by Rob Gifford
The main crop here is grapes, and at the time of my visit, the harvest is just beginning. Trucks laden with fresh green grapes can be seen in the streets, and baskets of them are being sorted beside the roads. Some sidewalks are covered by vine trellises, which provide wonderful shady walkways and protect pedestrians from the vicious heat of the summer sun.
Apart from the vines, the city itself is not particularly beautiful. There are attractive older parts, but like all cities in the western regions, it has a modern Chinese section that could be anywhere in the country. The town has a mellow feel to it, though, and many foreigners, especially backpackers, like to kick back here for a few days and do nothing. At the hotel that morning, I had bumped into two bearded Swedes who had ridden all the way from Europe, with tiny panniers on their bikes that can’t have held more than a change of clothes and a water bottle.
Considering the fact that we are in the middle of the desert, Turpan has a surprising number of places of interest to visitors. The first is an ancient irrigation system known as karez, which means “well” in Uighur. The system was designed more than two thousand years ago, and Turpan owes its existence to it. It is made up of dozens of long subterranean tunnels, which connect the head well in the mountains north of Turpan with the city and farmland below. No pumps are needed, nor any form of modern technology, nor building materials. The water flows entirely by gravity. Evaporation is reduced by keeping the channels underground.
The strained relations between Han Chinese and Uighurs are evident in the small tourist venue that houses the karez. The whole complex feels like a theme park, like a North American Indian village, where you can “experience” the native American culture. Welcome to Uighur World! Have your photo taken with a real Uighur dancing girl! Have her hold grapes over your mouth!
After you’ve walked down to view the underground streams that flow from the mountains to the city, you exit into an artificial bazaar, where small groups of Uighur women are positioned at regular intervals among the stalls. The women are all attractive, and heavily made up, dressed to the nines in bright traditional Uighur clothes. As each group of Han Chinese tourists comes along, the women strike a pose, rather like performing animals. One balances a bowl of grapes on her head as though sitting for a Renaissance painting. Another three sit at a table as if for a Roman banquet, again with grapes at the ready. Another pair of women loll around listening to Uighur music, ready to jump up and dance at the arrival of the next group of Chinese tourists.
China’s ethnic minorities do a lot of dancing. Or at least, in the minds of the Han Chinese, they do. There is almost as much stereotyped thinking in the Chinese mind about Muslim peoples as there once was (and perhaps still is) in the Western mind. When you see programs about the ethnic minorities on Chinese television, all they ever do is dance, dance, dance. And hold grapes while they dance. And talk about how China is one big, happy family.
The vendors hustle visitors as vendors do everywhere. When I stop to look at some beautiful pashmina scarves, I am surrounded by other sellers quoting me ridiculously inflated prices. Then I realize that all the vendors are Han Chinese, and in a fit of pique and solidarity with the Uighurs, I decide not to buy anything. If I’m going to be ripped off in Xinjiang, I want at least to be ripped off by a Uighur.
Murat calls me and says we can drive out to the dunes tonight. We arrange to meet later that afternoon, and he is accompanied by his friend-brother-cousin (the description varies), who is driving an old Volkswagen. His friend-brother-cousin speaks little Chinese and less English, and does all the driving, with Murat sitting next to him, leaning back to chat with me. “We will do a tour of Turpan’s famous sights, and then we will sleep in the desert,” he says.
“Great. Do we need to take anything with us?” I ask him.
“I have some rugs for us to sleep on,” he says. “Maybe we could buy some food and a bottle of wine.”
“Wine? Aren’t you a Muslim?”
“I only drink perhaps once a month.” He grins. “In fact, I had some last night, but I’ll make an exception today for you.”
We stop off at a supermarket and pick up some provisions, including a bottle of local red wine, produced by a company set up in Xinjiang as a joint venture between a Chinese vineyard and French advisers. Then we head out east of the city, back along Route 312.
The road passes the Flaming Mountains, which I’d missed in the dark on the way in. They are a deep red color, with small ravines flowing down them. Especially in the glow of early evening, the miniravines look from a distance like tongues of fire climbing up the side of the hills.
We stop briefly at some of the other archaeological sites just east of Turpan, such as the wonderful Bezeklik Caves, carved into a cliff face on a ledge above a small river just north of the highway. These, like the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas at Dunhuang, once housed fantastic murals, many of which were stolen by foreign archaeologists at the start of the twentieth century. They were literally hacked off the walls. We also stop at Karakhoja, the sprawling ruins of a garrison city that the Chinese established as one of their bases on their occasional forays into Xinjiang.
As we drive eastward, Murat tells me the story his father told him of how the Chinese first came to Turkestan. He blames it all on a horse. In 138 B.C., before the first military conquest of the region by Chinese troops, the Chinese emperor sent a man named Zhang Qian (pronounced Jang Chyen) through the territory of the dreaded Xiongnu tribe to reach another tribe, the Yuezhi, with whom the Chinese wanted to ally against the Xiongnu. On the way there, Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu and held for ten years. But he managed to escape and continue his journey, and eventually he reached the Fergana Valley (in modern-day Uzbekistan), where he discovered the people possessed the strongest and swiftest type of horse in the known world, which came to be known in the Uighur language as the “blood-sweating horse” because of the way its reddish skin glistened with sweat when it galloped.
In 125 B.C., thirteen years after he set out, Zhang Qian made it back to the imperial Chinese court at Chang’an (though, rather carelessly, he allowed himself to be captured and held by the Xiongnu on the way back as well). Zhang was showered with praise by the emperor, who gave him the title Great Traveler. The emperor decided that “blood-sweating horses” were exactly what he needed in the continuing struggle against the very mobile tribes of the steppeland, and he determined to get hold of some, thus initiating the first Chinese foray into Turkestan. The Chinese speak of this as being the start of the Silk Road, and the start of Turkestan’s incorporation into China, even though, as we’ve seen, the Chinese hold over what is now Xinjiang was sporadic at best until the 1750s.
“You see these?” Murat shouts angrily back to me against the wind that rushes in through the wide-open windows. He is pointing at dozens of nodding oil pumps beside the road, in the shadow of the Flaming Mountains. “These oil wells are nearly two miles deep. They pump ten tons of oil a day. Where does it all go? I’ll tell you where. East, for the Han Chinese to use. How much do we get to use of our own oil? None. How many Uighurs do the oil companies employ? Not a single one. This is our land they are exploiting, but we don’t benefit a dime.”
He tells me about a natural gas pipeline that has been built from southern Xinjiang to Shanghai, transporting the gas of the west to the east. Then he says it. He uses the phrase I’ve had in mind all along but haven’t said.
“China is a colonial power,” he says. “It has occupied us and is simply extracting our resources.”
No one can say that sort of thing in public, though no doubt Uighurs say it to one another all the time. For the Beijing government, so critical of Western imperialism and colonialism, it is anathema that a Chinese citizen might suggest China itself is guilty of such a crime. But speeding along in a car with an old Uighur buddy and a stray inquisitive Westerner, heard only by the wind, Murat doesn’t care about uttering such forbidden words.
After an hour’s drive, with daylight
slipping away, we park the car, take off our shoes, and wander barefoot across a dry riverbed. Then we literally clamber up the dunes. Much of the desert up till now has been gravelly scrubland with a hard yellow carapace. These are the first real sand dunes I’ve seen since Dunhuang.
The sun is setting gloriously, and I suggest we pause, otherwise we will miss it. So we sit down halfway up the dune, and I pull the bottle of Loulan wine and corkscrew and three plastic cups from my bag. It feels surreal to be sitting in the Gobi Desert with a couple of Muslims chugging a bottle of red wine. I propose a toast to Uighurs everywhere. They smile, and the three of us just sit in silence and watch the sun sink in an extravagant blur of orange.
Murat’s friend-brother-cousin then heads back to the car, where he will spend the night, and the two of us continue to struggle up the dune. The wind becomes stronger the higher we climb. So we dive into a small, protected dell between two dunes, stretch out our rugs a few feet apart, and lie down.
The moon is rising as beautifully as it always does over the desert, whiter, bigger, rounder than ever. And as we lie there, looking up at it, I ask Murat all the most sensitive questions about the Uighurs, and the struggle, if only psychological now, against the Chinese.
“It’s not 100 percent tragedy,” he says. “There is no law forcing us to do this. We are willing participants in our own destruction.”
“But you have no choice, do you?”
“We have no choice. The only way to oppose assimilation is not to go to a Chinese school. But if you don’t go to a Chinese school, you can’t succeed, you can’t get a good job. Look at me. I cannot read or speak Chinese very well. I can understand maybe 60 percent of what I read in a newspaper. If I could read and write, I would get a much better job.”
It sounds just like what the Tibetan teacher had told me several weeks before. Murat pauses, and a minute, maybe more, passes as we just lie there, looking up at the expanding universe and the stars stretched across it.
“The world is developing, and we have to participate,” he says.
There’s another pause, weighed down by a silent sadness.
“It’s a slow death,” he says finally. “And it is tragic, but what else can we do? The way I am dealing with it is by forcing my little brother to stay in school, to get the education I didn’t get, to go to a good university, but to use it to help the Uighur people, not the Chinese. We can’t opt out, we have to engage with the world and with the Han Chinese, and that inevitably leads to a dilution of our culture. But we can use it to our own benefit, as much as possible.”
“So what do you want your brother to do?”
“Perhaps study medicine, so that he can come back and help improve the health of the Uighur people.”
Murat is clearly a major influence on his brother and also on his younger cousins and friends, like the driver of our car, encouraging their engagement with the system to serve their own ends. But he draws a line at certain things. He despises the dancing attractions that serve the Chinese tourist trade at major hotels and other destinations, and he will not let anyone in his family take part in them, even though they pay relatively well. “Why should we dance to make the Chinese tourists happy, to fulfill some stereotype of what they think we are?” he says. “I would rather be a poor farmer than let anyone in my family do that.”
After every statement, there is silence. There is no rush. There is time to absorb what is being said. How rarely I have that feeling.
“What do you think of the separatists who actually take up arms and fight the Chinese state?” The number of such incidents has decreased in recent years, but there are still occasional flare-ups.
“Well, I am not bold enough to be one of them. I have parents. I have a younger brother to support. But I do think they are brave, and I admire their bravery.”
“Brave, but hopeless, right?”
He pauses in the gloaming. The air is still beautifully warm, but I can feel the coldness of the sand through the thin rug on which I am lying, sand that was baking hot just a few hours before.
“Yes, brave but hopeless,” he says finally. “We need to recognize that reality. There is no more hope for an independent Xinjiang. And that is what I’ve been saying. Let’s move on, and get on with recognizing that reality, and make the most of it.”
The wind blows some sand into our protected little gully.
“And what about America?” I ask him.
“We are Muslims. We don’t want to see Muslims killed. But we are also opposed to extremist Islam, like the Taliban. If Islam rules like that, then everyone will be poor and backward. And if Saddam had been a better ruler, the U.S. wouldn’t have attacked. And in fact, we have no reason to hate America. There is another people we hate more.”
The wind creeps again into our little dell, but it is a soft, welcome wind. Soon I hear Murat breathing more heavily, asleep on his rug a few feet away from me. I lie there for a while, happier than I have been at any other time on my journey. Perhaps the Chinese monk Xuan Zang slept here in the seventh century, the Buddhist scriptures he had brought back from India tucked under his saddlebag. Perhaps Aurel Stein slept here too, having pillaged the same Buddhist scriptures from the library cave at Dunhuang. Perhaps there is too much romance written into this crazy Silk Road. And with that, I fall asleep on the shifting sands of the desert, under a Uighur moon.
The earth duly rotates on its axis while I sleep, and I awake to a late sunrise, whose beauty mirrors perfectly the sunset of the night before. The wind has deposited a fine patina of freshly blown sand over me, and there are grains on my lips and in my nose and ears.
We drive back to Turpan, stopping at a small store to buy some naan bread and yogurt for breakfast. Not far from town, we stop again at a raisin market, where grape farmers from all around have brought their produce. Huge piles of grapes, some green, some red, are piled upon the ground, and buyers are walking around, tasting, testing, and bargaining with the farmers. All the buyers seem to be Han Chinese. All the farmers are Uighurs.
On the outskirts of Turpan, I change cars. Murat has arranged for another brother-cousin-friend to drive me to Urumqi, the regional capital, a hundred miles to the northwest. I embrace him and say goodbye.
Route 312 between Turpan and Urumqi is possibly the most impressive stretch of the road that I have traveled on the whole length of my journey. It’s made up of two completely straight black strips of tarmac stretching across the desert, two lanes in each direction, separated by a ten-yard strip of scrubland. In the front passenger seat is a rather glamorously dressed Uighur woman, who is also catching a ride with Murat’s friend to Urumqi. Her daughter had traveled there two days previously, on the same day as Rebiya, the girl I had met at the bus station in Hami. After three days’ orientation with the other three thousand students, she too will be heading for high school in eastern China, near Shanghai. Her mother is going to see her once more before the girl leaves.
“Everyone wants to go east,” the mother says. “Even students who weren’t good enough to be chosen for free places want to pay money for the opportunity to go to a high school in eastern China.”
Despite her enthusiasm for the school program, she complains about how the Han Chinese dominate every profession in Turpan. But she is pragmatic about where the future lies and takes the same line as Murat. “Fenlie meiyou qiantu. Separatism has no future. This is the only way.”
But like Murat, and like the Tibetan teacher I had met on the road to Xiahe, she will not allow her family to relinquish its identity.
“If you met my daughter, you’d hardly be able to tell the difference from a Han Chinese fourteen-year-old. But I tell her that she is a Uighur, and she should be proud to be a Uighur. I have told her she cannot marry a Han Chinese boy, and she cannot marry a non-Muslim. She is getting a better education, and then she must come back and help her people.”
The woman, who is married to a local businessman, asks me if I am traveling the Southern Silk Road, tow
ard Khotan and Kashgar. I tell her that, alas, this time I am not, that I am following Route 312 northwest from Urumqi to the border with Kazakhstan. She says she has just returned from a vacation along the Southern Silk Road, driving with her husband and some friends to Kashgar, and then back across the Taklimakan Desert.
The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin called the Taklimakan “the worst and most dangerous desert in the world.” Aurel Stein said the deserts of Arabia were tame compared with the Taklimakan. Today, a hundred years later, middle-aged Uighur women, wearing big earrings and layers of thick makeup, are crossing the Taklimakan for fun.
22. From Sea to Shining Sea
The first time I arrived in Urumqi was on a train from Xi’an in the summer of 1988. After days crossing the remote, dusty Gobi, I had been grateful to arrive, even though at that time, Urumqi (pronounced Oo-room-chee) was a depressing, underdeveloped city in the middle of nowhere.
I didn’t return until 2002, while reporting on the Chinese Muslim response to the attacks on the United States of 9/11. It was, of course, still in the middle of nowhere, but in those intervening fourteen years, Urumqi had turned into Los Angeles. And now, just a few years later, it has changed even more.
The English missionary Mildred Cable wrote about what an awful place Urumqi was, though she noted that in 1926 the postal commissioner here (who for some bizarre reason was an Italian) had organized the mail system so that a letter could reach Beijing in forty-five days. She called this “a truly marvelous accomplishment.” A letter in the opposite direction, through the Soviet Union, went slightly faster, reaching London in twenty-eight days.
Now, the people of Urumqi are connected instantaneously to Beijing and London and Moscow by broadband Internet service. All over the city are advertisements promoting wider, better, faster connections.
