China Road

by Rob Gifford

  When he returned to England, Stein and other experts analyzed the documents and concluded that the library cave had been sealed up around A.D. 1000, the dry desert air helping to preserve the manuscripts. One of the documents turned out to be the world’s oldest known printed book, the Diamond Sutra, a scroll made of seven panels of paper, on which carved wooden blocks were used to print. It is now housed in the British Library, which, along with the British Museum, has said it is not giving any manuscripts back to China.

  When word of what Stein had discovered got out, the race was on. He was followed by a brilliant French archaeologist and linguist named Paul Pelliot, who also talked his way into the library cave at Dunhuang and managed to cart off hundreds more of the manuscripts back to Paris. Then came Albert von Le Coq, a German sent by the Ethnographic Museum of Berlin. Russians and even Japanese started getting in on the act. Finally, in 1923, Professor Langdon Warner was sent to Dunhuang by the Fogg Museum at Harvard. He had developed an ingenious way to strip frescoes off walls and set about doing just that in some of the caves at Dunhuang, shipping the frescoes back to Boston. All of the archaeologists plundered what they could, not just at Dunhuang but at many sites in Gansu province and Chinese Turkestan. And China was powerless to stop them.

  News reached Beijing and Shanghai of the Ocean People raiding the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, and it further fueled the anger of China’s increasingly nationalistic urban youth. By that time, China had collapsed completely, after the failure of the 1912 Revolution, and then suffered the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which, in ending the First World War, handed all Germany’s concessions in China to the Japanese. The inability of the Chinese government to stop the pillaging of its precious artistic heritage played a major role in motivating China’s youth to reinvent, reinvigorate, and restrengthen the country. A huge wave of nationalism was emerging in the cities of the east, and by 1925, when Langdon Warner returned to pay a second visit to the caves, he could gain no access. The door had closed on twenty years of robbery, which had a fundamental impact on the Chinese psyche.

  What then unfolded, though, was a double tragedy (as Chinese tragedies so often are) because what the earnest patriotic youth of China finally settled upon for salvation was the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao. And Mao did not save China’s past, he destroyed it. During the Cultural Revolution, anything old or religious became a target, and many of the treasures along the Silk Road, including some of the caves at Dunhuang, were damaged.

  Now, a hundred years after Stein took the scrolls, and forty years after the Red Guards came calling with their sledgehammers, the caves at Dunhuang are open to the public, and the tourist trade is bringing in large amounts of cash for the region. The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, and Dunhuang itself, are gradually avenging the humiliations of the past and making sure they never happen again. The town’s newfound confidence is being flashed out by three neon Chinese characters on top of the Communist Party headquarters in the center of Dunhuang.

  “Beng xiaokang,” it reads. “Rush toward moderate prosperity.”

  The Mogao Caves lie about twelve miles from Dunhuang. Aurel Stein reached them by camel across the short stretch of desert from the town. Nowadays, tour buses and taxis zip back and forth all day. It’s a short drive, past the city’s small but busy airport, into the wide-open desert again just briefly, before you see the low yellow cliff face ahead to your right, dotted with a honeycomb of caves. A cell-phone tower stands nearby.

  I wonder aloud to my chubby taxi driver about the layers of religion in this place. “It’s amazing how this area was such a center of Buddhism sixteen hundred years ago, and then along came Islam and replaced it all.”

  He grunts.

  “And now it’s a layer of atheism,” I say after a pause. He grunts again.

  “Ni xin jiao ma? Do you believe in anything?” I ask him.

  “Bu xin. No, I don’t believe,” he replies.

  “Do you think it’s all superstition?”

  “Yes.” He nods, not really paying attention. Then he points to the first caves, cut into the rock face coming up on our right. “These are the caves where the monks used to live. The painted caves are up ahead.”

  Stein’s photos of the caves show their entrances fifty feet up, reachable only with a ladder. In the 1960s, however, before the madness of the Cultural Revolution, with the caves in bad shape after decades of neglect, concrete walkways were built outside the three rows of caves, so that all you have to do is climb up some stairs to get to them. A sort of pebble-dash concrete finish was added to the cliff face as well, presumably to prevent it from crumbling, and sturdy doors have been added to each cave to control access. All of these renovations may well have been necessary, but together they give the cliff face with its walkways the air of a badly built urban housing project. This is my first visit to the caves, and as I purchase my ticket, enter through the gate, and walk toward them, I am honestly not sure if these are the famed sixteen-hundred-year-old Caves of a Thousand Buddhas or some closets used for storage.

  Once you get used to the rather strange modernization of the outside, though, you can start to sink into that whole Wow-these-have-been-here-sixteen-hundred-years state of mind that is evident on the faces of many visitors as they tour the site.

  Buddhism entered China in the first century A.D., but the Han dynasty was avowedly Confucian, and it was not until the fall of the Han, and the period of disunity from A.D. 220 to 589, that Buddhism made real inroads into China. That period is sometimes compared with Edward Gibbon’s characterization of Europe after the Fall of Rome in A.D. 476 as the “triumph of barbarism and religion.”

  The caves are all man-made, the first one dating from A.D. 366, when local legend has it that a Buddhist monk named Lezun had a vision of a thousand Buddhas here and convinced a wealthy Silk Road pilgrim to fund the first cave temple. Over the centuries nearly five hundred of them were carved out of the rock. Some of the caves are tiny; others reach more than fifty feet high to house huge sculptures of the Buddha. As pilgrims came along the Silk Road, they carved out more caves, and many, like the famous monk Xuan Zang, brought new scriptures. Traders would sponsor a cave as a place to pray for safety when traveling the Silk Road. They were abandoned around the fourteenth century, with the advent of Islam, and rediscovered only five hundred years later.

  The caves are impressive. I tag along at the back of a tour group made up of mainland Chinese and Taiwanese tourists together. The guide is telling how the earliest artwork is from the Wei dynasty of the fourth century A.D., when Buddhism was starting to take root. The art of this period still retains its Indian influence, evident in the slim statues with fine hands and large heads. During the sixth and seventh centuries, as trade along the Silk Road grew and Chinese influence increased, the paintings and sculptures began to include more female figures, with the growing influence of the female Chinese deity Guanyin.

  No artificial lights are allowed in the caves, so the guide uses a flashlight to boost the weak rays of sunshine that struggle in through the narrow entrances. Many of the grottoes are decorated with paintings of Buddhist figures and stories from the past as well as colored friezes, in the original bright orange, green, and blue paints.

  Soon we come to the most famous one in the whole complex, cave number 17. It is set into the rock halfway along a corridor that leads to another cave.

  “This,” says the guide, “is the Library Cave. In 1900, the self-appointed abbot of Dunhuang, Wang Yuanlu, by chance came upon this cave, which had been completely sealed up. Inside it, he discovered a treasure trove of ancient documents, nearly one thousand years old, that had been preserved in the dry desert air.”

  The guide describes some of the documents, including the Diamond Sutra.

  “But then, the daobaozhe, the robbers, arrived.”

  The robbers were Stein, Pelliot, Le Coq, Warner, and the others. The guide betrays no emotion as he relates the story of how the fo
reigners robbed the Library Cave, carting the contents back to European museums. He says the word robbers without any real animosity, a matter-of-fact description about something that happened a hundred years ago.

  I follow the group for an hour or so, then peel off and head to the small museum, which catalogs the whole history of the “robbers” and what they took, complete with photos of Stein, Pelliot, and the others. On the way out, I get chatting with the woman standing behind the counter.

  “Have you forgiven us for doing all this?” I ask her.

  In a typical, polite Chinese way, she lowers her head but doesn’t reply immediately.

  “You haven’t really, have you?” I press her.

  “No. You’re right. We haven’t really.”

  Trying to lighten the mood a little, I tell her that I am about to go to London, and perhaps I can have a word with the people at the British Museum and ask them to return the treasured manuscripts.

  “Good. You should do that,” she says, her face brightening. “Please do that.”

  I end the day at Dunhuang’s other main attraction, the Singing Sands, a series of sand dunes named after the eerie sounds they are supposed to give out when the wind blows. For those who have oohed and aahed their way through the high culture of the Mogao Caves, the Singing Sands offer a chance to ooh and aah in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere, for the two main attractions here are camel riding and sand surfing.

  A steaming herd of tourists, Chinese and foreign, is nervously eyeing a steaming herd of camels at the entrance to the sands. Occasional pairs of humans break from their group and head for as friendly a member of the camel fraternity as they can find, clambering onto a saddle on the animal’s back with the help of the camel’s owner, then being led out across the sand. Nothing quite says “Old Silk Road” like a two-ton, two-hump Bactrian camel, and they are in huge demand wherever there are tourists who want to relive the thrill of trekking across the dunes.

  I stand trying to resist being sucked into such a shabby show of wanton tourism. But the urge for my own Oriental fantasy gets the better of me. I sidle up to one of the camel drivers with the pathetic approach of someone trying desperately not to look like a tourist, and eventually climb onto a particularly noisy, smelly beast. It’s only a half-mile walk in the shadow of the lunar dunes to the tiny Lake of the Crescent Moon, hidden away among the mountains of sand. The lake has attracted pilgrims for centuries. I trail two women from Hong Kong, who squeal and chatter and shout at their camels in Cantonese all the way to the lake.

  The camel driver waits with my mount at the lake as I sweat my way up a very long wooden staircase that has been cut into the sand to the top of the dunes. From there, it’s a stunning view out over the teardrop lake, the dunes, and the city beyond. There’s a crowd at the top, all sitting to gather their breath and enjoy the view, with a gentle desert breeze blowing and the sunset exploding in front of us.

  The way down is somewhat easier. It involves sitting on a small toboggan that looks more like a tea tray and pushing off, sand flying everywhere as you speed, shrieking, to the bottom of the dune.

  Mildred Cable and the French sisters came to Dunhuang many times during the 1920s and ’30s, and there is a wonderful description in one of their books of the three middle-aged English missionaries sand surfing. You can still almost hear the squeals.

  19. Endurance

  Two hours out of Dunhuang, and I’ve just rejoined Route 312, heading west. The road is only one lane in each direction, with a narrow, hard shoulder in case, heaven forbid, you should break down out here. A rather sad white line at the edge tries to separate the asphalt from the desert, but mostly the two just merge. We’re approaching the border with the region called Xinjiang, formerly known as Chinese Turkestan. A few buses and small blue trucks whiz past, plus occasional massive articulated trucks, three times as long as their blue cousins, almost pulling our modest red VW taxi into their slipstreams as they accelerate past. Up ahead, one of these behemoths has tipped on its side down a slight bank and lies like a beached whale in a sea of sand.

  “The driver must have fallen asleep,” says my taxi driver. The two truck drivers are squatting in the shadow of the stricken truck, presumably waiting for assistance.

  “Shouldn’t we stop and see if they need help?” I ask.

  “No. They probably have someone coming already to rescue them.”

  “Don’t get involved” is still the first rule of life in China.

  The colors all around are muted today. The desert is a scrappy, scrubby yellow, stretching forever on either side of the road. There are coarse, dirty green clumps along the roadside of what I think is known as camel grass, though frankly, if I were a camel I would turn my nose up at them. Even the sky today looks rubbed down with smudges of gray-white clouds. There are no settlements here. Humans are strictly just passing through. The only spark of color is the yellow paint of the dashed lines down the middle of the black strip of tarmac, pointing toward the western horizon.

  Suddenly, up ahead are several more bright yellow dots on the road. As we draw closer, it becomes clear they are cyclists, five in total, three wearing the yellow shirts of the Brazil soccer team. This is real desert, and I can’t believe anyone would be cycling out here. I tell the driver to pull over just beyond them, where I jump out and flag them down.

  “Hey! Ting yi xia! Stop! Can you stop? Where are you going?”

  “Yining,” says the front cyclist, pulling to a halt in front of me. His friends pull up behind him. Yining is the town right beside the Kazakh border, where I’m heading too.

  “Where are you coming from?”

  “Lanzhou.”

  “Why are you biking?”

  “We just wanted to get out and explore our own country a little. It’s an adventure.”

  The five of them are typical smiling, friendly Chinese students, eager to answer my questions, even though it would be over a hundred degrees in the shade if there were any. They are all members of Muslim ethnic minorities of the northwest and are studying at the Arabic school in Lanzhou.

  We chat for a few more minutes, and then I climb back into the car, feeling slightly embarrassed to be driving as they climb back on their bikes behind me under the merciless Gobi sun.

  I had set off early from Dunhuang that morning, driven two hours north, and then turned left, westward, back onto Route 312. A huge tollgate marked the entrance to the next section of the desert. A mile or so after the toll, just before we had met the cyclists, a massive articulated truck had pulled onto the road from the open desert. It was not even pulling off a side road—there are no side roads—but was literally driving in off the Gobi.

  “He’s avoiding the toll,” said my driver. “He just pulled out into the desert a few miles before the tollgate, looped around, and rejoined the road a few miles after it.”

  The desert here is neither the fine Sahara-type grains of the Singing Sands nor the hard beige scrubland surface of the previous sections of the Gobi. It has a layer of black across the surface. The driver says it is known as heisha, which means “black sand.” “It’s iron ore,” he tells me. “It isn’t good enough quality to mine, but there are some mines out there.”

  He points northward, to the vast emptiness beyond. “Tin, aluminum, copper, iron ore, gold.” Huge deposits of mineral resources lie beneath the desert sands. Oil and gas are already pumped east to fuel China’s economic boom, and the possibility of finding more out here could prove very important as China’s quest for energy intensifies.

  Xinjiang (pronounced Shin-jahng, meaning “New Frontier”) is the size of California, Texas, Montana, and Colorado combined (or, if you prefer, Britain, France, Germany, and Spain). If it were a country, it would be the sixteenth largest in the world, but it has a population of just 20 million people. Strictly speaking, Xinjiang cannot be called a province. Its official title is the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Uighurs (pronounced Wee-gurs) are the dominant ethnic group out here, and t
he one that causes Beijing the most problems.

  The government propaganda has not changed, but the language has. For two thousand miles, Chinese characters have dominated the road signs. Now they have to jostle for space with the place names written in the Uighur language, which uses Arabic script.

  Push forward Hami’s economic development.

  Protect China’s underground cables.

  Love your girl children.

  My cell phone vibrates, as all Chinese cell phones do on entering any new province or region. A message says, “Welcome to Xinjiang.” Then comes another one: “Looking for a gift? Khotan jade is perfect for any occasion. Call this number now.”

  Soon we arrive in the tiny town of Xingxingxia (pronounced Shing-shing-shyah), or Starry Gorge, the small scrap of human habitation that has always marked the traveler’s entry into Xinjiang. It is the site of one of the Old Silk Road’s best-known freshwater wells. After passing through the gorge that gives the town its name, I stop for lunch at a small roadside diner. The town barely qualifies as an oasis, it seems so barren.

  The owner of the small café is named Lao Zhang. He looks older than his forty-five years and has been running his little truck stop here in Starry Gorge for ten years. He is Han Chinese, originally from the city of Turpan, farther west on Route 312. Lao Zhang (pronounced Lao Jahng) is a cheerful kind of guy. It doesn’t take much to make his slightly pursed mouth break into a huge smile, and then a laugh explodes from within him.

  When I enter his tiny café, he is in the kitchen, stir-frying some food for two truck drivers who sit waiting to eat lunch. He comes through and smiles, and I decide to go and chat with him while he cooks. Despite a wide-open window, the kitchen is a furnace, the gas flame leaping up the side of the grimy black wok as he cooks.

  I stand beside the open window and simply ask him how life is. My question opens a floodgate.