Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  But perhaps this was a metaphor for death.

  Thereafter, for many centuries, when new faiths arrived along the Silk Road, people wondered if in fact they were foreign creeds at all, or if they were not the ancient wisdom of China returning home.

  3

  Mantra

  As my train eased westward out of Xian, following the vanished caravans along the Wei river, the brick and tile villages were misted in pear blossom and the high mauve flowering of the foxglove trees, or were circled by concentric lines of vegetables protected beneath plastic, so that half the fields looked under snow. All around us, the labyrinthine earth had been sculpted by the wind-blown sands of Mongolia, pouring southward over the ages. For hours we twisted and tunnelled through their plateaux. Terraces of wheat and rapeseed billowed into ravines, or overhung us in ledges of brilliant green.

  It took us fifteen hours to cover 450 miles. In the ‘hard seat’ carriages of China’s poor, the farmers sat wedged together among stacked luggage, dozing on each other’s shoulders, munching picnics, sipping jars of green tea. Where years before the aisles had been rinks of ash-clogged spittle and prostrate bodies, they were now strewn only with rubbish and the trussed bags of peasants and travelling salesmen. The shouting, the spitting, the smoking, even staring at the foreigner, had subtly abated. Instead, among students and families on holiday, the plump babies of the One Child policy sat in majesty, gurgling and urinating into hand-held potties.

  But as we veered north into the corridor of Gansu, curving toward Xinjiang, the emptiness of inner Asia filled the land with its premonition. The villages seemed to disintegrate as we approached them, their brick walls changed to mud. They looked near-deserted. Their dead lay under mounds in their fields. Everything seemed half constructed, or in decay. Slowly the fields thinned and the hills turned to unclothed dust. Their spurs crowded the canyons in compacted staircases, until we were winding among ziggurats. Sometimes cave-villages appeared, their terraces sown with early wheat above them, and a few trees stubbled the heights. Then everything–villages, canyons, fields–turned to the monochrome brown of the wind-borne loess. The earth was carved like soft cake. Beneath us the river was liquid loam, the colour of milk chocolate, roiling between cliffs split by rain into bitter gullies. Over this drama the dark descended suddenly, and our train became a snake glimmering through emptiness.

  At Lanzhou, stiff from sleeplessness, I stepped off the train into the China I remembered. A swarm of louche, swarthy men came hovering round me–the underclass of which Huang had warned–and the crowds marching the pavements looked rougher, poorer. I saw no other foreigner. I was walking the most polluted streets in China. For Lanzhou was an industrial Gehenna built up after the Communist victory to breathe economic life into the north-west. Now its three million inhabitants sprawled for fifteen miles along the Yellow River among oil refineries, textile and chemical plants, under mine-blackened hills. The longer streets disappeared into smog as if over a precipice. The cars gorged petrol at thirty pence a litre. Everyone coughed and retched.

  Twenty years ago a young schoolteacher had befriended me here, and I wanted to see him again. In those days Mouli was filled by a dogged sadness. He had been born a peasant on the fringes of Inner Mongolia, and in his youth during the Cultural Revolution, when millions of bourgeoisie were banished to the villages, he had become attached to the daughter of an exiled official.

  It has been said that the Chinese do not love. Observers of their family hierarchies have written that the only true tenderness exists between mother and son. Others have insisted that even the word for love in Chinese does not exist. And it is true that neither the blanket ai nor the benevolent ren translates into any unconditional passion.

  But Mouli, in his peasant ignorance, fell deeply, violently in love. Into his grim village the official’s pale daughter, who suffered from a weak heart, arrived like a chaste spirit. And she gently reciprocated. After the Revolution ebbed, and her parents took her back weeping to the east, nobody replaced her in his slow heart. The social immobility of China in those years fatally separated them. She became a secondary school teacher in Tangshan, while he struggled into language college and started to better himself.

  After I first met him he wrote me a bittersweet letter. He had decided, at the late age of thirty-three, to bow to family pressure and get married. When I saw him the following year I found his bride, a rosy twenty-six-year-old nurse, sottishly devoted. But he treated her like a servant, regretting her rural coarseness, and sometimes, he confided, dreamed helplessly of the other.

  All this was long ago, and now, when I arrived at his college, I had no idea what I might find. He was waiting for me at its gate. In the split second before recognition I saw a squat, sturdy stranger, whose fiercely bushing hair and thick brows and lips belonged, I thought, to a northern Chinese type. But the next moment, to my transient bewilderment, this substantial figure had coalesced with the young man I remembered, and Mouli was smiling at me.

  Our old friendship enveloped us. The humorous irony I remembered still interrupted his talk with pursed lips and mordant silences, over a tide of warm feeling. Only he had eased into a subtle authority–he had become associate dean of his faculty–and his hair was sprinkled grey. ‘Come home,’ he said.

  I had last seen him in a narrow room monopolised by a stark marriage bed–the symbol for double happiness still dangling above it. Now he occupied a four-room apartment where his wife came shyly to meet me. A big television sat unwatched in his sitting room, and the walls were hung with calligraphic scrolls and framed prints of the English countryside.

  She kept the dark glow he had once despised. Her features were stamped mask-like and regular on a broad face, yet she was handsome in her way, with a full mouth and tender eyes and hair swept back now in a glistening sheath. Her old slavery had eased away. She was studying law. Their teenage daughter, absent at school, wanted to look like her mother, Mouli laughed, and drew a deprecating hand down his own peasant face. She made him put on a waistcoat before he went out–his cardigan had gone at the elbows–and their eyes met in something like affection. Before, he had never looked at her.

  We walked through a university transformed from the drab buildings I remembered. The student intake had tripled, and big new blocks had gone up beside sports fields and a park. With his thick hands and rugged body, Mouli looked cursed with a harsher blood or history than those around him. ‘The students are quite different now. They even ask questions in class! We never dared do that!’ They passed us with deferential smiles: gangling, long-haired youths and soft-faced girls. They walked in tracksuits and sometimes held hands. ‘And they all know standard Chinese,’ Mouli said. ‘That’s the real change. They learn it on television, and even on the internet. In regions like my old village the dialects were utterly remote. Thirty years ago, I remember, when officials arrived there, we couldn’t understand a word each other said.’

  Now his office was twice the size of his old bedsitter, scattered with a suite of armchairs and a planetary desk, topped by two computers. Only the concrete floor maintained that this was China, with a washstand in one corner and a view of the Yellow River sunk among suburbs. He occupied this space with some pride, and a tinge of impermanence. The post of dean itself had lain open for nearly three years, because the college’s Party Secretary had blocked its occupancy. But Mouli’s colleagues already talked of him as ‘our dean’, and he was loved by the younger teachers, I sensed, because of his ingrained irreverence.

  Yet his current obsession betrayed a deep conservatism. For what he–an English teacher–most feared was the spread of English. To teachers in every faculty, he said, even in maths and Chinese history, a knowledge of English had become mandatory. And this was happening all over China. ‘We might as well adopt America wholesale! The president and all his senators! Get them over here! And what would they do for us? Nothing. Because our minds are different, shaped in a different language. And it won’t change.’ He w
as staring out of his office window. ‘Already China’s one big reconstruction site!’ All along the river the white buildings were going up, each one topped by a crane. ‘The trouble is this,’ he said. ‘You can’t relate Chinese life in English language. Because nothing really translates. Not culture, politics or even the everyday. The words don’t fit. The concepts aren’t there.’ He was writing a hefty article on this–it would make him enemies–in the university magazine called Silk Road. ‘The foundation of language is thought. How can we think in English?’

  As he spoke I was remembering, with dim amazement, the university I had strayed into twenty years ago. Then it was still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, when teachers had been persecuted for owning an English novel, a tape of Western music, a letter from abroad. Where, I wondered, was the old professor condemned to ten years as the college dustman for possessing a bible?

  Above all I remembered the gentle Yu, professor of English literature, whose body had been broken for crimes he never knew. I had come with a collapsible white stick for his daughter. They were both going blind: she from a childhood cancer, he from detached retinas caused by his battering in the Revolution. In parting he had predicted to me a better future for his people, born of exhaustion and a new sanity. Now that future had arrived, and its unpredictable power was spreading through the nation. Even then he had been frail, murmuring farewell beneath a hanging of his favourite poem: a verse by Li Bai which he could no longer read. I did not ask now what had become of him.

  See the waters of the Yellow River

  Leap down from Heaven.

  Roll away to the sea

  And never turn again…

  I had supper with Mouli’s colleagues that night, in a rather grand restaurant. It was heartening to see him in his semi-public role, his face still crumpling in humorous collusion, his chopsticks whirring. Long ago in writing about him, I had displaced him, for his protection, to another city. Now he was no longer at risk. He presided over the banquet like a benevolent king, distributing its delicacies, proposing toasts. Beside me his wife was dressed in a becoming green jacket and jester’s shoes. She still gazed at him from time to time, as if from some speechless exile, but I was no longer tempted to ask him about the past, or the pale teacher in Tangshan–if she was still there, or if he knew. He was content now, I thought, and it did not always do to remember. His journey from passion to stability had been China’s own.

  On my other side he had placed a young teacher, as if to illustrate the new uprootedness of China. She was almost European to look at, with her long frizzed hair and surgically rounded eyes. Her family were in a far city. She was flushed with rice wine. All through the meal she tossed me giddy proposals and intimacies. Once the traditional restraints were gone, it seemed, nothing remained. Her fingers travelled my shoulders, ribs. ‘You are going to Yongchang? I love to travel…It’s hard to find a decent guy…Maybe I can come with you? Take me to Yongchang!’ She was serious, maudlin with confidences. ‘I’d prefer to be a child, you know. Things become too complicated afterwards. I don’t want choice. I want to go backwards…take me with you!’

  ‘I already have a partner.’

  ‘But she is not here. What are you doing after this? Maybe we can go somewhere…’

  At last our party got to its feet with that Chinese abruptness when the banquet is over. As we clasped each other in parting, Mouli and his wife thrust a gift into my arms: a shirt from the Eternal New Fashion Co.–the label said–made from ‘the finest selected European fabric, designed to meet today’s fashion criteria’.

  Then I remembered, with a shock of long-past time, how years ago, before I travelled north in winter, Mouli and she had bought me one of the stiff quilted overcoats worn through the upheavals of the early Revolution. It had warmed me through my bitter journey to the end of the Great Wall, and it still hung gathering moths in my London flat, like a fragment of Chinese history, of crueller, more disruptive times, and of Mouli’s sorrow.

  My hotel was a gaunt leftover from the sixties, with a Sunday dance-floor where couples waltzed unisexually under wan lights to sweet music. From my veranda on its twenty-first storey Lanzhou receded through a yellowing smog where skyscrapers and chimneys poked like drowning ships. A few car horns sounded weak and lost below. The sun stalled overhead like a sickly orange, and far away the scarred mountains along the Yellow River locked the horizon in.

  The hotel sucked in newly mobile workers and small businessmen. The local prostitutes were so persistent that I unsportingly disconnected my phone. Policemen lounged on guard in the lobby, and a chart on my table warned about the cost of damaging the hotel fittings, from destroying a double bed to chipping a mirror. This meticulous list turned vandalism into recreation. Wallpaper stains could cost you $5 per square foot, and carpet stains $10 (cleanable), $50 (serious). I could not help imagining some peasant bull in this flimsy china shop, pocketing a basin plug ($5) and defacing some pictures (I sympathised, $3–$8), then losing control and hanging on the luggage rack ($80) and breaking down the door ($120) before smashing the lavatory ($200) and surrendering to the police in the lobby.

  My only visitor here–a chance contact from England–took me to his home instead. Hongming lived in a rickety block put up in the fifties. In the city their cracked white tiles and splintered window-frames loomed everywhere, entered by fetid stairways which spiralled past iron doors and peepholes. Hongming had been married for twenty years, but his wide-open face was still a boy’s. He made documentary films, and his flat was bursting with technology. But alongside his DVD player, the laptop and the fax machine, the shelves were strange with Lamaist artefacts. Stone inscriptions lay alongside ceremonial horns. They were mementoes of a love affair, for Hongming had fallen for Tibet. He spoke about this–and everything–with restless ebullience, as if on the edge of some internal anarchy. ‘Will you see my film?’

  Then he played me the video of the documentary he had made, with fascinated passion, on Tibet. It was the first of several which he hoped would one day appear on local television. His camera had gazed on those magic ceremonies and customs with rapt sympathy, lingering over sand-prayers on the shores of the upper Yangtze, on the engraved libraries laid in walls of sacred stones, end to end.

  ‘I was invited to show this at a Santa Barbara film festival,’ he said. ‘and I managed to go. I was astonished to find the Dalai Lama there. I was sitting next to him. I didn’t know what he’d say. While they showed the film, I didn’t dare even to look at him. Only at the end I looked.’ He bit his lip. ‘And he was weeping.’

  His wife appeared from the kitchen with dumplings and a Tianshui wine. She looked even younger than he.

  Hongming said: ‘I told the Dalai Lama: you should go back to your country. He replied: your people will not allow it.’ He poured out the wine. ‘And there was nothing more to say.’

  Even now we were deceptively close to the Tibetan hinterland. Barely a hundred miles to the west, the Qilian mountains sheltered the Lamaist monastery of Labrang, where I hoped to go, then lifted to the grasslands of Qinghai, whose plateaux roll without break south-westwards to Lhasa. Hongming had access to aerial satellite photographs of the whole region to our north, and we tried to trace my route on these–from Labrang to the oasis of Dunhuang, then west again over expanses of alarming yellow nothingness a thousand miles to Kashgar. ‘It’s dangerous,’ he said.

  For a while we argued the dilemmas of this route, then elfishly, out of the blue, he said: ‘You should wash your feet.’

  ‘What?’ They were splayed indelicately in front of me, marinated in thick socks and trainers. How long had he been enduring them? Some Chinese are hypersensitive to smells, I knew. I looked down in dismay. They had almost seven thousand miles to go. Perhaps the Uzbeks would be easier, the Afghans, the Iranians…

  Then he said: ‘It’s a kind of therapy. Traditional Chinese foot-washing.’

  Twenty minutes later we were sitting in a massage parlour while two pretty gi
rls in green brocaded jackets and white kerchiefs tugged off our shoes. Some of these places are not what they pretend, but this one was. Our feet were dunked in scalding pails of herbal medicine, then pummelled and kneaded into pink puree. The foot–so Chinese tradition goes–is a microcosm of the body, with its own lungs, heart, kidneys: and as my attendant chopped my soles with fingers like steel rods, I started to believe it. My feet had migraines and heart attacks. The girl smiled sweetly. ‘Foreign feet are so big!’

  Meanwhile, on an overhead television broadcasting financial news, Edward Cheung of China Assets Management was discussing the foreign equities outlook with Brian Chu of the Associated Trading Department. I affected to relax like a consequential businessman, but the girl began pulling my fingers from their sockets. They went off like pistol-shots. When I looked across at Hongming, he was lounging in his chair while his torturer went to work, his face bisected by a hedonistic smile, his eyes closed. ‘Are you happy?’ he asked. ‘You are happy, aren’t you?’ Then: ‘Would you like to meet the Living Buddha?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said automatically, with no idea who that was. I only knew it wasn’t this.

  Then the girl transferred her attention to my toes. I had forgotten I had so many. They suffered strokes and seizures. For a while longer she beat a steely tattoo on my calves and shins, knuckling my insteps, frowning a little. Then, just as Brian Chu was clinching his theory about foreign exchange reserves, it was all over. The girls kept my dirty socks by mistake, or as souvenirs, and I hobbled off with Hongming into the shaking city lights.