Loulan to the west, and they were exhausted, filthy, and hungry. Dunhuang in 1907 was a poor, grimy, isolated town, but it was like the Promised Land for the archaeologist and his weary caravan.

  The man was Aurel Stein, and what was to take place over the next few months would ensure his name endured in lights in the annals of Western archaeology but lived in infamy in China.

  The Middle Kingdom was still five years away from the overthrow of the imperial system, but the country was already in a state of near-collapse. The colonial powers had carved out their spheres of influence and were milking China dry. The imperial elite had hung on desperately to their delusions of cultural grandeur, unable to accept their weakness and unwilling to give up their power. Several waves of reform from below had been stifled by pressure from above, especially from the ultraconservative empress dowager. But after the Western powers suppressed the antiforeign Boxer Rebellion, in 1900, and forced humiliating financial reparations upon the court, even the empress dowager and her die-hard conservative allies realized that they had to change. But it was all too late, and soon the country collapsed.

  In the western regions in 1907, Chinese control was extremely shaky, even though the lands outside the mouth of Jiayuguan Fort had supposedly been part of the great Qing dynasty empire since the conquests of the mid–eighteenth century. The Qing dynasty had made one last campaign to pacify the west in the 1880s but had not won any local hearts and minds in the process, and a weak central government plus poor communications throughout the country meant that Beijing exercised very little direct control over distant regions such as Gansu, Xinjiang, and Tibet. The feeble remains of the imperial court in Beijing were focused on trying to defend China against the Ocean People coming from the east. Little did they suspect that some cunning Ocean People would sneak in from the west with archaeological, not military, objectives.

  The British and the Russians had begun their geostrategic chess game, immortalized as the Great Game by Rudyard Kipling in his book of the British Empire, Kim. A large part of their respective interest in Gansu, Chinese Turkestan (now Xinjiang), and Tibet was strategic. The Russians had expanded into Central Asia and were scouting the periphery of their new empire. The British were concerned about Russian incursions into imperial India, so efforts began in earnest to map the regions surrounding the subcontinent. The British sent spies, often undercover, to survey the adjacent territories, primarily to learn if a Russian approach to India from the north was possible or planned.

  The other, secondary interest—of the British, Russians, and many others—was archaeological. There had been rumors for some time during the mid–nineteenth century that there were Buddhist cities hidden beneath the shifting sands of Chinese Turkestan, and perhaps an entire forgotten Buddhist civilization. Covert forays by British intelligence officers resulted in a number of interesting finds, which persuaded archaeologists in British India that there were indeed fantastic artifacts under the desert, and a race began among the European powers to find them.

  The man who emerged as the granddaddy of large-scale European exploration there was an obstreperous Swede named Sven Hedin. Hedin made four expeditions to Central Asia between 1893 and 1935. Hedin was known for his eccentricities, such as playing Bizet’s Carmen on his music box in the middle of the desert. But he was an intrepid explorer who braved atrocious conditions in summer and winter and drank his fair share of camel’s urine when his water supplies ran out in the desert. On his second expedition in 1899, Hedin discovered the long-lost city of Loulan, a formerly prosperous outpost on the Silk Road that had disappeared under the sand when the Tarim River changed course in the sixth century.

  Sven Hedin and the famed Russian Nicolay Przhevalski, who also roamed all over Chinese Turkestan and Tibet, were first and foremost explorers; they dabbled in archaeology. (Hedin was also a geographer and cartographer.) Aurel Stein, by contrast, was a top archaeological scholar, an Orientalist, whom the great Asian scholar Owen Lattimore later called “the most prodigious combination of scholar, explorer, archaeologist and geographer of his generation.”

  During his first expedition in 1900, accompanied by a whole caravan of camels and local guides, and his intrepid terrier Dash, Aurel Stein traveled up from India and along the Southern Silk Road, where he began to excavate the ancient cities of Dandan-uilik and Niya. There he found not only evidence of Chinese presence from the eighth century but also clay seals on wooden tablets depicting Greek deities, showing that Western artistic images had traveled east along the Silk Road. Up until that time, no one knew European influences had ever reached that far.

  On his second expedition, in the winter of 1906–7, Stein had visited Loulan, the desert city that Hedin had discovered seven years before. He had carried out a thorough archaeological dig in subzero temperatures (it was considered easier to work in freezing cold than in baking heat) and discovered more fascinating documents, which revealed much about the former Chinese outpost in the west.

  So, on that cold March morning in 1907 when he finally arrived in Dunhuang, Aurel Stein was flush with success. His memoirs of the trip, a fascinating book called The Ruins of Desert Cathay, suggest that he was not expecting to do anything more than visit the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, a series of man-made caves that had long been known to travelers who stopped at Dunhuang. But soon after his arrival, he heard from an Urumqi trader that a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu, who had appointed himself guardian and abbot of the caves, had discovered a secre
t grotto that had been sealed for centuries. Word in the bazaar was that the cave was full of ancient manuscripts.

  With Jiang, his faithful Chinese amanuensis, close at hand, Stein went to visit the abbot and set about building a friendship with him with one purpose only in mind: to persuade the monk to let him see, and then possibly take, some of the precious manuscripts.

  Stein sought common ground with Abbot Wang in their mutual admiration of Xuan Zang, the Chinese monk well known throughout China for his travels to India in search of Buddhist scriptures in the seventh century. Abbot Wang was indeed thrilled that Stein was a fan of Xuan Zang (pronounced Shwen Dzang) and in the end agreed to let Stein read some of the ancient documents, and then to go inside the library cave itself. Stein’s understated description of the experience belies the importance of the discovery.

  The sight the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open. Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest’s little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet.

  It was a treasure trove of manuscripts in many languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Uighur, some forty thousand in all. After weeks of tiptoeing gently around Wang and the abbot’s fears of losing his influence over the caves, Stein’s Chinese helper, Jiang, managed to persuade Wang to part with some of the manuscripts. By slowly increasing the sum, he gradually acquired more, until he had paid 130 pounds sterling for twenty-nine crates full of manuscripts, paintings, embroideries, and other relics, which were then shipped back to the British Museum.